page_title: Ancient Egyptian literature
section_title: Poems, songs, hymns, and afterlife texts
hierarchical_section_title: Ancient Egyptian literature / Literary genres and subjects / Poems, songs, hymns, and afterlife texts
caption_attribution_description: English: "This is an excellent example of one of the many fine vignettes (illustrations) from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer. The scene reads from left to right. To the left, Anubis brings Hunefer into the judgement area. Anubis is also shown supervizing&#32;&#91;sic&#93; the judgement scales. Hunefer's heart, represented as a pot, is being weighed against a feather, the symbol of Maat, the established order of things, in this context meaning 'what is right'. The ancient Egyptians believed that the heart was the seat of the emotions, the intellect and the character, and thus represented the good or bad aspects of a person's life. If the heart did not balance with the feather, then the dead person was condemned to non-existence, and consumption by the ferocious 'devourer', the strange beast shown here which is part-crocodile, part-lion, and part-hippopotamus. However, as a papyrus devoted to ensuring Hunefer's continued existence in the Afterlife is not likely to depict this outcome, he is shown to the right, brought into the presence of Osiris by his son Horus, having become 'true of voice' or 'justified'. This was a standard epithet applied to dead individuals in their texts. Osiris is shown seated under a canopy, with his sisters Isis and Nephthys. At the top, Hunefer is shown adoring a row of deities who supervise the judgement." A more detailed explanation of the scene can be found in the public domain The Book of the Dead, by E. A. Wallis Budge.[1]
context_page_description: Ancient Egyptian literature was written in the Egyptian language from ancient Egypt's pharaonic period until the end of Roman domination. It represents the oldest corpus of Egyptian literature. Along with Sumerian literature, it is considered the world's earliest literature.
  Writing in ancient Egypt—both hieroglyphic and hieratic—first appeared in the late 4th millennium BC during the late phase of predynastic Egypt. By the Old Kingdom, literary works included funerary texts, epistles and letters, hymns and poems, and commemorative autobiographical texts recounting the careers of prominent administrative officials. It was not until the early Middle Kingdom that a narrative Egyptian literature was created. This was a "media revolution" which, according to Richard B. Parkinson, was the result of the rise of an intellectual class of scribes, new cultural sensibilities about individuality, unprecedented levels of literacy, and mainstream access to written materials. However, it is possible that the overall literacy rate was less than one percent of the entire population.
context_section_description: The funerary stone slab stela was first produced during the early Old Kingdom. Usually found in mastaba tombs, they combined raised-relief artwork with inscriptions bearing the name of the deceased, their official titles (if any), and invocations.
  Funerary poems were thought to preserve a monarch's soul in death. The Pyramid Texts are the earliest surviving religious literature incorporating poetic verse. These texts do not appear in tombs or pyramids originating before the reign of Unas (r. 2375–2345 BC), who had the Pyramid of Unas built at Saqqara. The Pyramid Texts are chiefly concerned with the function of preserving and nurturing the soul of the sovereign in the afterlife. This aim eventually included safeguarding both the sovereign and his subjects in the afterlife. A variety of textual traditions evolved from the original Pyramid Texts: the Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom, the so-called Book of the Dead, Litany of Ra, and Amduat written on papyri from the New Kingdom until the end of ancient Egyptian civilization.
  Poems were also written to celebrate kingship. For example, at the Precinct of Amun-Re at Karnak, Thutmose III (r. 1479–1425 BC) of the Eighteenth dynasty erected a stela commemorating his military victories in which the gods bless Thutmose in poetic verse and ensure for him victories over his enemies. In addition to stone stelas, poems have been found on wooden writing boards used by schoolboys. Besides the glorification of kings, poems were written to honor various deities, and even the Nile.
  Surviving hymns and songs from the Old Kingdom include the morning greeting hymns to the gods in their respective temples. A cycle of Middle-Kingdom songs dedicated to Senusret III (r. 1878–1839 BC) have been discovered at El-Lahun. Erman considers these to be secular songs used to greet the pharaoh at Memphis, while Simpson considers them to be religious in nature but affirms that the division between religious and secular songs is not very sharp. The Harper's Song, the lyrics found on a tombstone of the Middle Kingdom and on Papyrus Harris 500 from the New Kingdom, was to be performed for dinner guests at formal banquets.
  During the reign of Akhenaten (r. 1353–1336 BC), the Great Hymn to the Aten—preserved in tombs of Amarna, including the tomb of Ay—was written to the Aten, the sun-disk deity given exclusive patronage during his reign. Simpson compares this composition's wording and sequence of ideas to those of Psalm 104.
  Only a single poetic hymn in the Demotic script has been preserved. However, there are many surviving examples of Late-Period Egyptian hymns written in hieroglyphs on temple walls.
  No Egyptian love song has been dated from before the New Kingdom, these being written in Late Egyptian, although it is speculated that they existed in previous times. Erman compares the love songs to the Song of Songs, citing the labels "sister" and "brother" that lovers used to address each other.
caption: This vignette scene from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer (Nineteenth dynasty) shows his heart being weighed against the feather of truth. If his heart is lighter than the feather, he is allowed into the afterlife; if not, his heart is swallowed by Ammit.
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