Turin erotic papyrus
come behind me with your love, Oh! Sun, you have found out my heart, it is agreeable work."Īccording to French egyptologist Pascal Vernus, the papyrus has nothing erotic. The text appears to have been hastily written in the margins and would seem to express enjoyment and delight: The real significance of the images is yet unknown since those fragments of text that have survived reasonably intact have so far not yielded any clear purpose for the Erotic Papyrus. After Jean-François Champollion saw the papyrus in 1824 in Turin, he described it as "an image of monstrous obscenity that gave me a really strange impression about Egyptian wisdom and composure."[ Modern audiences often misconceive that ancient Egyptian art is devoid of sexual themes. The severely damaged Erotic Papyrus is the only known erotic scroll-painting to have survived. The various male images have also been interpreted as a single protagonist, who has several encounters with a courtesan Overall, the artistic merit of the images is high, suggesting that the Erotic Papyrus had an elite owner and audience. In contrast, the women are nubile and appear with canonical erotic images of convolvulus leaves, Hathoric imagery, lotus flowers, monkeys and sistra. Not conforming the convention of bodily perfection in ancient Egyptian art, the men depicted on the papyrus are "scruffy, balding, short, and paunchy" with exaggeratedly large genitalia. This part of the scroll-painting has been described as satirical and humorousĬontaining twelve successive scenes, the erotic section takes up two-thirds of the Turin Papyrus. The first third depicts animals performing various human tasks. It is currently housed by the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy Discovered in Deir el-Medina in the early 19th century, it has been dubbed "world's first men's mag." Measuring 8.5 feet (2.6 m) by 10 inches (25 cm), it consists of two parts, one of which contains twelve erotic vignettes depicting various sex positions. The Turin Erotic Papyrus (Papyrus 55001, also called the Erotic Papyrus or even Turin Papyrus) is an ancient Egyptian papyrus scroll-painting that was created during the Ramesside Period, approximately in 1150 B.C.E.
In funerary beliefs, the carefully construed union of Isis with her defunct husband Osiris influenced the customs not only of royalty, but also of ordinary mortals of the elite who desired to rekindle their own sexual powers for eternity. A corpus of texts relate to the creation of the world, expressing this male/female perfection in no uncertain terms, and a celebration of this event as it happened ‘the first time’ was symbolically re-enacted by the king and queen, impersonating the divine principles, on the royal marital bed. The Egyptians sought to explain phenomena around them in terms that implied sexual duality. However, the vital importance of sexuality was conveyed on the walls of tombs and temples in pictorial metaphors which required a century and a half for scholars to decipher. Where literary sources are fairly explicit, unambiguous pictorial evidence is more scarce, the Turin papyrus providing an intriguing exception. Twelve positions of intercourse, performed by more than a single couple, with ancillary figures and various props to hand may at first give the appearance of a catalogue of the kind that is known from other civilizations.Ĭonsidering the extent, permanence and impact of ancient Egypt as well as the conditions so favourable to the preservation of even fragile objects and documents, it is surprising that relatively few examples of erotic drawings have come to light here, the more so considering the importance of such matters and the way in which sexuality permeated all aspects of Egyptian society to a degree that may not be apparent at first sight. The age and setting may be exotic but the subject matter is one that all human beings can immediately relate to. In twelve scenes it testifies to the imagination of a draftsman of more than 3000 years ago.
The papyrus scroll known as ‘The Erotic Papyrus of Turin’ is a unique document of ancient Egyptian sexual life. Virgili (ed.), Papiro erótico, Barcelona 2013, pp.