The Blind Musician

A wall painting from the Theban Tomb TT52―the burial place of Nakht and his wife, Tawy. Nakht was a scribe, priest, and astronomer during the reigns of Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III (circa 1400-1352 BCE during the 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom). This is part of a grander scene of a fancy banquet. Photo: Gunter Schmidt. We see a depiction of a seated blind harpist who appears to be singing while accompanying himself on the instrument. His blindness is expressed by a curved line instead of an actual eye.”When they first appeared in the Middle Kingdom, the texts known as Harper’s Songs were designed to praise death and the life after death.

But in the famous ‘Harper’s Song from the Tomb of King Intef’, preserved in a papyrus copy, the praises of the afterlife were replaced by anxious doubts about its reality, and by the advice to make merry while alive and to shun the thought of death. Such a skeptic-hedonistic message may have originated in songs sung at secular feasts; but when transmitted as a funerary text inscribed in a tomb and addressed to the tomb owner, the message became incongruous and discordant. The incongruity did not pass unnoticed. In the tomb of the priest Neferhotep [who flourished during the reign of King Horemheb, circa 1323-1295 BCE, the last monarch of the 18th Dynasty] there are three Harper’s Songs, each expressing a particular response.

One song continued the skeptic-hedonistic theme but blended it with elements of traditional piety in an attempt to tone down and harmonize the contrary viewpoints. The second song is an outright rejection of skepticism and hedonism, coupled with a praise of the land of the dead. The third is a description of life after death in traditional ritualistic terms. Thus, the three songs in one and the same tomb reflect the Egyptian preoccupation with the nature of death and the varying and conflicting answers and attitudes that continued side by side.

“― Lichtheim, Miriam, Ancient Egyptian Literature: Volume II: The New Kingdom, University of California Press, Berkeley, USA, 1976.