For Our Destinies : The Funerary Laments of Upper Egypt

This diachronic and synchronic analysis examines the poetics of funerary lament in Upper Egypt ($\sp{\rm c}$idid), using a comparative methodology derived from ethnoarchaeology. The study interprets the meaning of contemporary lament as the ritual expression of grief for an idealized deceased via stylistic, linguistic and thematic comparisons with ancient Egyptian funerary texts, in particular, the earliest corpus of incantations written in hieroglyphics, the Pyramid texts (ca 2,686 BC-2,181 BC). The heuristic of a concordance is adopted and the various themes and motifs of lament are organized under thematic headings from which a holistic view of the contents is gleaned. A subsequent comparison of thematic domains in both ancient and modern funerary lament reveals important metaphoric and cosmological parallels, with respect to the phenomenology of death and conceptions of the afterlife. The rigorous kinesics and codes of lament performance are also analyzed using the same contrastive framework and it is proposed that the conventionalized postures of lament are kinesic icons which may have acquired semantic significance from stick-figure postures, formerly used to incarnate human emotions in hieroglyphics. In order to formulate a contemporary cosmology of the afterlife from the lament texts, a series of staged events and transformations experienced by the deceased, is interpreted within the broader rubric of concordance themes, taking as a model, the cosmology and topography of the afterlife elaborated in the Pyramid texts. Significant correspondences become visible through the juxtaposition of texts and iconography and the mapping of the ancient cosmology on the modern. Emergent as key to the interpretation is the notion that the tomb is a watery place, in which the deceased may be inundated and regenerated in the subterranean waters which nourish the Nile. It is argued that this notion derives from a seminal core myth of lament first documented in the Pyramid texts and present in transformations of Egyptian mythologies of death and the afterlife since the Old Kingdom. Belief in the intrinsic value of dynamic and antiphonal lamentation for the dead to the living is proposed as the force which has shaped and sustained the oral performance tradition over millennia