Myth & Folklore
Dreams in ancient Egypt: sleeping in the temple, and a papyrus of interpretations
A papyrus from around 1200 BCE lists over two hundred dreams and their meanings, colour-coded for good and bad. And the practice of sleeping in temples to obtain a healing dream may have begun here.
The Chester Beatty Papyrus III, now in the British Museum, dates from the reign of Ramesses II, around the thirteenth century BCE, and contains what is probably the oldest surviving systematic dream interpretation manual — though the text itself is likely a copy of considerably older material.
The structure
The format is consistent and simple. "If a man sees himself in a dream doing X — good, it means Y." Or bad, it means something else.
The scribe used red ink for the word "bad" and for unfavourable interpretations, and black for the rest, which makes the papyrus visually striking and immediately legible. Red was the colour associated with Set, disorder and danger.
Over two hundred dreams are catalogued. A selection:
Seeing a large cat — good; it means a large harvest will come to him. Seeing his face in a mirror — bad; it means another wife. Drinking warm beer — bad; it means suffering will come upon him. Seeing himself dead — good; it means a long life before him. Burying an old man — good; it means flourishing.
The interpretations frequently work by opposition — dreaming of death signifying life — and by wordplay, which is the same mechanism Artemidorus used a millennium and a half later and which appears in the Mesopotamian and Islamic traditions too. Egyptologists have identified numerous cases where the interpretation depends on a pun in Egyptian that is invisible in translation.
The Egyptian term is rswt, written with a determinative depicting an open eye. The associated verb means to awaken or to be watchful. The implication embedded in the writing system is that dreaming is a state of seeing — the dreamer is awake in some sense, and something is being shown to them. Dreams were understood as things one saw, not things one had.
Who did the interpreting
The papyrus is addressed to followers of Set, which has been read as indicating a particular priestly group. Interpretation was a specialist function, and professional interpreters — sometimes called the masters of secret things — are attested.
The biblical account of Joseph interpreting Pharaoh's dream, in which the Egyptian court's own magicians and wise men fail first, reflects an accurate understanding that Egypt had a recognised profession for this and that it was consulted at the highest level.
Incubation
Sleeping in a sacred place to obtain a divine dream is well attested in Egypt, and may be the earliest documented instance of the practice.
Petitioners slept in temple precincts, particularly at sanctuaries associated with healing. The cult of Imhotep — the architect of the Step Pyramid at Saqqara who was deified centuries after his death and became a god of medicine — was especially associated with it. The Greeks identified Imhotep with Asclepius, and the Asclepian incubation practice at Epidaurus and elsewhere may descend from Egyptian precedent, though the direction of influence is debated.
Later Graeco-Roman period sites, particularly the Serapeum at Saqqara and the sanctuary at Deir el-Bahari, have yielded substantial evidence of incubation: dedicatory inscriptions, graffiti from pilgrims, and structures interpreted as dormitories for the purpose.
The Dream Stela
The most famous Egyptian dream sits between the paws of the Great Sphinx at Giza.
A granite stela erected by Thutmose IV, in the fifteenth century BCE, records that as a prince, before he became king, he rested in the shadow of the Sphinx during a hunt and fell asleep. The god of the Sphinx — Horemakhet — appeared to him in a dream, complained that sand was burying his body, and promised Thutmose the kingship if he would clear it.
He did, and he became king. The stela records the transaction.
Historians generally read it as a legitimising document — Thutmose IV was probably not the designated heir, and a divine dream conferring the throne is a useful thing to have carved in granite. Which is itself informative: a dream claim was politically usable, meaning the audience took the category seriously.
Protective magic
As in Mesopotamia and in rabbinic tradition, bad dreams could be countered.
Spells survive for protection against nightmares and against the entities thought to cause them. One procedure involves the dreamer describing the dream while bread soaked in beer and herbs is rubbed on the face, then reciting a formula addressed to Isis. Another involves smashing a pot on which the dream has been written.
The logic is transfer and destruction — precisely the same logic as the Mesopotamian practice of telling a dream to a clod of clay and dissolving it in water. Whether this represents shared inheritance or independent invention of an obvious idea is not resolvable.
What is distinctive
Two things stand out relative to neighbouring traditions.
The Egyptian material shows a strong emphasis on dreams as visual revelation — something shown, by a god, to a passive viewer. There is less of the Greek interest in the dreamer's own condition and less of the Mesopotamian emphasis on systematic prediction across every domain of life.
And the interpretations in the Chester Beatty papyrus are notably concrete: harvests, wives, property, illness, legal outcomes. It is a document about the practical anxieties of a literate Egyptian household, which makes it as useful to social historians as to anyone interested in dreams.
