Variability In The Earlier Egyptian Mortuary Texts

This book spins around the convening idea of variability to offer fourteen new views into the Pyramid and Coffin Texts and related materials that overarch archaeology, philology, linguistics, writing studies, religious studies and social history by applying innovative approaches such as agency, politeness, material philology and object-based studies, and under a strong empirical focus. In this book, you will find from a previously unpublished coffin or a reinterpretation of the so-called ‘Letters to the Dead’ to graffiti’s interaction with monumental inscriptions, ‘subatomic’ studies in the spellings of the Osiris’ name or the puzzles of text transmission, among other novel topics.

Janet Richards considers social stratification in Middle Kingdom Egypt, exploring the assumption that a 'middle class' arose during this period. By focusing on the entire range of mortuary behavior, she shows how Middle Kingdom Egyptian practices and landscapes relating to death reveal information about the living society.

The ancient Egyptian mortuary text known as the Book of the Dead had its heyday from the onset of the New Kingdom (around 1550 BCE) until approximately 50 BCE. Crafted on papyrus, this collection of magical spells, coined as the "Book," aimed to guide the departed through the Duat, or underworld, into the realm beyond. It represented an amalgamation of texts contributed by various priests over nearly 1,000 years. Stored within the deceased's coffin or burial chamber, the Book of the Dead marked a continuation of funerary literature, succeeding the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts, which were inscribed on items rather than papyrus. Some spells within the book dated back to the third millennium BCE, while others emerged during the Third Intermediate Period (11th to 7th centuries BCE). These spells, once inscribed on tomb walls and sarcophagi, eventually found their place in the Book of the Dead.

The chapters of Middle Kingdom Palace Culture and Its Echoes in the Provinces discuss the degree of influence that provincial developments played in reshaping the Egyptian state and culture during the Middle Kingdom. Contributors to the volume are Egyptologists from around the world who have developed their research following a conference held at the University of Jaén in Spain.

This study of the history of regional elites and of the archaeology of their cemeteries shows that the Coffin Texts of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom do not reflect a form of popular religion, but rather the cult of local rulers.

"Human beings," the acclaimed Egyptologist Jan Assmann writes, "are the animals that have to live with the knowledge of their death, and culture is the world they create so they can live with that knowledge." In his new book, Assmann explores images of death and of death rites in ancient Egypt to provide startling new insights into the particular character of the civilization as a whole. Drawing on the unfamiliar genre of the death liturgy, he arrives at a remarkably comprehensive view of the religion of death in ancient Egypt. Assmann describes in detail nine different images of death: death as the body being torn apart, as social isolation, the notion of the court of the dead, the dead body, the mummy, the soul and ancestral spirit of the dead, death as separation and transition, as homecoming, and as secret. Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt also includes a fascinating discussion of rites that reflect beliefs about death through language and ritual.

The coffin published in this book represents a type that had some popularity in southern Upper Egypt in the early Middle Kingdom, but which, despite its extraordinary decoration had not attracted attention so far. The most striking feature of the decoration is that the object friezes - the pictorial rendering of ritual implements usually found on coffin interiors of the period - also include complete ritual scenes, some of which are attested only here. Apart from this, the decoration includes an extensive selection of the religious texts know as the Coffin Texts. The author first studies the archaeological context and dating of the coffin and attempts a reconstruction of the construction procedures from his technical description of the monument. The detailed account of the decoration in the rest of the book interprets the ritual iconography and offers fresh translations and interpretations of the Coffin Texts. A methodological innovation is that he regards the scenes and texts not as individual decoration elements, but as components of an integral composition. The background of this composition is argued to be a view of life in the hereafter in which the deceased is involved in an unending cycle of ritual action which reflects the funerary rituals that were actually performed on earth. On the one hand, these netherworldly rituals aim at bringing the deceased to new life by mummification, on the other the newly regenerated deceased partakes in embalming rituals for gods representing his dead father (Osiris or Atum). These gods, in their turn, effectuate the deceased's regeneration. The entire process results in a cycle of resuscitation in which the afterlife of the deceased and of the 'father gods' are interdependent. The sociological bias of this interpretation, with its emphasis on kinship relations, differs significantly from earlier attempts to explain Egyptian funerary religion.