Eros on the Nile

By Karol Mysliwiec

Book Overview

Daily life in ancient Egypt was, according to Karol Mysliwiec, saturated with eroticism and much influenced by cult and magic as well. Ancient Egyptian religion, with its variety of gods living,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0801440009
• ISBN13: 9780801440007
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

King Tut's woody

They never tell you that Pharaoh Tutankhamen was mummified with his (...)standing proud. Which is why anyone who has ever spent any time reading about ancient Egypt needs to read "Eros on the Nile," which fills in a big blank. Without some understanding of sex ideas, nothing of the rest of Egyptian society makes much sense. Not that, in our terms, it made much sense anyway. In many creation stories, gods created themselves by impregnating their mothers. The illogic of this did not bother the priests, says Karol Mysliwiec, who has worked in Egypt for four decades. The nutty things the Egyptians believed were not any nuttier than what people believe in churches and mosques every week, but they were distinctively nutty. My favorite was "sprouting Osiris," in which a whole nation worshipped a Chia pet. However, Mysliwiec examines all this with a perfectly straight face. Readers seeking tabloid style titillation will be disappointed. "The imagination of Egyptian theologians often led them far beyond the bounds of daily life," Mysliewiec writes, "although at times their tales bear comparison with the reports of the present-day gutter press." Most of the book is about religion, but most of Egyptian religion was about sex, mostly generation. "Anxiety regarding fertility was a permanent feature of Egyptian consciousness." Egyptians had a different relationship with their gods from us. They frequently threatened and cursed them, not Job-like for what the gods had already imposed on them, but to prevent them from persecuting them. Sex among the gods ran heavily to incest, with liberal doses of rape and homosexuality. The incest was adopted by the pharaohs and some of the top people, but for most Egyptians, sexual propriety was not too far from what the Rev. Jerry Falwell would have preached, with two exceptions. The Egyptians had little use for the missionary position, and homosexuality was neither approved nor disapproved. Mysliwiec says that Egyptians were open and unashamed about sexual matters, though not much in the book ratifies this. However, they maintained certain customs that were not that far from prudery. "Egyptian love poetry never speaks of marriage," and marriage was merely a contract. It had no legal or religious standing. Divorce was by contract, too, and the law was aimed to protecting women and children. Surprisingly, Mysliwiec does not say anything about custody of children. He distinguishes between eroticism and sexuality, which he does not define but appears to mean between psychology and sensuality. Besides custody, "Eros on the Nile" is also surprisingly silent on inheritance, but otherwise Mysliwiec packs an enormous amount of information in about 125 pages of text. The book is well illustrated and translated into very English English by Geoffrey Packer. Among words not often encountered these days, I noted calque, thill, coroplast and furuncle.