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| A Blind Harper: A cemetery on the wall of an tomb from the Middle Kingdom, A blind man playing music |
The differentiation between songs, hymns and verse in Ancient Egyptian texts is not always clear. The pattern is to treat as songs those poetic texts which are described with musical tools. If the songs are learned to have a clear connection with temple cults and festivals then they are commonly described as hymns. Poetic texts which are got in some tombs which are established with scenes of labor are likened with songs sung by Egyptian labourers in the modern era and are also therefore classified as songs. Other songs relate to the rage of the dead and are nearly always showed with harps from which the title "Harper's Songs" is gained. Since the songs are expressions on death, rather than being part of the rituals linked with burial, freer aspect of thoughts is encountered in these texts. Songs sought to assure the owner of the tomb about his destiny after death by way of praise. The greater freedom, in the case Harper's Song from the Tomb of King Intef, even got so far as to doubt the reality of an afterlife, lamenting death and proposing that life should be delighted whilst it could Miriam Lichtheim saw this as preceding a more suspicious strand of thought which would be contemplated in studies such as the Dispute between a Man and His Ba and new Harper's Songs.
The little song from the funerary stela of Iki is described with the went sitting at an proposing table with his wife and the rotund harpist Neferhotep sitting ahead of them:
O tomb, you were built for festivity,
You were founded for happiness!
The singer Neferhotep, born of Henu.
The stelle of Nebankh from Abydos contains a Harper's Song with the gone shown seated at the providing table with the harpist squatting before of him:
The singer Tjeniaa says:
How firm you are in your seat of eternity,
Your monument of everlastingness!
It is filled with offerings of food,
It contains every good thing.
Your ka is with you,
It does not leave you,
O Royal Seal-Bearer, Great Steward, Nebankha!
Yours is the sweet breath of the northwind!
So says his singer who keeps his name alive,
The honorable singer Tjeniaa, whom he loved,
Who sings to his ka every day.
A song from the grave of Paatenemheb, which sees from the rule of Akhenaten, is described in its first line as having been copied from the tomb of a King Intef, (a name used by several kings from 11th and 17th dynasties) It is also continued in the Ramesside New Kingdom Harris 500 papyrus. These works are had by scholars as being a copy of a genuine Middle Kingdom text. The song indicates a person should savor the good things in life, avoid musing of death and states doubt about the reality of an afterlife.
Make holiday, don't weary of it!!
Look, there is no one allowed to take their things with them,
and there is no one who goes away comes back again.
Equivalence have been made between the opinions shown in the above text with a verbal description by Herodotus from a much later period of how a feast for the rich in Egypt would climax with a wooden simulacrum of the deceased being broadcast with the saying "Look upon this!" and "drink and wallow, for thou shalt be as this."
Harpers Songs from the New Kingdom period answer to the rational skepticism exposed in this song by way of cool rejection of impiety or by leading the skepticism.
In the subject of the priest Neferhotep the three Harper's songs saw in his tomb show a full range of viewpoints. In one the wary position is went with the more conventional expressions of hope, the second eliminates skepticism, whilst the third is a ritualistic statement in life after death.
I have heard those songs that are in the ancient tombs,
And what they tell
Extolling life on earth and belittling the region of the dead.
Wherefore do they thus, concerning the land of eternity,
The just and the fair,
Which has no terrors?
Wrangling is its abhorrence; no man there girds himself against his fellow.
It is a land against which none can rebel.
All our kinsfolk rest within it, since the earliest day of time;
The offspring of millions are come hither, every one.
For none may tarry in the land of Egypt,
None there is who has not passed yonder.
The span of earthly things is as a dream;
But a fair welcome is given him who has reached the West.
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