Khetu her sebt ter rek Rā
Jamāu her at r ast-sen.”
Though part of the text is unhappily much mutilated, we yet may gather the general ideas of the poem from the disjecta membra which remain.
It is a funeral song, supposed to be sung by the harper at a feast or anniversary in remembrance of the deceased patriarch Neferhetep, who is represented sitting with his sister and wife Rennu-m-ast-neh, his son Ptahmes and his daughter Ta-Khat standing by their side, while the harper before them is chanting. The poet addresses his speech as well to the dead as to the living, assuming in his fiction the former to be yet alive. The room of the tomb, on the walls of which such texts were inscribed, may be thought a kind of chapel appointed for the solemn rites to be performed by the survivors. The song which bears a great resemblance to the “Song of the House of King Antef,” lately translated by the eminent Mr. Goodwin, affords a striking coincidence with the words which Herodotus (ii. 78) asserts to have been repeated on such occasions, while a wooden image of the deceased, probably the figure called “usheb,” was circulating among the guests. “Look upon this!” they said; “then drink and rejoice, for thou shalt be as this is.”
The Song of the Harper
[Chanted by the singer to the harp who is in the chapel of the Osirian, the Patriarch of Amen, the blessed Neferhotep.]
He says:
The great one is truly at rest,
the good charge is fulfilled.
Men pass away since the time of Rā[531]