Ancient Life: Comic Relief

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Smelling victory, the lion pounces. The antelope, recoiling in defeat, clutches its weapon and lifts a trembling hoof into the air. But there’s no blood and gore here—just a gentlemanly game of Egyptian senet.

The scene above is from the so-called Satirical Papyrus, which dates to about 1150 B.C. and is now housed in the British Museum. The papyrus also contains other humorous paintings of animals: a fox tends goats, a cat herds geese and a lion performs a mummification. All of these activities are represented, though in a more dignified “high” style, in Egyptian tomb scenes. A painting in the Theban tomb of an early 14th-century B.C. official named Nebamun, for example, shows a worker herding geese as a scribe counts them. And the Papyrus of Ani (c. 1320–1290 B.C.), in which Ani stands in judgment before Osiris, includes a scene showing Ani and his wife playing senet—a popular Egyptian board game, in which pieces of astragali (animal knucklebones) are moved around a grid of 30 squares.

The Satirical Papyrus, then, appears to be just that: a parody of “high” themes in the “low” style. Such humor is rare in Egyptian art; the papyrus’s closest parallels are decorated ostraca from the workmen’s village of Deir el-Medina, near modern Luxor on the west bank of the Nile. A number of these ostraca are painted with animal vignettes mocking serious Egyptian funerary scenes. The Deir el-Medina ostraca may even have been painted by the very craftsmen who decorated tombs in the Valley of the Kings.

So perhaps the Satirical Papyrus, like the Deir el-Medina ostraca, represents the Revenge of the Workers, a comic subversion of the often harsh relations between upper and lower classes—then as now.

Smelling victory, the lion pounces. The antelope, recoiling in defeat, clutches its weapon and lifts a trembling hoof into the air. But there’s no blood and gore here—just a gentlemanly game of Egyptian senet.