ABSTRACT
This chapter centres on an early twelfth century bce literary composition known to scholars as The Tale of the Two Brothers. It utilises a model of womanhood in which feminine beings simultaneously occupy multiple spaces of the Egyptian conceptual world: the created order on the one hand, and the primordial state that precedes and lies beyond creation on the other. Through the cultural framing of their bodies and sexuality, Egyptian women were embedded in both the created and pre-creation worlds, simultaneously inhabiting multiple conceptual spaces. The suite of erotic markers are given a positive or negative framing depending on whether an act lies within or outside of socially sanctioned parameters for sexual relations.
