Abstract
Ancient Egyptians acknowledged the significance their bodies held in their lives in multiple ways: they aspired to taking care of them while alive, they protected them with laws and moral codes, and they made deliberate efforts to preserve them for an afterlife. Within that cultural context, ancient Egyptian storytellers described and moralized the human body in relation primarily to ageing, pain, disease, temporary disability, public image and behavior, and sexuality. In this essay, I concentrate on passages from ancient Egyptian fictional stories such as Sinuhe or Two Brothers that bore witness to their storytellers’ decision to include descriptive details about the ways in which a character’s body and physical appearance responded to the story’s unfolding plot progress. Such a literary choice usually coincided with the process of ‘zooming in’ a narrated event that involved a character’s first entry into a scene or the transformation of a character’s physical status. Approaching, thus, references to human bodies and their adornment, which ranged from a passing mention to longer descriptions, as outcomes of storytelling strategies, I explore the stylistic manners in which physical details contributed to the construction of ancient Egyptian character physical appearance and of corpo-real storyworlds.