From the Beginning to the End: How to Generate and Transmit Funerary Texts in Ancient Egypt
In: Journal of Ancient Near Eastern ReligionsSearch for other papers by Foy Scalf in
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With a continuous tradition spanning more than two millennia, funerary texts from ancient Egypt offer an excellent data set for studying how compositions were composed and passed on in the ancient Near East. Clear evidence demonstrates the importance and mechanics of scribal copying in the transmission process. What remain less clear are the methods by which new compositions were created. In some cases, the accretion of scholia, commentary, and exegesis produced new versions of old texts. This is well illustrated by the continuum between Coffin Text (ct) spell 335 and Book of the Dead (bd) spell 17. In other cases, however, large collections appear in writing for the first time showing few hints at the earlier stages of their production. This is true for the Pyramid Texts (pt), whose pre-written forms can only be hypothesized. Fortunately, fragmentary steps from conception to textualization are partially preserved for a relatively little studied corpus from Roman Period Egypt, sometimes known by the title the Demotic Book of Breathing. Despite clearly representing the final stage in the pt-ct-bd tradition, scribes did not create this composition by copying from its predecessors. Instead, a new composition was crafted without direct parallel. In addition, the new text was never fixed, as fifty separate exemplars attest to a core set of formulae that could be added to, subtracted from, or rearranged at will. The variance in this corpus reflects a growing trend toward multiplicity in similar funerary manuscripts from Greco-Roman Egypt. A portion of this variance can be demonstrated to derive from an active oral tradition and it is this oral tradition, I will argue, that provided the raw material for new compositions such as the Demotic Book of Breathing. This paper will therefore address how textual traditions began by looking at the very end of funerary literature in ancient Egypt.
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5
Isaac Gewirtz, Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac On the Road (New York: New York Public Library, 2007).
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17
David P. Silverman, “Textual Criticism in the Coffin Texts,” in Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt, ed. W. K. Simpson, yes 3 (New Haven: Yale Egyptological Seminar, 1989), 30–33.
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19
Chris H. Reintges, “The Oral Composition Form of Pyramid Text Discourse,” in Narratives of Egypt and the Ancient Near East: Literary and Linguistic Approaches, eds. F. Hagen, et al., ola 189 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 3–54.
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25
Harco Willems, Les Textes des Sarcophages et la Démocratie: Éléments d’une histoire culturelle du Moyen Empire égyptien (Paris: Cybele, 2008); Mark Smith, “Democritization of the Afterlife,” in ucla Encyclopedia of Egyptology, eds. Jacco Dieleman and Willeke Wendrich (Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, 2009), 1–16; Harold M. Hays, “The Death of Democritisation of the Afterlife,” in Old Kingdom, New Perspectives: Egyptian Art and Archaeology 2750–2150 bc, eds. Nigel Struckwick and Helen Strudwick (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2011), 115–130; Harco Willems, Historical and Archaeological Aspects of Egyptian Funerary Culture: Religious Ideas and Ritual Practice in Middle Kingdom Elite Cemeteries, chane 73 (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 124–229; Harco Willems, “Die Frage der sogenannten ‘Demokratisierung des Jenseitsglaubens’ vom Späten Alten Reichs bis zur Zweiten Zwischenzeit,” in Handbuch der Altägyptischen Religion, eds. Jan Assmann and H. Roeder, Handbuch der Orientalistik (Leiden: Brill, in press).
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29
Christopher Eyre, The Cannibal Hymn: A Cultural and Literary Study (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), 20.
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33
For description, see Th. Devéria, Catalogue des manuscrits égyptiens (Paris: Charles de Mourgues Fères, 1881), 155; Vleeming, Short Texts ii, 703 (no. 1163). Translations can be found in E. Revillout, “Les prières pour les morts dan l’épigraphie égyptienne,” Rev. ég. 4 (1885): 52, and Marie-France Aubert and Georges Nachtergael, “Le cerceuil de Chélidôn au Musée du Louvre,” CdÉ 80 (2005): 298, n. 17. A full edition and hand copy can be found in Scalf, Passports, no. 29, 137 and 364.
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36
Papyrus Louvre E 3452, studied by Mark Smith, The Demotic Mortuary Papyrus Louvre E. 3452 (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1979). However, Demotic funerary phrases were composed in graffiti from an earlier period, as discussed below.
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39
Smith, Demotic Morutary Papyrus Louvre E. 3452, 4–13; Martin Stadler, Einführung in die ägyptische Religion ptolemäisch-römischer Zeit nach den demotischen religiösen Texten (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2012).
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42
For general commentary, see Smith, Traversing Eternity, 557–564; Vleeming, Short Texts ii, 779–793.
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From the Beginning to the End: How to Generate and Transmit Funerary Texts in Ancient Egypt
In: Journal of Ancient Near Eastern ReligionsSearch for other papers by Foy Scalf in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
With a continuous tradition spanning more than two millennia, funerary texts from ancient Egypt offer an excellent data set for studying how compositions were composed and passed on in the ancient Near East. Clear evidence demonstrates the importance and mechanics of scribal copying in the transmission process. What remain less clear are the methods by which new compositions were created. In some cases, the accretion of scholia, commentary, and exegesis produced new versions of old texts. This is well illustrated by the continuum between Coffin Text (ct) spell 335 and Book of the Dead (bd) spell 17. In other cases, however, large collections appear in writing for the first time showing few hints at the earlier stages of their production. This is true for the Pyramid Texts (pt), whose pre-written forms can only be hypothesized. Fortunately, fragmentary steps from conception to textualization are partially preserved for a relatively little studied corpus from Roman Period Egypt, sometimes known by the title the Demotic Book of Breathing. Despite clearly representing the final stage in the pt-ct-bd tradition, scribes did not create this composition by copying from its predecessors. Instead, a new composition was crafted without direct parallel. In addition, the new text was never fixed, as fifty separate exemplars attest to a core set of formulae that could be added to, subtracted from, or rearranged at will. The variance in this corpus reflects a growing trend toward multiplicity in similar funerary manuscripts from Greco-Roman Egypt. A portion of this variance can be demonstrated to derive from an active oral tradition and it is this oral tradition, I will argue, that provided the raw material for new compositions such as the Demotic Book of Breathing. This paper will therefore address how textual traditions began by looking at the very end of funerary literature in ancient Egypt.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 1221 | 279 | 15 |
| Full Text Views | 401 | 15 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 272 | 32 | 1 |
