During the Ramesside period love songs and poems were a predominant manner in which the men and women in ancient Egypt expressed their emotions, thus indicating to us that emotion played a vital role in the art of these societies (Watterson, 1997:51).
During the Ramesside period you can see a clear difference in the way in which men wrote in contract to the way in which women wrote. The general approach of the love songs consist of a man singing of a woman’s beauty and wishing to approach her, but lacking the confidence to do so. He is unable to control his thoughts, overwhelmed with passion and lust, willing to make sacrifices to be with her, if only he could find the courage to approach her. Men considered loving their wives to be the proper thing to do and showed their love through ensuring she has food and clothing and soothing her body in perfumed oil (Watterson, 1997:54). The men made use of terms of endearment such as “my queen” which indicates that the men thought highly of women. A woman was considered valuable for her fertility, thus men were advised to marry young to create a large family. This would get him the respect of his peers for the size of his family and would be viewed as having an active happy marriage (Watterson, 1997:60).
The general approach of the love
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Often they referred to one another as “sister” or “brother” which could be confused for incest in our modern era, however at that time it was in fact a term used to refer to their beloved partner and what we would consider to be incest now posed no issue to ancient Egyptians as marriage between cousins and siblings were rather common. The only negative effect considered by the Egyptians was the fact that the family did not grow through the merging of 2 different families, thus the family could not be enriched through the inheritance of the cattle and land of another family (Watterson