The Rituals of Love in Ancient Egypt: Festival Songs of the Eighteenth Dynasty and the Ramesside Love Poetry

作者：John Coleman Darnell · 发表于：˜Die œWelt des Orients · 年份：2016 · DOI：10.13109/wdor.2016.46.1.22 · 被引用次数：7 · 研究领域：Biblical Studies and Interpretation、Ancient Egypt and Archaeology、Historical and Linguistic Studies

Summary The love poetry of Ramesside Period Thebes presents human love against a backdrop of frequently bucolic and marshy environments, with the trappings of festivals and religious imagery present in some of the poems. Precursors for the corpus appear in the form of festival songs recorded in Eighteenth Dynasty Theban tombs, presenting the festival activities of the gods against a backdrop of mortal love, performed in the setting of banquets involving ritual drunkenness. The Ramesside love poetry may reflect events of a romantic and even orgiastic nature that accompanied certain New Kingdom Theban celebrations. The common festival background for parallel corpora of texts celebrating divine love and human love in Egypt may provide a template for the performance setting of the Song of Songs, and help explain why that text is both so descriptive of the interactions of two human beings, and a text ultimately accepted as part of the Old Testament.