Okay, so, as OP and an Egyptologist I'm going to attempt to explain why people tend to feel this way from both a historical and historical reception stand point (friendly, none of this is combative I just tend to speak like an academic for obvious reasons, so it can come across like that. Please don't take it the wrong way!). Basically, it boils down to people seeking something in a text that it cannot possibly give and was never designed to.
You speak of not being able to find joy in the study of Ancient history or Ancient Egypt in particular. That's a personal thing, I get it. But it also speaks to a mindset wherein the Ancient Egyptians are not considered beyond what you already know about them. It's a bias towards recency and existing knowledge. It's one of the first things we're trained explicitly not to do. In doing so, you're placing an expectation on the text and the ancient author to provide you, the modern reader, with something that's familiar that you can connect to easily. That's not always the case with ancient works of literature or art.
They say the past is a foriegn land, where we may be of the same blood and the same species, but culturally we're so very different and those differences evolve as the centuries tumble on. The past is not a mirror to our present. It is an echo, a ripple, distorting as time passes, just as it has been since it was made. So of course there was joy, of course there was singing and dancing. Every culture on Earth has it. They're human after all. But how we see it, depends on how well it's framed by those who understand the echoes of the time that has passed.
So, I understand the need for a visceral reminder that the Egyptians were human, but it can be achieved in so many other ways than a poor translation of a text that, contextually, shouldn't have that connotation. We don't need translations that only pander to the individualistic need of the modern reader and ignore the Egyptians who wrote it. It's also concerning, for an Egyptological standpoint, that despite the many things the Ancient Egyptians are known for, even if it's their funerary culture, that it has to take a poor translation for their humanity to be seen. Caring for the dead and performing rites is as old as time itself; sure it's not an obsession as it has so often been painted, but it's a fundamental aspect of humanity. Not seeing their humanity before this is a bias, and I would ask everyone who feels like this to examine that bias closely. It doesn't come from a good place, and while I know it's unintentional, you will need to unpack it at some point.
That being said, it's natural to look for oneself in the past, but as I said before, the past is an echo rather than a full representation. We have to stop trying to find ourselves and instead find those who did live in the past in the way that they present themselves. They're not always as we expect them to be. But Party girls? I can do that!
© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
This is a painting from the tomb of Nebamun depicting a party in full swing. It's one of the most well known and reproduced scenes aside from another scene from this tomb that depicts Nebamun fishing in the marshes. In this scene you can see many images of women at the party, some are musicians, some are dancing, some are talking, and some are taking recreational drugs (sniffing lotus flowers, that specific type can get someone high, and the Egyptians knew this). If anything was 'girls night' it's this.
So that brings me back to the Maxims of Ptahhotep. What you're wanting the text to do - a rebuke of modern reception of Ancient Egyptian culture - just isn't possible. It's basically asking the Ancient Egyptians to pass commentary on themselves for a modern audience thousands of years before it was needed, and that doesn't make any sense. So does it make it much less remarkable? Yes! They are! They're just people! People are remarkable, but they're also just as unremarkable. History is often touted as the brave, terrible, or awe inspiring deeds of humanity, but that's not all it is. Most of it is the mundanity of people's lives that are lived and mourned over and over, and it's truely wonderful to explore once you stop needing it to be explosive and look at the people that made it instead.
Saying 'marry a rich girl feel sterile' is your opinion, and that's fine, but let's try putting this back in context. The Maxims of Ptahhotep is a sbAy.t text or wisdom text (sabayt means wisdom in Middle Egyptian, they're telling us the genre of the text and I feel we should respect that) and wisdom texts are not designed to be controversial or break any moulds. The Egyptians wrote them to pass their culture down in written form. They're the purest form of 'this is who we are and what we believe' and it's your bias towards needing 'radical and controversial' that causes your disappointment. The Egyptians cannot be any more than what they already are. This is a father passing down knowledge to his son on how to conduct himself in society. He's caring for his son, he's being a father, and showing us the concerns a father has for his child in order to live a good life. Of course, this only works if indeed Ptahhotep is the real author. You find this a lot with ancient texts; there's no author. It's an amalgamation of many different voices and you're not going to find a 'personality' beneath because there isn't one unless you're reading someone's personal letters. But the nature of the text means it's mundane! It's sterile! Yet if you read the whole text, read it in context, it tells us so, so much about Ancient Egyptian society, and that's so important. Mundanity is far more important than big flashy events, because it reminds us not to forget the average person; the people who won't be remembered with names, dates, and carvings on walls.
Having the Egyptians tell us who they are in their own words, understanding their morals and values outside of all the mysticism that surrounds them in modern pop culture is radical. Recognising their humanity is just as mundane as ours is radical. Allowing the Ancient Egyptians to be people, boring, regular people, is radical, especially after all the racist mysticism that has to be combated. They are not there to inspire us, their lives are not for us to twist and turn to make our own seem more impactful or important. They are there simpply because they lived, and it is my job as an Egyptologist and Historian to make sure that their voices are heard in the most authentic way possible.
Unfortunately, this doesn't always make it palatable for a modern audience. But I'd rather I was true to the reality of the experiences the Egyptians were trying to convey, than give into the bias of the need to see oneself reflected back in the ripples of time and muddy those waters. No one can see if what's presented isn't real in the first place.
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