Love in Ancient Egypt E-Book

Pietro Testa

• Herausgeber: Harmakis Edizioni
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

The ancient Egyptian had feelings similar to ours: hatred, love, piety, contempt, friendship, benevolence, envy, cruelty, social climbing, humility ... The concept of maat, social balance, material justice and morality which, according to indigenous sources, regulated the social gear, whose highest representative was the king, heir to the land of the gods, a good shepherd who took care of his flock, feeding and defending it.
The young Egyptians loved. Love, this unfathomable and profound feeling, was in their soul and was manifested in marriage, in the family and in the attention for the children and for the wife. The spouses loved to call themselves 'brother' and 'sister', because for the Egyptians the feeling for brotherhood was highly regarded ... and then, when you get older, your partner can be considered a brother / sister, having lived an arch of life together.

Leseprobe

PIETRO TESTA

LOVE IN ANCIENT EGYPT

© All rights reserved to Harmakis Edizioni

S.E.A. division Advanced Publishing Services,

Registered office in Via Del Mocarini, 11 - 52025 Montevarchi (AR)

Operating Office, the same as mentioned above.

www.harmakisedizioni.org

[email protected]

Editorial Director Paola Agnolucci

The facts and opinions reported in this book only bind the author.

Various information may be published in the Work, however in the public domain, unless otherwise specified.

ISBN: 9788831427234

© 2020

© Layout and graphic elaboration: Leonardo Paolo Lovari

For those who left silently

towards the starry spaces of the infinite cosmos.

Preface

When we talk about ancient Egypt, we generally think of the pyramids, gods and mummies, losing sight of the most important element of this culture: the human being.

The ancient Egyptian lived in a society and a civilization defined by his way of being. A civilization that lasted over three thousand years, based on an organized system that led the country to be a focal point in the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean.

The ancient Egyptian had feelings similar to ours: hatred, love, piety, contempt, friendship, benevolence, envy, cruelty, social climbing, humility ... The concept of maat, social balance, material justice and morality which, according to indigenous sources, regulated the social gear, whose highest representative was the king, heir to the land of the gods, a good shepherd who took care of his flock, feeding and defending it.

The young Egyptians loved. Love, this unfathomable and profound feeling, was in their soul and was manifested in marriage, in the family and in the attention for the children and for the wife. The spouses loved to call themselves ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, because for the Egyptians the feeling for brotherhood was highly regarded ... and then, when you get older, your partner can be considered a brother / sister, having lived an arch of life together.

In this booklet I present the ‘love poems’ of ancient Egypt, tender and delicate compositions that express the feelings of lovers in relation to the ancient mental and material context. An attempt was made to translate these documents as closely as possible to their originality, by referring the reader wishing to study the hieroglyphic text in the appendix executed with the JSesh software by S. Rosmorduc Quando si parla dell’antico Egitto, in genere si pensa alle piramidi, agli dei e alle mummie, perdendo di vista l’elemento più importante di questa cultura: l’essere umano.

c.

Pietro Testa

Naples 2017

CHAPTER 1

NOTES ON LITERATURE

1.1. The culture of writing

The past does not arise spontaneously but is the result of a construction and a cultural representation. The social reconstructions of the past constitute fictions of continuity centered on a group, imagined through remembrance figures and produced in the process of cultural practice.

Since cultural memory is not transmitted by biological inheritance, it must be kept active through the succession of generations. This is a process of memorization, reactivation and transmission of meaning, which reside in the guarantee of continuity and identity.

Identity concerns the memory and memory of an individual through time and also of a group, with the difference that this does not have a neuronic memory. In its place there is culture, that is, a complex of knowledge that guarantees identity and objected in symbolic forms: myths, songs, dances, proverbs, laws, sacred texts, images, paths and even landscapes.

In Egypt we find an archival and protection interest for monuments and ancient texts, apart from forms of awareness of antiquity for its own tradition.1Libraries and book culture developed in the Templars and schools scriptoria: an example is the House of Life, the vehicle of this form of cultural memory that rested on a large amount of texts.2

In the world of oral tradition, the potential for innovation (information) of texts is limited, since they remain in the cultural memory when dealing with widely known things. In the world of written transmission, however, the opposite occurs. A tremendously touching example is given by the ‘Lamentations of Kha-kheper-Ra-seneb’, a Middle Kingdom author: 3

2

He says: ● 4

“Ah, I wish I had speeches that are unknown, ●

strange phrases in new language that has not (ever) passed, ●

free of repetitions and not a sentence passed by the voice ●

3

pronounced by ancestors! ●

I express a thought 5 untying everything I say, ●

since therefore what was said is repeated, ●

when what was said was said! ●

The word of the ancestors is not boasting

4

when, therefore, they will find posterity! ●

5

No one who has spoken speaks, but one who will speak ●

and of which another will find what he will say. ●

Not a storyteller after that ●

- has been done before - ●

not a narrator of what will be said ●

6

- it is a search for what has vanished ●

and it’s a lie ●

and his name will not be remembered by others- ●

I said this according to what I saw, ●

starting from the first generation until

7

to those who will come later: ●

they want to imitate what has gone by. ●

Ah, I would like to know what others ignore ●

as has not been repeated! ●

It is a touching complaint about the pressure to vary and innovate the culture of writing, but it is a problem that concerns only the writer. In the world of oral tradition the knowledge of the cantor decides his rank in society, since there are no other forms of preservation of knowledge outside the memory of the declamator. Repetition here is not a problem, but a structural necessity: without repetition tradition collapses; innovation would be forgotten.

The most surprising thing in the text quoted above is that in it you hear the voice of an author who perceives tradition as something external and extraneous, and who despairs before the task of affirming and legitimizing his own speeches as something proper and new to tradition.

For the oral poet, tradition passes through him and fills him. The poet who writes, on the other hand, sees himself outside of tradition and feels that his affirmation towards it depends on his most intimate self. It is not for nothing that the title of the composition is

1

Collection of words, gleaning of sentences ●

and search for speeches with an ingenious mind ●

and addresses his complaints to his heart

He said to his heart: ●

“Come, my heart, so that I can speak to you ●

so that you can answer my speeches, ●

so that you can explain to me what crosses the country ●

and because those who shine are thrown to the ground. ●

I am one who is meditating on what is going on. ●

Kha-kheper-Ra-seneb is the first writer ‘tormented’ by the loneliness that accompanies writing. Who writes only for himself or with his heart must squeeze his own self if he wants to assert himself with something new towards tradition. Since the past arises from a fracture in the passage of time, here we come across for the first time in one of the most typical conditions for the birth of the past: the making oneself written by tradition.