Week 4 Reading Diary continued: The Two Brothers

The story The Two Brothers from the Egyptian Myth and Legend by Donald Mackenzie (1907) in the Ancient Egyptian Myths and Stories Unit immediately stood out to me because I always like stories that involve siblings since my brother and I are very close. This story is really cool because the brothers get in a small fight over the older brother's wife, but then they make up and remain close for the rest of the story. Even when the younger brother keeps having his soul carried in different vessels (a branch, a seed, a bull, a tree, and a baby).

flowering acacia

I really like the magic in this story with the soul being carried through in different ways. I had never heard of an acacia, and so it was cool to read what kind of tree the brother ended up having his soul carried in.  I really didn't like that both of the women in this story were evil. If I retold this story in a storytelling post I would probably make the siblings or their significant others mixed gender so that it wouldn't be a story about two brothers who were awesome and their wives who kept messing things up for them. 

Other elements of the story that I liked were the change in setting. In following along with this story I felt that I got to read about many different places. In my usual storytelling posts I just stick to one setting, so it would be cool to try to get in an extra setting or two, even though the stories are pretty short.