The World Turned Upside Down: a Comparative Study of the "Topsy-Turvy Motif" in Egyptian and Northwest Semitic Texts

Abstract

For decades, scholars of the Hebrew Bible and Egyptian texts have identified occurrences of a textual motif using various terms: “topsy-turvy,” mundus inversus, “world upside down,” “social woe,” “national distress,” pessimistic texts, and so on. This study offers the first fully comparative analysis of the motif. It is also the most comprehensive and interdisciplinary to date. In it, I collect and analyze a number of texts from ancient Egypt and the Levant, define the topsy-turvy motif, identify its characteristics, and elucidate its function in the texts in which ancient scribes deployed it.