Staging "Lamentations" and "Triumph": New Methods of Understanding Two Ancient Egyptian Dramatic Texts

Due to the ephemeral nature of performance, material evidence for the content, context, and intention behind ancient Egyptian dramatic texts is extremely limited. What remains are the texts themselves (often in pieces) and iconographic evidence such as that found on the walls of the Temple of Horus at Edfu. There, illustrations of dramatic scenes appear in relief alongside the text of what translator H. W. Fairman entitled “The Triumph of Horus: An Ancient Egyptian Sacred Drama.” Inscribed sometime during the second century BCE, the Edfu text refers to a dramatic reenactment of the battle between Horus and Seth for the Egyptian throne, a performance tradition attested more than fifteen hundred years earlier on the stelae of Ikhernofret and the pharaoh Neferhotep I. For this reason, Fairman and others have referred to “The Triumph of Horus” as the oldest play in the world, suggesting its potential as a significant contribution to the early theatre history canon. In December of 2019, theatre students at the University of Maryland performed a staging of “The Triumph of Horus” as well as another important dramatic text from the Late Period, “The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys,” as translated by R. O. Faulkner. The intention of this production was to determine if embodied practice could reveal new ways of understanding and transmitting knowledge about ancient Egyptian dramatic performance. This paper will discuss the development, rehearsal process, and outcome of this unique production, incorporating research methodology from the fields of theatre historiography and performance studies.