Life in Ancient Egypt - Leisure and enjoyment

The at-home

For most Egyptians a get-together would have been a simple affair: sitting around a fire or lamp, telling stories, singing songs, eating sweetmeat and drinking beer. Not so for their betters. They organised banquets on a lavish scale - if pictures in tombs are to be believed. The tables were burdened with all kinds of food, the wine was poured by shapely servants.

Traditional receptions could be full of rituals, with people having to observe a strict etiquette, though the very fact that they had to be reminded of it may be a hint that the rules were not as strictly observed as some would have liked them to be.

Men and women sat apart, the host on a chair, the guests on stools, pillows or floormats. During the New Kingdom they were sometimes depicted as wearing a cone on their heads. Conventional wisdom has it that these were made of scented grease, which would melt and flow down the wig releasing the perfume. Few traces if any of such grease have been found on wigs, and fastening grease cones to hairpieces without them falling off, would not have been easy. It may therefore have been a pictorial convention similar to the lotus flowers hovering above the heads of revellers. 

    These banquets appear to have been staid affairs, the worst that seems to have happened to the guests was to become drunk (and there are pictures of that having happened) or overeat.


Ancient Egyptian humour - What the ancient Egyptians laughed at

    Not everything we laugh at we think of as humorous, and what is considered amusing changes from place to place and from time period to time period. We should therefore be cautious when talking about ancient Egyptian humour. Of course they smiled and laughed, told jokes and funny stories, but their sense of the hilarious was not identical to ours.
    There are a number of topics which seem to have been thought of as funny throughout the ages. Much as it pains us politically correct westerners, we have always laughed at other people's infirmities or idiosyncrasies. The blind, hunchbacks, dwarfs and retarded have been butts for our jokes. Schadenfreude, the pleasure of delighting in somebody else's misfortune, may not be quite as cruel as it used to be, but we still laugh at somebody slipping on the proverbial banana skin. Bodily functions too have tickled our funny bone. Not quite as down to earth has been satire, the art of poking fun at the powers that be; and rarest of all has always been the gentle flower of self-mockery.

Like beauty, funniness lies in the eye of the beholder. One man's joke may well be perceived to be an insult by somebody else. The ancient Egyptians were as likely as us to take umbrage at becoming the butt of a joke as a New Kingdom scribe learned to his chagrin.
Satire

    Different social classes will laugh at different things. While the oppressed working classes would see the funny sides of their "betters", upper class scribes must have thought the descriptions of the various tradesmen in the Satire of the Trades to be hilarious. 
    
    To the ancient Egyptians, used to depict their gods in both human and animal shapes, the gulf between humans and animals must have been smaller than it is to us. Still it tickled their fancy to look at pictures of animals behaving like humans or listen to animal fables reflecting human behaviour.



Music

Music in all its forms, be it simple clapping, singing or playing instruments had an important place in ancient Egyptian life. It was heard in temples as part of worship, during processions and holidays, at parties, and, as one may suppose, in the evenings when the light had become too low to do any work and people continued to sit together for a while. It also had economic importance: Boring drudgery was made more bearable by chanting or by listening to music, making workers more efficient.

Instruments

Egyptian musical instruments were well developed and varied. They included string instruments such as harps, lyres, lutes, percussion instruments like drums, rattles, tambourines, bells (first used during the Late Period) and cymbals (Roman Period), wind instruments like flutes, clarinets, double pipes, trumpets, and oboes

Harps, developed from the hunting bow and used since the Old Kingdom, were triangular or arc-shaped. They usually had eight to twelve strings made of animal gut; and both men and women played them - sitting, standing or kneeling. At times their soundbox was tapped or beaten, described in inscriptions as sqr bn.t - striking the harp.They were generally made of wood and probably did not project very far. Harps were often decorated and could be expensive works of art
    During the New Kingdom there were harps of various shapes and sizes, the number of their strings was increased, and their sound boxes were improved. Some of the harps had columns, but these were rare.
    The large sized instruments were often covered with flowery or geometrical ornamentations. In one picture on a tomb, a harp is shown with a jaguar's skin, an instrument for rich people. Harps were played at parties, social gatherings, and ceremonial events, often in conjunction with other instruments, such as double pipes and rattles.
Lute
The marks on the instrument's neck have been interpreted by some as being frets.
   
    Another string instrument classified as a guitar because of its flat back and curving sides, may not have looked much like a modern guitar. It was improved if not invented by the Egyptians. 
 Article about Egyptian music: https://study.com/academy/lesson/egyptian-music-instruments-history.html

Egyptian inspired music: https://youtu.be/GI6dOS5ncFc

Information found on: http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/timelines/topics/music.html