‘God loves the silent one’: the value of silence in ancient Egypt through temple interdicts and autobiographical inscriptions

This paper follows in the wake of some studies on the uncommon theme of voice and noise bans to be found in Ptolemaic temple inscriptions. Those prohibitions bring to the fore the existence of certain ‘rules of quiet’ regarding the access to the temples, leading to assume that silence was considered, at least in the Ptolemaic period, one of the defining criteria of the sacred. To verify this inference and the evolution of the concept throughout the Pharaonic age, more documents are taken into consideration: mainly tomb inscriptions and biographical texts from stelae and statues of various periods of the Egyptian history. Though no clear evidence of the existence, prior to the Ptolemaic age, of such rules emerge from the analysis, the figure of the ‘silent man’ (‘grw’) recurs frequently, often in connection with the area of the sacred. The paper focuses on a list of biographical inscriptions that may prove the importance of this feature in the Egyptian concept of morality. With the added support of some literary texts, we’ll try to cast a light on a remarkable trait of the Egyptian identity, unparalleled in the Mediterranean area: a peculiar appreciation of silence.