Papyrus Chester Beatty I, verso · New Kingdom Egypt
Sister Without Rival
On the back of a New Kingdom roll now in Dublin, a young man and a young woman take turns. They call each other brother and sister. They mean lovers.
The young man of the cycleThe young woman of the cycle
Waset (Thebes)
The love songs of Papyrus Chester Beatty I were not written on a fresh sheet kept for delight. They occupy the verso of a roll whose recto holds the Contendings of Horus and Seth, a mythic lawsuit, loud with gods. Desire, in this case, is what a scribe put on the back.
Seven stanzas survive in a cycle of alternation. A young man speaks, then a young woman, then he again. They address one another as senet and sen, sister and brother. In New Kingdom love poetry this is lovers’ speech, not a household register. No genealogy is being claimed. A mouth is being dared.
The opening, in the man’s voice, has become the poem’s public face. He does not argue. He compares. She has no rival. She is like the star-goddess, Sopdet, the bright returner, at the rising of a good new year. The beloved is not proven. She is sighted, as a calendar is sighted, and the year is said to begin.
The rest of the cycle is less famous and more ordinary, which is its intelligence. There is a girl at a door. There is beer. There is the complaint that a heart will not behave. Gardens, linen, the river as a road between houses: the New Kingdom love songs keep returning to rooms one could actually walk into. They are not hymns that have been politely lowered. They are songs that know the street.
Late Egyptian is the language. Hieratic is the hand. Thebes, Waset, is the likely air of composition, though the papyrus’s exact find-spot was never the sort of fact a dealer confirms. What we have is Dublin, a glass case, and a verso that outlasted the mouths. The word the songs keep needing is mr, mer: to love, and mryt, the beloved. A verb that became a person.
The line that survived
Sister without rival, more beautiful than anyone. She is like the star-goddess, rising at the beginning of a good new year.
Editorial English rendering, after the opening of the man’s first stanza, Papyrus Chester Beatty I, verso. Not a published modern translation.
Interpretation
Brother and sister, here, are not a riddle about incest. They are an Egyptian lovers’ address, as conventional and as intimate as any later language’s darling. To read them as siblings is to refuse the poem its mouth.
The comparison to the star-goddess is not proof that the girl was good. It is proof that someone, looking, reached for the highest bright thing he knew. Beauty is a way of seeing. It is not a character reference.
Distant echoes
Across the table
Rise Up, My LoveAnother collected desire that was never only private, and never only holy.
Another language
OspreysWater, a bird, a woman sighted, longing before the moralists arrive.
Source / evidence
- Papyrus Chester Beatty I, verso·Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (CBL Pap 1). Late 19th to 20th Dynasty, often placed c. 1220 to 1160 BCE. Hieratic, Late Egyptian. Seven-stanza love cycle.
- Alan H. Gardiner, The Library of A. Chester Beatty·First modern publication of the papyrus (1931). Description and transcription remain the point of departure; later literary translations are under copyright and are not quoted here.
The Late Egyptian verse is ancient and in the public domain. English here is a brief labeled editorial rendering, not a modern published translation copied at length. No letters are invented; none survive as correspondence.
A word opens beside this story: mer
One question remains
If a beloved is named by a star and a year, what, then, is the person standing in the door?