A number of hymns to the gods are preserved from the Middle Kingdom (Franke 2003), often being inscribed on stelae and other funerary monuments. One of the lengthier examples is a hymn to Osiris attested on numerous monuments from the Middle and New Kingdoms, which takes the typical hymnic form of a second person laudatory address to the god (Lichtheim 1973: 202-4). Such hymns tend to invoke a god under a multitude of names and epithets, and often make indirect allusion to mythological episodes connected with the god. Liturgical hymns are also preserved on papyrus, as is probably the case with one Thirteenth Dynasty papyrus from the Ramesseum tomb which contains a cycle of hymns to the crocodile god Sobek (Gardiner 1957).
It is likely that certain hymns came to be transmitted primarily for their aesthetic and literary qualities rather than as functional religious texts: there exist a number of rather corrupt New Kingdom manuscripts of a lengthy Hymn to the Inundation whose phrasing suggests a composition date in the Middle Kingdom (van der Plas 1986). This hymn is a eulogy to the personified Nile flood, praising him as the provider of bounty, ‘‘the bringer of food, great of provisions.’’
Royal hymns are fairly well attested for the Middle Kingdom, the best known of these being a cycle of hymns in praise of Senwosret III preserved on a papyrus from the town of Lahun (Collier and Quirke 2004: 16-19). These hymns, which make extensive use of repeated refrains, laud the king as the protector of Egypt and its inhabitants. The phrasing of these eulogies is similar to that found in the ‘‘loyalistic’’ sections of the teachings, and the same style also occurs in the Tale ofSinuhe, when the title character delivers a fulsome paean of praise on behalf of Senwosret I. A fragmentary Second Intermediate Period papyrus contains another royal eulogy without a specific royal name (Parkinson 1999), while another papyrus of similar date comprises a cycle of hymns to the crowns of the king, associated with the god Sobek (Erman 1911).
Virtually nothing survives that can be identified as ‘‘secular songs’’ from the Middle Kingdom, and there are no love songs preserved from this period, though tomb walls occasionally contain snippets of song praising the tomb owner; for example, singers are depicted singing liturgical praise songs for the tomb owner Sarenput I in his early Twelfth Dynasty tomb at Aswan (Parkinson and Franke 2007), and in the roughly contemporary Theban tomb of Senet mother of Intefiqer, harpists are depicted singing intercessory petitions on behalf of Intefiqer to the goddess Hathor (Parkinson 1991: 126-7), probably an illustration of part of the funerary ritual. A few stelae from the Middle Kingdom contain harpists’ songs which extol the fortunate state of the blessed dead provided with a proper tomb: one begins, ‘‘O tomb, you were built for festival!’’ (Sethe 1928: 87.2). These mortuary harpists’ songs are likely to be the ancestors of the substantial number of New Kingdom tomb harpists’ songs which express doubts about the afterlife. The best known example of this genre is the Harpist’s Song from the Tomb of King Intef (Fox 1977) whose message echoes the ba in the Dialogue of a Man with his Soul: no one has ever come back from the next world to reveal what it is like, so human beings should concentrate on enjoying their time on earth by making holiday. The dating of this harpist’s song is disputed: if the text’s self-attribution to a tomb of a king Antef is in earnest, it could refer to a king of that name from either the Eleventh or Seventeenth Dynasties. However, the language of the song contains certain late features which perhaps make it more likely that it is a later composition, perhaps as late as the late Eighteenth Dynasty.
World History
