Love Songs of Ancient Egypt

The Ramesside pharaohs ruled from a Nile Delta capital called Per-Ramesses, and somewhere in their world, at court or among the workmen who cut the royal tombs at Deir el-Medina, someone began writing down what young men and women said to each other when they were in love. No single hand did it. What survives is a scatter: three papyrus rolls of long song cycles, roughly twenty ostraca (the limestone flakes and potsherds Egyptians used for anything not meant to last forever), and one broken pottery jar, copied out across a century and a half. The lovers in these poems call each other sister and brother, a term of tenderness rather than kinship, and their world is intensely physical: a sickness only the beloved can cure, a bird caught in a snare as a figure for desire, an orchard where the trees themselves seem to be listening in. One roll, the one now kept in Dublin, opens by announcing itself as the words of the great entertainer, and scholars take that as a clue to how the songs were used: sung at banquets or court festivities, or at a festival for Hathor, whose domain was love, drunkenness, and music, rather than recited privately between two people. Egyptian writing is otherwise dominated by hymns, instructions, and funerary spells, which is what makes this small body of openly secular verse so unusual; nothing else from three thousand years of Egyptian literature sounds quite like it. Some Egyptologists argue the songs were composed for the court at Memphis or the royal women's establishment at Gurob and only later carried south to the workmen's village; others think Deir el-Medina's own literate craftsmen, who left behind letters, sketches, and schoolboy exercises by the thousand, wrote at least some of them themselves. Either way, nobody put a name to a single line.

The question of who

No scribe signs these songs, and the lovers inside them are never named either. Egyptologists group the Dublin roll with a cluster of Deir el-Medina papyri that the scribe Qenherkhepshef and his family collected and expanded across three generations, though whether this particular copy came from their own shelves or a neighbour's is still argued. The songs may well be older than any surviving copy: a Ramesside scribe could easily have written down something already sung for decades.

How it nearly did not

Papyrus Harris 500 survived New Kingdom Thebes only to be wrecked in Alexandria, where an explosion tore through the house of its owner, Anthony Harris, and swallowed parts of its love songs for good. Its companion roll fared better through favouritism alone: when the 1928 Deir el-Medina find was divided up, the collector Alfred Chester Beatty kept the single largest, most complete papyrus for himself.

Three thousand years

• c. 1300 BCE The Ramesside love songs begin circulating, sung at court or at Deir el-Medina, no one knows which first
• c. 1200 BCE Papyrus Harris 500 copied, shelved alongside the Tale of the Doomed Prince
• c. 1150 BCE Papyrus Turin 1966 copied, a song narrated by a sycamore tree
• c. 1147 BCE Papyrus Chester Beatty I copied at Deir el-Medina, the love songs share a roll with the Contendings of Horus and Seth
• 1872 The British Museum buys the Harris papyri, from Selima Harris, already scarred by an explosion in Alexandria
• 1928 IFAO excavators find a papyrus cache at Deir el-Medina, Alfred Chester Beatty keeps the fullest roll for himself
• 1931 Alan Gardiner publishes Papyrus Chester Beatty I, the first full edition of its love songs
• 1985 Michael Fox pairs the corpus with the Song of Songs, the first sustained comparison of the two literatures
• Now Still being read