Bird-headed creatures from the ancient world!
See them bite! Fight!
And—they’re gods!
It ain’t just mummies in Egypt, y’know!

Delight and mischief are palpable in Phil Blank’s illustrations,
which bring the reader viscerally into this bawdy tale, jubilantly
translated from an Egyptian manuscript by Mildred Faintly.

The text comes from a twelfth-century BCE papyrus, purchased
on the illegal antiquities market in the ‘Roaring Twenties’ of the
twentieth century. 

About The Story

The 3,400 year old ‘fable’ is a parade example of the particularly
African genius of this particularly African country. Written in
play form (and possibly performed as a puppet show), it shows
an intuitive humor and love of language which will be familiar
from Black American comedy. If one imagines these lines
delivered by Bernie Mac or Whoopi Goldberg, the correctness
of the characterization is immediately apparent.

This story is also, unambiguously, an African animal fable, of
the kind familiar from Uncle Remus and the Signifying Monkey
folk poetry.

As much as any Grimm’s Fairy Tale, this narrative also works
on the level of children’s literature—but not the sanitized,
dumbed-down, and prettied-up children’s literature of commercial
publishing. This is the kind of primary-process, uninhibited,
nastily hilarious fantasy that children (and adults) actually delight
in. Literature with guts: greasy grimy gopher guts, to be precise.
A scholarly introduction sets the stage for the story, providing
crucial context, and illuminating themes and motifs that identify
the story as specific to a certain region and time.