Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists Abstracts of Papers

XICE – Abstract of Papers
above all the identification of the dead king with the god Osiris and the worship of the
sun god Ra. The sun temples seem to have played a key-role in this complex, winding
evolution, although only for a brief period.
Excavating anger in ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek literature
Emily Jane O’Dell
While there are traces of the material lives of the ancient Egyptians around the world,
what does not remain are tangible samples of ancient Egyptian emotion. The emotions
of the ancient world, with particular attention to Egypt and Greece, were in significant
respects different from our own concepts of emotion, and these differences are crucial
to our understanding of ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek culture. This paper will
compare and contrast the emotion of anger in ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek
literature, along with its inherent consequence—a desire for revenge. The subject of
the emotions is inherently interdisciplinary, and has become popular over the last
thirty years in a variety of fields, including but not limited to: psychology, 109
sociology, psychology, history, anthropology, philosophy, political science,
neuroscience, and, more recently, artificial intelligence. While the study of the
emotions has more recently has garnered the attention of students of classical Greece
and Rome, 110 the same cannot be said yet of those of Egyptology. 111 Egyptologists
have, more or less, assumed that the ancient Egyptian terms relating to emotions
neatly correspond to our own categories of emotion, but they have wrestled with how
to properly define a plethora of emotion words in the dictionary and in scholarship for
some time. Nevertheless, there are profound discrepancies to be encountered, and we
must not take it for granted that ancient Egyptian words project conveniently onto our
own emotional vocabulary and understanding.
The one emotion that consistently appears in both classical and modern lists of
emotion is anger. However, David Konstan 112 has shown that the ancient Greek
concept of anger is in many significant respects different from our modern concept of
anger. If we envision anger as a desire for revenge after a real or perceived slight, we
can acknowledge that anger is dependent on an assessment of social roles,
relationships, and consequences. The question of who may belittle or seek revenge on
another is intimately connected to the power dynamics of one’s social relationship,
especially with respect to gender and class. The grammarian Demetrius 113 states:
“Giving orders is succinct and terse, and every master is monosyllabic to his slave,
whereas suppliation and lamentation go on at length.” Obviously, the impassioned
supplication of the Eloquent Peasant, as contrasted with the pithy or non-existent
responses of his superiors, could be considered one such example of a statusdetermined
linguistic exchange inspired by anger and a perceived injustice. In
addition to social status, we must examine gender to discover to what degree women
109
There are sub-fields of psychology that address emotion such as evolutionary psychology,
experimental and neuropsychology, social psychology, and psychotherapy.
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Such as SORABJI 2000, HARRIS 2001, NUSSBAUM 2001; on Rome, cf. C.A. BARTON 2001, BRAUND
and MOST 2004, and KASTER 2005.
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My dissertation on the emotions of ancient Egypt will be completed next year.
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KONSTAN, DAVID. The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical
Literature. University of Toronto Press: Toronto. 2006.
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Quote from his essay On Style.
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