The Egyptian Book of the Dead
9781613102442
418 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
When, in the year 1892, Sir Peter Le Page Renouf began the publication of his translation of the Book of the Dead, his intention was that the work, once completed, should be preceded by an elaborate Introduction, giving, besides all the information concerning the form and the history of the book, his views as to its sense and its religious value. As with the unfinished part of the translation, so here, we are left without any notes or any clue whatever as to the form which this introduction was to have taken, and we are obliged to resort to the fifth of the Hibbert lectures, given by Renouf in 1879, in order to know his views about the book. Before speaking of its contents, we have to state briefly under what form the book has come down to us. It is hardly necessary to repeat that it is no book at all in the ordinary sense of the word. It is neither a unity nor a whole, it is a collection which has grown by degrees, at various epochs. Undoubtedly part of it goes back as far as the Old Empire; the texts of the Middle Empire show already that there were various editions, and we are forced to admit that its origin is not much later than the beginning of Egyptian civilization, as we see that some of the rubrics attribute certain chapters to a king of the 1st dynasty. In the course of centuries the original text was modified and enlarged, new chapters were added, revisions were made, without casting these detached fragments into a whole. The various parts of the book were always independent, like the Hebrew Psalms; the acceptance of a chapter does not necessarily imply the acceptance of the next chapter, and it seems as if the relatives of the deceased chose in the collection which was at their disposal what they liked best, and the number of chapters which corresponded to the price they wished to pay for a papyrus. This description applies chiefly to the texts of the Book of the Dead of the period prior to the XXVIth dynasty. Under the Saïte kings it seems that a complete revision of the text was made; a definite order was adopted, which was not rigidly binding on the writers, but to which they generally adhered; various chapters were added, especially the last ones, 162-165, which are never found in the older copies. It seems also that something like what we should call an authorized version was adopted; and this was done by men to whom the book washardly intelligible. A great many glosses were introduced, which were copied afterwards in all the hieroglyphic and hieratic texts. Although we do not find the strict accuracy of Hebrew manuscripts, the number of variants in the Saïte, Ptolemaïc or Roman texts is considerably smaller than in the manuscripts of the Theban period, and a collation of the hundreds of papyri of late epoch which fill our museums would lead to no great result. However, it is from a text generally considered as Saïtic, but which I believe to be of the Ptolemaïc epoch, that the Book of the Dead has been first made known in all its extent. In 1842 Lepsius published the long papyrus in the Turin Museum, a document which he called “the largest piece of Egyptian literature which has been preserved.” Before him Champollion had seen it, and had noticed that a great number of repetitions of the same text existed in various museums. He made use of it in his grammar, quoted here and there a sentence taken from it, but he did not make a special study of the document. Lepsius understood at once the importance of the book, which was the vade-mecum of the deceased, and seeing how much more extensive the Turin Papyrus was than the short copies which had been published before, he traced the whole document and published it two years afterwards. Lepsius gave to this work the name of Todtenbuch, “Book of the Dead,” in opposition to the name of “Ritual” adopted by Champollion, which is certainly incorrect.
