The opera's libretto notes that this is a love poem found in a royal mummy of the Amarna period, from Journal of Egyptian Archæology, translated by Sir Alan Gardiner. I imagined that a strip of poetry was wrapped up with other amulets and talismans, maybe even written by the surviving partner.
Fast forward--for fun I'm taking an introductory class in Egyptian hieroglyphs, and I thought, if I'm learning how to actually read the things I'm seeing at the MET, I should see what the original love poem looks like. If Gardiner translated it, that implies he worked from hieroglyphs. And maybe I could reproduce the hieroglyphs into a translated piece of art for the home. So I started to search.
I wound up on JSTOR, and spent what felt like six hours trying various searches of Journal of Egyptian Archæology AND Gardiner, or Gardiner AND "love poem", or Amarna and poem (it was here that I discovered the libretto I was working from had spelled Amarna "Armarna"). The problem was that the Journal spans over a hundred years of articles, and the libretto didn't specify which volume it was referencing. It looked like I was going to need the services of an Honest to Horus Reference Librarian.
When I told Mark, and he realized I was working from an opera, he said, "Uh, John; maybe they made the poem up. You know, it's art." I protested that the journal and Gardiner were real, but Mark just smiled.
I went back to JSTOR and figured that I had to do a different kind of search. Somehow, I hit the right combinations of Akhenaten and Glass and came up with a Egyptologist's review of the Philip Glass opera. While he didn't quote the poem, he did mention in the footnotes that it was from the King's Valley Tomb 55, and that Gardiner had written an article, "The So-Called Tomb of Queen Tiye" in the Dec 1957, 43rd volume of the Journal of Egyptian Archæology. I would have never found it using the keywords I had been using.
I skimmed the article... old French archeologists..., haphazard tomb..., so-and-so can be forgiven for..., souvenirs..., this translation is gibberish..., is it a man or a woman in this sarcophagus, ... and I got to a description of bands of gold foil that had been affixed to the inside of the sarcophagus but had fallen onto the mummy... very likely Akhenaten's name had been removed from the gold foil and someone else's name replaced... and Gardiner's actual translation.
Which was similar to the English words in the libretto. But some phrases from the original had been omitted in the libretto, and the libretto's transliteration in general was short, present-tense declarations, instead of a long future-tense affirmation. The result is that Glass's wording is more ambiguous, whereas Gardiner's translation is more firmly a prayer from a woman (probably Nefertiti) to a divine being (the Aten, or Akhenaten as the emissary of the Aten). It wasn't even wrapped in the mummy, the gold bands of a funerary prayer or spell had fallen off of the inside of the lid of the sarcophagus and onto the mummy.
"It's not the real grail?!?!" I said, quoting Micheal Palin as Galahad in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Mark was right, sort of, Glass had taken artistic license with the poem.
Oh well. I've got the original hieroglyphs now, I suppose I can work with Gardiner's scholarship and see what design I can come up with.
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