Hymns and Prayers to Amun Re

Religious meditations on Amun-Re are the subject of this section: the sun hymn of Suty and Hor with its pre-Amama hints of the Aton religion; the ritualistic and cultic hymns in the Cairo papyri, with their rather stock expressions-not good poetry but excellent for the details they convey about the worship of Amun-Re; and, finally, the surpassing series of lyric outbursts from the Leiden papyrus, written in the time of Ramesses II, which express both the genius of a poet and the worship of a deeply religious person. The Leiden hymns give the fullest, most rounded, most vivid, and deepest portrait of Amun-Re that we have. They are the apogee of ancient Egyptian religious thought.