Love Songs of Papyrus Chester Beatty I
Desire between social equals, voiced by a woman as freely as by a man, is worth preserving in writing on its own terms, without moral frame or divine sanction.
- secular love poetry free of religious framing
- female speakers voiced with equal candor to male speakers
- conventional sibling terms used for lovers
- extended garden and hunting metaphors for desire
A cycle of secular love poems, the largest of several such collections from Ramesside Egypt, in which young speakers, alternately male and female, address a sister or brother, conventional terms for lover rather than literal siblings, with frank longing, jealousy, and desire, using extended metaphors drawn from gardens, birds, and hunting. Strikingly free of religious or moralizing framing, the cycle is notable for giving the female voice equal weight and candor to the male, and was likely composed and copied within the scribal community of Deir el-Medina.
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