Preserved on Papyrus, Named for a Dutch City

The hymns take their modern scholarly name, the Leiden Hymns, from Papyrus Leiden I 350, the specific manuscript housing them now held in the Netherlands, a naming convention common across Egyptological scholarship in which surviving papyri are frequently identified by the modern museum or collection where they are held rather than by any title the ancient Egyptians themselves gave the text, since ancient Egyptian religious compositions of this kind were not generally given fixed titles in the way modern readers might expect.

Dating to the Nineteenth Dynasty, roughly 1200 BCE, the hymns represent a period of Egyptian religious thought considerably later than both the Amarna-period Great Hymn to the Aten and the Eighteenth-Dynasty Great Hymn to Osiris also catalogued in this atlas, giving scholars a useful comparative sequence of Egyptian theological development across several centuries within the broader New Kingdom period alone. Their sophisticated, paradox-embracing theological language has made them a frequently cited text in broader scholarly discussion of whether and how ancient Egyptian religious thought approached something resembling philosophical theology, a discussion connected to similar questions scholars ask about other ancient Near Eastern religious corpora, including Mesopotamian hymns such as the Great Hymn to Shamash discussed elsewhere in this atlas.