“Do not offend your heart as long as you exist,
Spend a perfect day, […]
Offer your heart its daily intoxication until the day of mooring!”

This is the invitation to enjoy earthly life conveyed by the hieroglyphic text of the song pronounced by the harpist, painted in one of the underground chambers of Inherkhaouy’s tomb in Thebes, dating to the Ramesside period. Such an exhortation stands out to modern visitors and may well have surprised ancient visitors too, in a space more closely associated with death and the owner’s post-mortem survival than with festive celebration of life. Although the text designates the owner as the intended recipient, it actually seems to address the living visitors, who still have time ahead of them, rather than the deceased who has already passed into the beyond. This text is not an isolated case: it belongs to a textual category traditionally known as “harpers’ songs” (Harfenlieder), attested only after the Amarna period. Some of these songs reinterpret the motif of the perfect day, the feast under the sign of divine perfection, which was already present in banquet scenes of the Thutmosid era. In those earlier scenes, by contrast, the deceased—truly dead, having recovered his senses, invested with his new divine essence, and integrated into the community of the gods—was invited to enjoy his condition during the ritual banquet shared with the living, as well as to delight in the spectacle offered by the musicians, among whom harpers were already present. How should we interpret this transformation of the perfect-day motif, once addressed to the deceased and now directed at the living? Behind this question lies the issue of the function of the musicians and their songs inscribed within the tomb space.

The aim of this dissertation is to shed new light on figurations of musical performances in private tombs, focusing on the New Kingdom, the period that provides the richest material. Our approach—semiotic, pragmatic, and anthropological—seeks to show how the musical image-texts, which depict musical performances within the tomb, prove to be performative in that space. We will first highlight their ritual role and show how, in most cases, they contribute to the deceased’s post-mortem survival. In some contexts, however, these image-texts can take on an exceptionally meta-ritual value, thus calling into question the very usefulness of the funerary cult. We will also illuminate how they participate in the staging of the deceased’s identity and the affirmation of a literate culture. Moreover, we will show that they do not merely constitute a purely visual or auditory experience; instead, they are fundamentally multisensory, both for the deceased and the tomb’s visitors. Finally, we will underscore how they fit into the logic of the tomb considered as a liminal space—a true threshold between terrestrial and divine space-time, and between the world of the living and that of the dead.