The Chester Beatty dream papyrus and dream interpretation in Egypt
Papyrus Chester Beatty III, from Deir el-Medina, is the oldest known Egyptian dream book: its structure, red ink and the followers of Horus and Seth.
The oldest dream interpretation manual to have reached us is not Greek but Egyptian. It is the so-called Papyrus Chester Beatty III, now kept in the British Museum in London, a scroll copied more than three thousand years ago in the village of the craftsmen who built the pharaohs' tombs. Its contents show that a written and organised tradition of reading dreams already existed in the Ramesside period.
A scroll from Deir el-Medina
The papyrus comes from Deir el-Medina, on the west bank of Thebes, home to the community of scribes, painters and stonecutters employed in the Valley of the Kings. It formed part of a family archive that belonged, among others, to the scribe Qenherkhepeshef, who lived between the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties. The collector Alfred Chester Beatty acquired it in the twentieth century and donated it to the London museum.
The copy probably dates from the reign of Ramesses II, in the thirteenth century BC. On linguistic grounds some scholars have suggested that the text derives from an older original, perhaps of the Middle Kingdom, but the question remains open. On the back of the same scroll there is, among other things, a copy of the poem on the battle of Kadesh.
How the book is built
The manual is arranged in columns of short entries, all built on the same pattern: «If a man sees himself in a dream» performing a certain action, followed by the verdict, good or bad, and finally the explanation. Thus, for example, seeing oneself in a dream eating a certain meat or looking into a deep well could announce good fortune or misfortune.
The interpretations judged unfavourable are often written in red ink, the colour that in Egyptian writing was associated with danger and with the god Seth. Many explanations rest on puns between the name of the dreamt object and that of the announced event, a procedure that would reappear centuries later in Artemidorus as well.
Followers of Horus and followers of Seth
One section of the text distinguishes between men who follow Horus and those who belong to Seth, the god of disorder and violence. The dreams of the latter are interpreted differently and their character is described in negative terms: quarrelsome, rebellious, prone to excess. It is an early example of the idea that the meaning of a dream depends on the person who has it.
Egyptian evidence is not limited to this papyrus. On the so-called Dream Stele, set between the paws of the Sphinx at Giza, the pharaoh Thutmose IV had it recorded that he had dreamt of the god, who promised him the kingship if he freed the statue from the sand. In the temples of the late period there were also priests charged with interpreting the dreams of the faithful.
The Chester Beatty papyrus thus gives us back a concrete aspect of Egyptian daily life: the idea that the night brought messages and that there were books to decipher them. The fact that such a text circulated in a village of craftsmen, and not only in temples, shows how widespread these beliefs were. It was consulted by scribes who, in the morning, went back to work in the tombs of the kings.