The early literature of the Egyptians is largely religious; and the oldest Egyptian poems are the hymns of the Pyramid Texts. Their form is also the most ancient poetic form known to us—that “parallelism of members,†or repetition of the thought in different phrase, which the Hebrew poets adopted from the Egyptians and Babylonians, and immortalized in the Psalms.151 As the Old passes into the Middle Kingdom, the literature tends to become secular and “profane.†We catch some glimpse of a lost body of amorous literature in a fragment preserved to us through the laziness of a Middle Kingdom scribe who did not complete his task of wiping clear an old papyrus, but left legible some twenty-five lines that tell of a simple shepherd’s encounter with a goddess. “This goddess,†says the story, “met with him as he wended his way to the pool, and she had stripped off her clothes and disarrayed her hair.†The shepherd reports the matter cautiously:
“Behold ye, when I went down to the swamp. . . . I saw a woman therein, and she looked not like a mortal being. My hair stood on end when I saw her tresses, because her color was so bright. Never will I do what she said; awe of her is in my body.â€152
The love songs abound in number and beauty, but as they celebrate chiefly the amours of brothers and sisters they will shock or amuse the modern ear. One collection is called “The Beautiful Joyous Songs of thy sister whom thy heart loves, who walks in the fields.†An ostracon or shell dating back to the Nineteenth or Twentieth Dynasty plays a modern theme on the ancient chords of desire: