In the Library
Love Songs of Ancient Egypt
Unknown, 1927
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 10 minutes
- Translated by
- Translated by Aylward M. Blackman (1927)
- Chapters
- Chapters 6
- Length
- Length 2k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
Your love has penetrated all within me / Like honey plunged into water,
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Bible
Unknown
The Song of Songs sits inside the Bible, Hebrew love lyrics as frank about the beloved's body as these Egyptian songs, with the same gardens, perfumes and sister-brides.
£1.99
Fragment 31
Sappho
Sappho's fragment does the same thing, but narrows the whole ache of desire into one trembling body watching a rival across the room.
£1.99
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Pablo Neruda
Neruda's sequence does the same thing, but trades the anonymous scribe's voice for a modern poet naming one woman's body in aching, specific detail.
£1.99
About the book
Three thousand years ago, along the Nile, someone set down what it feels like to be undone by another person, and it reads as though the ink is still wet. The lovers here call each other sister and brother, tokens of tenderness rather than blood. One lies sick for seven days because the beloved has not walked past the door; another longs to be the servant who washes a lover's linen, just to hold what has touched that skin. In one cycle the very trees of the orchard lean in and gossip about the couple hidden in their shade. What astonishes is not that longing is this old, but that it was already exactly this: the racing pulse, the helpless invention, the certainty that the whole world is arranged around a single face. These are among the oldest love poems on earth, and they still know your heart better than most written since.