Lamenting is associated with the goddess Isis, whose cries awoke her husband Osiris and enabled him to transform into an immortal spirit and descend to the netherworld,787 but it is also a means of expressing shared sorrow in a communal setting. Women are frequently shown mourning more expressively than men in tomb scenes788 but this may be an iconographic convention rather than a reflection of reality, perhaps linked to the iconography of Isis and Nephthys (Figure 38): as Deborah Sweeney points out, ‘the scenes in tombs are often an interpretative rendering rather than a record.’789
However, in modern Upper Egypt it is the women who are responsible for lamenting (‘idid) at funerals,790 particularly those who are post-menopausal since they are immune to the dangers of crossing the boundary between the living and the dead that may harm fertility.791 Death pollution (mushahara) is thought to afflict lactating women or those of child-bearing age if they come into contact with recently bereaved widows or women who have just left a funeral.792 This does not seem to have been the case in the New Kingdom, where infants are depicted carried by children,793 presumably while their mothers participate in mourning rituals. Funerals can be a forum for the display of social solidarity,794 and communal wailing/lamenting served to remind funeral attendees of the shared loss, and to inform the bereaved wife that she was not alone.795
Among the many euphemisms for death,796 the image of travelling and being distant from family members is common: death as departure is a feature of several funerary laments, in which the immediate family, particularly wives and sons, plead with the deceased not to leave,797 and
Figure 39: Female mourner. Terracotta. Provenance unknown; late Middle Kingdom-early New Kingdom. 25 cm high. Louvre, E 27247.
Is illustrated in Opening of the Mouth scenes, where the widow798 clasps her husband’s coffin or mummy (Figure 40).
The attribution of the laments to the deceased’s family sets modern and ancient lamenting apart. Those who compose and lead laments in modern Luxor (badaya, ‘the one who begins’) are not necessarily related to the deceased’s family but are highly regarded by other women, while professional mourners (naddabat), who rip their clothes and pour dust onto their hair, are extremely poor and often subsidise their income by prostitution.799 Bereaved widows still rend their clothing, unplait their hair and daub their faces with mud, partly in emulation of the state of the dead, since a deceased woman’s plaits are unravelled prior to burial.800 Ancient burials, such as those at Diospolis Parva for example,801 show that at least some women were interred with plaited hair,802 suggesting that the loose and dishevelled hair of mourners depicted on, for
Figure 40: Widow weeping and throwing dust onto her hair at the foot of her husband S anthropoid coffin. Tomb of Nebamun and Ipuky (TT181), Khokha, 18th Dynasty. After Mekhitarian 1978: 128.
Instance, Middle Kingdom coffins and New Kingdom tomb walls was not a display of empathy with the deceased but rather an aspect of the chaos created by death.
The laments inscribed above funeral procession scenes are superficially similar to harpers’ songs in their apparently ‘heretical’ approach to death and the afterlife.803 804 They are characterised by a subversive pessimism in which no comfort counters the overwhelming negativity they express.805 For example: ‘He who liked to get drunk is now in a land without (even) water.’806 Book of the Dead Spell 175b, a spell for not dying again, which seems to question orthodox views regarding the afterlife is countered by explanations from Atum, and equilibrium is thus restored:807
O Atum, what means it that I proceed to the necropolis, the silent land, which has no water and no air and is very deep and very dark and (all) is lacking, wherein one lives in quietness of heart and without any sexual pleasures available? ‘I have given blessedness instead of water, air, and sexual pleasures, quietness of heart instead of bread and beer, ’ says Atum.
Funerary laments are a form of communication with the dead. They articulate feelings of bereavement and longing while also being a forum for the expression of unorthodox views about death that, aside from the harpers’ songs which were also inscribed in tombs, are otherwise rare in written sources. They also create ‘an environment for the enactment of emotions of sorrow, anger and loss, and [empower] women to display these sentiments.’808 The inscribed laments may only represent a fraction of those performed, since the performers were probably illiterate and the laments would therefore have been part of oral tradition, passed from mother to daughter.809 Werbrouck suggested that lamentations and images of lamenters were incorporated into tomb decoration so that their presence would provide the ka of the deceased with a continuous state of wellbeing in the afterlife.810 This is questionable given the content of the laments:811 would the deceased be comforted by re-experiencing his funeral? Rather, laments were intended then as now to benefit both the living and the dead,812 during the funeral rather than afterwards.
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