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Abstract
Prohibition of music is only known by six documents; three date from the Ptolemaic period and three come from Hellenistic literature. Despite several hypotheses proposed in earlier studies, the reasons for this taboo remain unclear. After a review of all the documentation, this paper analyses the set of musical instruments that are forbidden and reaches the conclusion that none of them seems to have been banned because of a specific liturgical taboo concerning the material they are made of, nor do the restrictions stem from an exclusive profane or military purpose, or from a use that was restricted to certain festive rites, or because there was an instrumental practice which would be reserved to either men or women. However these instruments have a common character : the noise they make when people play them. So the solution seems obvious when we realise that in five documents these restrictions are related with Osiris and his abaton: Osiris as the ruler of the domain of the dead, Lord of the West, of the necropolis and of Silence loathes noise. But this cannot account for it entirely since other sources indicate that this god has a privileged relationship with music. Nevertheless, this contradiction seems to be resolved in the Osirian doctrine and its funerary practices. Indeed, the rite of reviving Osiris' body apparently begins after a period of sepulchral silence during which all music is banned in order not to disturb the repose of the god. With the crucial act of mummification music the songs first play a prophylactic role and, during the ritual of the Opening of the mouth, they finally participate in the rebirth of Osiris. So the prohibition of music has its roots in the oldest Egyptian beliefs in a cycle which endlessly opposes nothingness to creation, death to life and silence to noise; emerging from this eternal fight, Osiris - with all the deceased whom he embodies - triumphs over death forever.
This article discusses the sources for Egyptian hieroglyphs, language and epigraphy, and 'Egyptomania' in Egypt and Rome. Egyptian scribes continued to compose lengthy and stylistically complex hieroglyphic texts on temple walls and other media well into the early third century ce. Contemporaneous religious manuals and other papyri, meanwhile, attest to a concentrated effort to codify and transmit this written knowledge within temple libraries. The system of Egyptian hieroglyphs fascinated most prominent Roman scholars of the Second Sophistic, and the mystical interpretations of Horapollo influenced European thinkers through the Renaissance.
This volume is dedicated to an intriguing Platonic work, the Laws. Probably the last dialogue Plato wrote, the Laws represents the philosopher's most fully developed views on many crucial questions that he had raised in earlier works. Yet it remains a largely unread and underexplored dialogue. Abounding in unique and valuable references to dance and music, customs and norms, the Laws seems to suggest a comprehensive model of culture for the entire polis – something unparalleled in Plato. This exceptionally rich discussion of cultural matters in the Laws requires the scrutiny of scholars whose expertise resides beyond the boundaries of pure philosophical inquiry. The volume offers contributions by fourteen scholars who work in the broader areas of literary, cultural, and performance studies.
This volume explores how the choruses of Greek tragedy creatively combined media and discourses to generate their own specific forms of meaning. The contributors analyse choruses as fictional, religious and civic performers; as combinations of text, song and dance; and as objects of reflection in themselves, in relation and contrast to the choruses of comedy and melic poetry. Drawing on earlier analyses of the social context of Greek drama, the non-textual dimensions of tragedy, and the relations between dramatic and melic choruses, the chapters explore the uses of various analytic tools in allowing us better to capture the specificity of the tragic chorus. Special attention is given to the physicality of choral dancing, musical interactions between choruses and actors, the trajectories of reception, and the treatment of time and space in the odes.
The Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All is one of the major works from the golden age of Egyptian literature, the Middle Kingdom (c. 1980-1630 bc ). The poem provides one of the most searching explorations of human motivation and divine justice to survive from ancient Egypt, and its stark pessimism questions many of the core ideologies that underpinned the Egyptian state and monarchy. It begins with a series of laments portraying an Egypt overwhelmed by chaos and destruction, and develops into an examination of why these disasters should happen, and who bears responsibility for them: the gods, the king, or humanity. This volume provides the first full literary analysis of this poem for a century. It provides a detailed study of questions such as: its date of composition; its historicity; the identity of its protagonists and setting; its reception history within Egyptian culture; and whether it really is a unified literary composition, or a redacted collection of texts of heterogenous origin.
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