The Tale of the Doomed Prince
At a Glance
- Central figures: A nameless Egyptian prince doomed by prophecy, his protective father the king, and the foreign princess who becomes his wife.
- Setting: Ancient Egypt and a distant foreign kingdom; the story survives in a fragmentary papyrus from the New Kingdom period, its ending lost.
- The turn: The Seven Hathors decree at the prince’s birth that he will die by crocodile, serpent, or dog - and the king’s attempt to seal his son away from all three fates fails when the prince demands his freedom.
- The outcome: The prince survives encounters with both the serpent and the crocodile, aided by his wife, but the third prophesied danger - his own loyal dog - remains unresolved, the manuscript breaking off before the end.
- The legacy: The story does not survive complete; what endures is the fragment itself, and the unresolved question of whether any man can outrun the decree of the Hathors.
The Seven Hathors spoke at the prince’s birth. They came, as they always came, to stand over a royal cradle and declare what the child would become. What they said that day was not what the king had hoped to hear. The boy would die - by crocodile, by serpent, or by dog. One of the three would find him. The Hathors did not say which.
The king ordered a palace built far from the river, far from the fields, far from the roads where a man might walk with a dog at his heel. The prince grew up inside it, fed on luxury, surrounded by walls, denied the world entirely. It was a life without danger. It was also barely a life at all.
The Palace at the Edge of the World
The prince lived enclosed until he could no longer bear it. He looked out from his high window at the roads leading away into the distance and told his father he wanted to go. The king resisted. The king relented. He gave his son horses and weapons and servants, and the prince rode out into the world for the first time.
He crossed deserts. He passed through cities he had only heard named. He was careful - careful in the way a man is careful when he knows the specific shapes his death might take - but he was alive in a way the walled palace had never permitted. He traveled north, into lands where Egypt’s name was known but its gods were distant, and eventually he came to the court of a foreign king.
The Foreign King’s Tower
The foreign king had a daughter, and the foreign king had built her a tower. The logic was simple: suitors had come from every kingdom to compete for her hand, and the king was not yet ready to let her go. So he set the tower’s window high above the ground and announced that the man who could leap to it from horseback would have her. Many tried. None reached it.
The prince tried. On the first attempt he fell short. On the second. Then, one morning, he made the leap and caught the sill, and the princess pulled him through the window, and that was that.
The king was not pleased. His daughter was promised to the first man who reached her window, but the king had not expected the winner to be a foreign wanderer of no obvious rank. The prince, when pressed, told them only that he was a man fleeing his fate. The princess, who had watched him try and fail and try again, had already made up her mind. The king consented.
The Serpent in the Night
They were married and settled into the foreign court, and for a time the prophecy seemed to recede. Then the serpent came.
It came at night, slipping through the floor of the chamber where the prince slept. The princess was awake - she had taken to watching over her husband while he slept, knowing what had been foretold - and she saw it moving across the floor. She set out a bowl of beer and a bowl of wine, and the serpent drank, and the drink slowed it, and she took up a blade and killed it before it reached the bed.
The prince woke to find his wife standing over a dead serpent. He offered a prayer of gratitude and understood, not for the first time, that the gods had given him better protection in this woman than any stone wall his father had ever built.
The Crocodile at the River
The crocodile was different. It had been following the prince for some time - a great crocodile, old and patient, that surfaced whenever the prince came near water. The animal was not merely wild. It spoke to the prince. It told him that the two of them were bound together, that wherever the prince went the crocodile would follow, and that neither would be free of the other until one of them was dead.
There was a water spirit in the river as well, and the crocodile was at war with it. The spirit attacked the crocodile night after night. While the spirit kept the crocodile occupied, it could not reach the prince. The prince fought alongside the spirit. The crocodile was driven back, again and again, into the deep water.
The prince had now survived two of the three. Only the dog remained.
The Loyal Dog
The prince had kept a dog since early in his journey - a dog he had taken in, fed, traveled with. By the time the serpent and the crocodile were behind him, the dog was the closest companion he had aside from his wife. The prophecy was specific: one of the three would kill him. The dog was the last.
The manuscript ends here. The papyrus breaks off mid-story and does not resume. Whether the prince found a way to escape the final decree, whether the dog turned on him, whether his wife was again the one who intervened - none of it survives. The Hathors pronounced, the scribe wrote, and then time took the ending away.
What remains is the prince - riding out through the palace gates for the first time, leaping at that high tower window and missing, watching his wife stand over the dead serpent in the dark. Still moving. Still alive. The fate not yet arrived.