Illuminating Osiris

Illuminating Osiris comprises twenty-seven articles by students, friends, and colleagues in honor of Mark Smith, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford. Smith is especially renowned as a Demoticist and specialist in ancient Egyptian religion. His numerous Demotic text editions and translations of Egyptian funerary and religious compositions have been enormously influential in the field. The contributions in Illuminating Osiris naturally reflect Smith's particular interests in the religion and literature of Graeco-Roman period Egypt, dealing with cult, rituals, astronomy, and divination, among other subjects. The book includes many editions or reeditions of texts written in Demotic, Hieratic, and Ptolemaic Hieroglyphs. It is profusely illustrated and supplied with detailed indices.

This book examines different forms of ritual activities performed in houses of Graeco- Roman Egypt. It draws on the rich archaeological record of rural housing and evidence from literature or papyrological references to both urban and rural housing.

This book is about the weird and wonderful lesser-known ‘spirit’ entities of ancient Egypt –daemons, the mysterious and often fantastical creatures of the Egyptian ‘Otherworld’ – and the closely related spirits of the dead, which together conjure the excitement of all things otherworldly. Daemons and spirits are generally defined in Egyptology as creatures not of this world, which do not have their own cult centre, and both groups are frequently listed together in protective spells. This volume explores the general nature of daemons and spirits in ancient Egypt and discusses a selection in more detail: it uses artefacts from Wales’s important collection of Egyptian objects at the Egypt Centre at Swansea University, in which are to be found a dwarf daemon with sticking out tongue; several guardian daemons of the Otherworld; creatures who are part snake and part feline; spirits of deceased humans; and a Greek satyr Silenus, companion to the wine god Dionysus.

This new volume in the Oasis Papers series marks the 40th anniversary of archaeological fieldwork in the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert under the leadership of Anthony J. Mills and presents a synthesis of the current state of our knowledge of the oasis and its interconnections with surrounding regions, especially the Nile Valley. The papers are by distinguished authorities in the field and postgraduate students who specialise in different aspects of Dakhleh and presents an almost complete survey of the archaeology of Dakhleh including much unpublished, original material. It will be one of the few to document a specific part of modern Egypt in such detail and thus should have a broad and lasting appeal. The content of some of the papers is unlikely to be published in any other form elsewhere. Dakhleh is possibly the most intensively examined wider geographic region within Egypt.

Of all the enormous monuments throughout Egypt and Nubia that Ramesses II (the Great; ca. 1279-1212 BCE) left behind, his temple at Abydos, built early in his reign, stands as one of his most elegant, with its simple architectural layout and dramatic and graceful painted relief scenes. Though best known for its dramatic reliefs depicting the battle of Kadesh, the temple also offers a wealth of information about religious and social life in ancient Egypt. It reflects, for example, the strenuous efforts of the early Ramessides to reestablish the Osiris cult in Egypt-and particularly at Abydos-in the aftermath of the Amarna period. Building on the comprehensive photographic and epigraphic documentation of the temple presented in The Temple of Ramesses II at Abydos volumes 1 (Wall Scenes) and 2 (Pillars, Niches, and Miscellanea), volume 3 (Architectural and Inscriptional Features) offers a detailed analysis of the overall architectural layout and decorative program of the temple and its symbolism. This discussion approaches the religious history of the site through its archaeology, its inscriptions-both planned and secondary (graffiti)-and its situation in the complex religious landscape of Abydos. Of particular interest are the temple's role as a staging point for the great Osiris Festival and its procession, among the most important of all ritual events in the Egyptian religious calendar during the Ramesside period; the promotion of an active, unbound form of Osiris; and the evidence for important cult activities that took place on the rooftop of the temple, the presence of which is documented today by the staircase that accessed it from Court B.

(Auto-)biography is a genre of ancient Egyptian written discourse that was central to high culture from its earliest periods. Belonging to the nonroyal elites, these texts present aspects of individual lives and experience, sometimes as narratives of key events, sometimes as characterizations of personal qualities. Egyptian (auto-) biographies offer a unique opportunity to examine the ways in which individuals fashioned distinctive selves for display and the significance of the physical, religious, and social contexts they selected. The present volume brings together specialists from a range of relevant periods, approaches, and interests. The studies collected here examine Egyptian (auto-)biographies from a variety of complementary perspectives: (1) anthropological and contrastive perspectives; (2) the original Old Kingdom settings; (3) text format and language; (4) social dimensions; and (5) religious experience.

In The Craft of a Good Scribe, Steve Vinson offers a comprehensive study of the Demotic Egyptian First Tale of Setne Khaemwas (Third Century BCE), the first to appear since 1900. "First Setne" is the most important extant Demotic literary text, and among the most important fictional compositions from any period of ancient Egypt. The tale, which is by turns lurid, tragic and ultimately comic, deals with Setne's theft of a magic book written by the god Thoth himself, and subsequently Setne's punishment through a hallucinatory encounter with the ghostly femme fatale Tabubue. Vinson provides a new textual edition and commentary, and explores the tale's cultural background, its modern reception, and approaches to its interpretation as a work of literature.

The first, complete English translation of the ancient Egyptian Netherworld Books The ancient Egyptian Netherworld Books, important compositions that decorated the New Kingdom royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, present humanity's oldest surviving attempts to provide a scientific map of the unseen realms beyond the visible cosmos and contain imagery and annotations that represent ancient Egyptian speculation (essentially philosophical and theological) about the events of the solar journey through the twelve hours of the night. The Netherworld Books describe one of the central mysteries of Egyptian religious belief—the union of the solar god Re with the underworldly god Osiris—and provide information on aspects of Egyptian theology and cosmography not present in the now more widely read Book of the Dead. Numerous illustrations provide overview images and individual scenes from each Netherworld Book, emphasizing the unity of text and image within the compositions. The major texts translated include the Book of Adoring Re in the West (the Litany of Re), the Book of the Hidden Chamber (Amduat), the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, the Books of the Creation of the Solar Disk, and the Books of the Solar-Osirian Unity. Features: Accessible presentations of the main concepts of the Netherworld Books and the chief features of each text Notes and commentary address major theological themes within the texts as well as lexicographic and/or grammatical issues An overview of later uses of these compositions during the first millennium BCE