Dr Freud along the Nile: Constructing an archaeology of psychology through Ancient Egyptian dream interpretation and its dream books (c. 1300 BCE–200 CE)

The project will be the first comprehensive study of dream interpretation in ancient Egypt. The Egyptians thought dreams contained messages about the future and were one of the first civilisations to develop a discipline of dream interpretation, codified in an array of dream books spanning 1.5 millennia (c.1300 BCE–200 CE). In these papyri, thousands of dreams were described, each followed by an interpretation of how it would influence the dreamer’s life. Only two substantial dream books have been published, but several more remain unpublished in museums, due to the complexity of the cursive script in which most are written (called demotic). The first part of this project will complete the critical text edition of these papyri, which is already at an advanced stage. The latter will bring together all these and previously published texts into a monograph tracing the first full history of Egyptian dream interpretation. A multiform approach will be applied to their study, with special attention to the unique insights they offer into ancient Egypt’s psychology. The dreams’ interpretations illustrate the most intimate hopes and anxieties of the ancient Egyptians, while their descriptions shed light on parts of the Egyptian psyche otherwise unknown to us, such as erotic dreams of a queer and subaltern sexual nature. The project will result in a radical rewriting not only of dream interpretation in ancient Egypt, but also of the social and psychological history of this civilisation.