Ptahhotep Maxim 31: Homosexuality

We're reading the book Middle Egyptian Literature: Eight Literary Works of the Middle Kingdom by James P. Allen. And by read I mean read.

Re-writing it, actually.

A couple of times.

The hieroglyphs are re-written using Jsesh so they go left to right and not right to left and not top to bottom. Then they're transferred to Photoshop and formatted as they are in the book. Then the transliterations are provided copied from the book, and the segments deduced from the transliterations. The English translations are copied from the book, and then each word is looked up in dictionaries. And you wouldn't believe what a mess those things are. Back and forth, back and forth, flippity flip flip all the way through from beginning to end over and over and over. It's a serious mess all over the place with three or four windows open going back and forth between them. Constantly resizing.

So now we're at the point where the priest knows what he's talking about.

And we expect him to be expansive but he hardly has anything at all to say. Only five lines.

And he addresses only one form homo-tude, an older man satisfying the lust of a boy. I suppose the sort of homo life a priest thinks about judging by modern day legal settlements and widespread international dissatisfaction with the Catholic church. The priest doesn't mention going down to the docks trolling for rough trade sailors, nothing about going to bars or to gay rodeos, or gay pride parades. Nothing about picking up hairy-ass soldiers or cornering a farm hand in the estate barn. Nothing about all the artists, craftsmen, musicians, caterers, jewelers and merchants. Nothing about all those quarrymen all over the place. Nothing about adult scribes.

There is a well known case of a homosexual couple memorialized in early Egyptian art in the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep. Life belongs to Khnum and Khnum is satisfied. In some of the hieroglyphs the names are strung together in word play with possible meaning of "joined in life and joined in death. Niankhkhnum had a wife shown seated behind him in a banquet scene but her image was nearly totally erased in ancient times for unknown reason.  The two men were royal manicurists and hairdressers. Laugh if you like, they were very high ranking officials. Right up there with keeper of the royal poop.

Wanna see 'em?  Tap the "images" button.

Maxim 31 says:

You should not have sex with a woman-boy,
though you know what is barred would be water on his heart,
for there is no cooling for what is in his belly.
He should not spend the night to do what is barred:
he will cool down only after he breaks his desire.

I thought there would be more.

Apparently the priest didn't want to be too discouraging.

Here it is in .gif form, optimized to 100% which is a lot.