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The language of the surviving copies and the attribution to Intef date it to the end of the First Intermediate Period, when the Theban state was gaining supremacy over its rivals at Hermopolis in the north. Transcending these declarations of joie de vivre, however, is the sentiment of a harpist’s song, probably meant to be played at funerary rituals, associated with a King Intef (as several Eleventh Dynasty kings bear this name, it is unclear in whose tomb specifically this song would have originally appeared). However, the scribe does not imply that the afterlife is not real indeed the concept is somewhat redeemed at the end when man and soul agree to join hands and enjoy both life and death together as partners: ‘I will alight when you are weary, and we will reach harbour together!’ It shows a deep cynicism of the fundamentals of Egyptian funerary religion, explaining that even the most lavish attempts to halt death are, ultimately, futile. The insinuation that death comes to us all and in equal amounts, that departed nobles and pharaohs are the same in death as the pauper, is a radical one. The anonymous scribe’s assertion of equality in death is profound. their altars have been destroyed, like the lost who have perished on the shore for want of an heir, when the waves have taken their toll and the sunlight likewise, to whom the fish at the water’s edge speak. Those who built in granite achieved works – beautiful pyramids, beautiful works – so that their builders should become gods. The certainty of the Egyptian mortuary cult, in its pursuit of physical construction as a means of guaranteeing immortality, is thoroughly undermined: However, the ability of the dead to return to life in any capacity is scrutinised in the text and left in considerable doubt: ‘Life is a transitory state: trees fall.’ In an ironic twist, it is the man who yearns for death while his soul argues for life. The text takes the form of a disagreement between a man and his ba, an aspect of one’s soul depicted as a human-headed bird that soars between the netherworld and the living world to visit the tombs of the deceased. It survives to us on a papyrus and some fragments, probably from the reign of Amenemhat III (c.1860-14 BC). ‘A Dialogue Between a Man and his Soul’ is considered a masterpiece of Egyptian literature. Despite the re-establishment of central power in the Middle Kingdom, a certain fatalism persisted in its literature, which hints at a continued awareness of the dissonance between the invincible pharaoh projected by state propaganda and the relative chaos of the previous epoch. Egypt in this period had just emerged from an era of devolved power, fragile central government and intermittent warfare between various Egyptian kingdoms, dynasts and petty warlords. It is telling that such sentiments arose in the Middle Kingdom. Two texts from the Middle Kingdom (c.2050-1710 BC) show that, far from striving blindly towards eternal life, there were those who were engaged in critical, even cynical, religious philosophy and thought. Yet, despite this popular view of the Egyptian afterlife, some Ancient Egyptians were highly ambivalent about such beliefs. Likewise, the power-crazed ‘Cannibal Hymn’ from the pyramid of the Old Kingdom pharaoh Unas (c.2345-15 BC) reads: ‘The lifetime of Unas is everlasting, his limit is eternity.’ Shelley’s Ozymandias resonates with the student of Ancient Egypt for a reason. In ‘The Great Hymn to the Aten’, from the reign of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten (c.1350-35 BC), the pharaoh’s wife Nefertiti is described as ‘living and youthful for ever and ever’. They desiccated their bodies for use in the afterlife and built pyramids – ‘resurrection machines’ – that would ensure the pharaoh had eternal life by transfiguring him into a star, living on in the night sky forever.Īncient Egyptian literature often suggests a similar ethos. The lone and level sands stretch far away.Īncient Egyptian religion is, in these terms, a naive and narcissistic effort to deny the inexorable predation of time, which strives instead for immortality.
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Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Shelley’s Ozymandias, describing an inscription on a shattered, ancient statue, captures this in its coda: Ancient Egypt is commonly believed to have been a society enthralled by the notion of eternal life.