Love Songs (Schott 1950; Hermann 1959; Fox 1985; Guglielmi 1996; Mathieu 1996) is the collective term for a number of songs, song collections, and song cycles, whose Egyptian labels vary, for no apparent reason, between sayings (rw), verses (tsw), and songs (hswt) which probably do not refer to genre distinctions but to the oral moment (r) of the intonation (hst) of the texts, which are understood as bound linguistic and semantic units (ts). The songs are, even in their respective combinations in collections or closed cycles, unique (only O. Borchardt 1 and O. CGT 57367 have parallels [Mathieu 1996: 113-14]) and documented exclusively in Ramesside manuscripts from Thebes. Their date of origin is, however, believed to be as early as the Eighteenth Dynasty.
Three papyri and numerous ostraca containing Love Songs have come down to us (Mathieu 1996). Their basic theme is amatory affection. This is verbalized by male and female voices which do not necessarily reflect actual speakers but may rather be literary fictions of primarily male origin (Meskell 2002: 130; Mtinch and Moers 2005: 147-8). These voices are textually integrated as antiphons (P. Chester Beatty
I group C) or as groups of male and female stanzas which interchange within a song (first group of P. Harris 500, first group of Cairo Love Songs) or form a song of their own (second group of P. Harris 500, P. Chester Beatty group G, second group of Cairo Love Songs). As elsewhere, Egyptian descriptions of desire range from catching a shy glimpse of the beloved to imagining a happy future after spending a first night together. Also the Egyptian forms of the literary treatment of desire can be compared with types of texts known from other pre-modern cultures. Clear subtypes of the Egyptian Love Songs are Glorifications which praise the bodily perfection of the quasi-deified beloved (P. Chester Beatty I, group C, songs 1 and 6), the Paraclausithyron, in which the male lover complains at the door of the woman’s house because he is not being admitted (P. Harris 500, first group, song 7, P. Chester Beatty I rto, songs 6 and 7), or the Alba in which a female voice bemoans the end of love-making at daybreak (P. Harris 500, first group, song 1 and second group, song 6). Other recurrent motifs are love as drunken ecstasy, as disease, or as trap, and the wrongly designated ‘‘travesties’’ (Fox 1985: 292-4). In these last-mentioned songs, desire is expressed as a wish to overcome the distance between the lovers. Male voices temporarily imagine themselves as servants, laundrymen, or even as material objects in order to get close to the beloved, while female voices imagine the male lover as royal messenger, royal horse, or a desert gazelle speeding towards her. Overall, the male voices tend to be more explicit in imagining physical contact (second group of Cairo Love Songs) than the rather metaphorical wishes of female voices which mostly imagine the lover still on his way (P. Chester Beatty I, group G).
Because of the superficial ‘‘naturalness’’ of their subject matter, Egyptian Love Songs are usually perceived as a spontaneous expression of the deeply human feeling of love, an anthropological constant found all over the world (Meskell 2002: 126-34). However, interpreting the songs as a natural expression of the desire of the individual heart is methodologically problematic, as doing so overlays the culturally unfamiliar premises of the Egyptian text with the presuppositions of one’s own culture (Guglielmi 1996: 377-8; Gillam 2000; Munch and Moers 2005). Rather, evidence suggests that the Love Songs depict completely fictional emotional landscapes which enable the social control of emotions. The texts do not promulgate an individual desire as something autonomous but instead present role schemata which show how a passive passion caused by the perfection of the beloved can be dealt with in line with social conventions (Mathieu 1996: 168-72, 247; Munch and Moers 2005: 145-6). The texts even describe the imagined courtship of the yet oblivious lovers not as a private affair, but as a regulated social act conducted by the institutionalized role-schemes of ‘‘messengers’’ or ‘‘mothers’’ (P. Chester Beatty I, group C, song 2). In addition, the character of Mehy - the charioteer who often appears in the texts and is normally interpreted as ‘‘Postillon d’Amour,’’ ‘‘Cupid,’’ or ‘‘Lover’s Patron’’ - epitomizes the male ideals in the contemporary Egyptian elite and is, therefore, the central role model of the male voices in their quest for the fulfilment of their social and sexual fantasies (Gillam 2000). The fact that it is an example of role poetry is, however, especially clear from the landscapes described in the text. There are the idealized Nile landscapes as well as spacious park-like gardens, which are known from iconographic and textual sources of the New Kingdom to be the specific imaginings of the Egyptian elite in terms of their self-image (Widmaier 2009) and the construction of which is also referred to as a status symbol in the Teaching of Anii (B 19,1-4). The affectionate voices do not only communicate with each other in these imagined landscapes, but almost transfer to them the lovers’ innermost thoughts and feeling. Consequentely, the lovers themselves become smoothly one with parts of the landscapes in which they act (P. Harris 500, first group, song 3 and entire third group, esp. song 2), while the landscapes, for their part, lend an imaginary voice to the love that they have witnessed. The lovers are, therefore, an integral part of an imaginary social landscape where, even as lovers, they have an exact social position and do not individualize themselves by escaping into themselves (Fox 1985: 293-4).
In line with this is the possibility of reconstructing the material situation of the performance of the Love Songs in the context of musical banquets or festivities (Schott 1950: 29-36; Hermann 1959: 156-66; Fox 1985: 244-6; Assmann 1989; Meskell 2002: 130-1). Attempts within the text to encourage the lover to increase his efforts to ‘‘open up’’ the female beloved by performing Love Songs with dancing and singing, as well as with wine and strong beer (P. Chester Beatty I rto., song 1), apply not to private scenes, but to the usual circumstances of the performance of the songs at banquets. The same is true of the third ‘‘Song from the Orchard’’ (P. Turin 1966 rto. 1,15-2,15; Mathieu 1996: 85-6) which describes the organization of a public garden party by a young noblewoman. The scene shows marquees and pavilions situated in the shadow of a tree, while servants bring out musical instruments and supply the party with a variety of breads and beers as well as preserves and fresh fruits, and at the end of the three-day celebration those gathered around the beer stall will be wildly intoxicated while the two lovers amuse themselves in the shadow of a tree. O. Borchardt 1 (Mathieu 1996 pl. 22-4) gives the clearest reference to the specific situations in which Love Songs are used, in which all concepts constituent of, and appropriate to, the genre and its usage are merged within one song. Dance, accompanied song (Hs), and intoxication lead directly to the abandonment and oblivion (shmh-ib) that represents a ‘‘good day’’ (hrw nfr):
1 What a lovely day (hrw nfr) to see you, brother
2 What great enchantment, the sight of you!
3 Come to me with beer
4 And singers (hsw) with instruments
5 - Their ditties full of abandonment (shmhw-jb)
6 To joy and delight.
7 Your temperament (smw) thus presented
8 And you perfectly in the role
9 Speak, and your oration shall be heard!
10 The dance be your magnificence!
11 Your sister is charming in approval
12 And bows before your face.
13 Embrace it, with beer and incense
14 Like a gift to God!
Understood as role poetry, the Love Songs offer a unique combination of fiction and functional location in specific performance contexts and are, therefore, by no means abstract (thus Burkard and Thissen 2008: 86) or de-functionalized, as was proposed by interpreting the label shmh-ib of some songs as a general term for entertainment-literature (Assmann 1999: 12-13). From this viewpoint the emphasis on physicality in the texts gains another significance. Bodies and the sensual perceptions thereof are not only described in the Love Songs - rather, they are primarily imaginative constructions of the members of the Egyptian elite at a specific performance of the songs. On such occasions, guests gaze at other guests and deconstruct their bodies to parts, serving as metaphors of desire; they hear the voices that drive them mad, and they indulge in anointing, smelling, and tasting until they have made themselves sick - several New Kingdom tombs show banquets with vomiting guests (Schott 1950: pl. XI) - and only here, in a clearly predefined setting, are these guests allowed briefly to lose exactly that composure which is also spoken of in the Love Songs as to better keep it in other contexts (Munch and Moers 2005: 141-6).
World History
