CHAPTER XVII.
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_a._ Berlin Museum. No. 1470.
_b._ British Museum. No. 9901.
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_See_ NAVILLE, “Book of the Dead,” I, Plate.
[Illustration]
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NOTES.
The seventeenth chapter is one of the most remarkable in the whole
collection, and it has been preserved from times previous to the XIIth
dynasty. The very earliest monuments which have preserved it have handed
it down accompanied with scholia and other commentaries interpolated
into the text. Some of the monuments enable us to some extent to divide
the original text from the additions, in consequence of the latter being
written in red. But there is really only one text where the additions
are suppressed, and which therefore offers the most ancient form, as far
as we know it, of the chapter. This is the copy on the wall of the tomb
of Horhotep. The sarcophagus itself of Horhotep contains a copy of the
text along with the additions. The chapter must already at the time have
been of the most venerable antiquity. Besides these two copies of the
chapter we have those from the sarcophagi of Hora and Sit-Bastit
(published, like those of Horhotep, by M. Maspero[24]), two from the
sarcophagi of Mentuhotep, and one from that of Sebek-āa (the three
latter published by Lepsius in his _Aelteste Texte_). The British Museum
has Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s copy of the texts inscribed on the coffin of
Queen Mentuhotep of the XIth dynasty, and also a fragment (6636 a) of
the coffin of a prince named Hornefru. Here then we have an abundance of
witnesses of the best period. They unfortunately do not agree. The
progress of corruption had no doubt begun long before, and the variants
are not simply differences of orthography but positively different
readings. The differences however are chiefly in the scholia. Even when
the explanations of the text are identical, the form differs. The latest
recensions have retained the form ⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂; the
ancient added the feminine ⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂. _What is that?_
But some of the ancient texts give the equivalent words
⁂⁂⁂⁂, and Horhotep does without them altogether. These words
were evidently additions not merely to the text but to the scholia.
The text of the chapter grew more and more obscure to readers, and the
explanations hitherto given were so unsatisfactory as to call for
others. The texts of the manuscripts of the new empire furnish a good
deal of fresh matter, much of which is extremely ancient, though the
proof of this is unfortunately lost through the disastrous condition of
literature in the period preceding the XVIIIth dynasty. The XVIIIth
dynasty and its immediate successors inherited but did not invent the
new form of the Book of the Dead, with its succession of vignettes,
which however differing in detail bear the stamp of a common traditional
teaching. The manuscripts of a later period bear witness, with reference
to this as well as to other chapters, to a recension of an authoritative
kind. The text becomes more certain though perhaps not either more true
or more intelligible, and the notes and explanations have here reached
their fullest extent.
It would take an entire volume to give the translations of all the forms
the chapter has assumed. It must be sufficient here to give the earliest
forms known to us of the text and of the first commentaries. These are
printed in characters which show the difference between text and later
additions; all of which, it must be remembered, are of extreme
antiquity—some _two thousand years_ before any probable date of Moses.
Explanations or other interesting matter occurring in the manuscripts of
the later Empire will be referred to in the notes.
The title in the early copies is the simple one here heading the
chapter. In those which begin at the XVIIIth dynasty the title is very
like that given for the first chapter. The chief additions are that the
deceased person “_takes every form that he pleases, plays draughts, and
sits in a bower, comes forth as a soul living after death, and that what
is done upon earth is glorified_.”
1. It would be difficult for us to imagine that the very remarkable
opening of the chapter is an addition. Yet it is unknown to the
primitive recension on the walls of Horhotep’s tomb, though found
everywhere else. The texts however which contain it do not agree. “I am
He who closeth, and He who openeth, and I am but One.” ‘He who closeth’
is ⁂⁂ _Tmu_, ‘He who openeth’ ⁂ _Unen_. As the god who closes
and who opens is one and the same, ‘I am but One,’ is a very natural
ending of the sentence, and for its sense the whole may appeal to
classical, and higher than classical, authority.
“Modo namque Patulcius idem
Et modo sacrifico Clusius ore vocor.”[25]
“I am Alpha and O, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord.”[26]
The meaning of the Egyptian is quite plain, but the readings most
probably through the absence of determinatives in the oldest style are
somewhat different. Horhotep and other texts have ⁂⁂⁂⁂,
apparently as one word (compounded of _tmu_ and _unen_), which may
signify the ‘closer and opener,’ but Sebek-āa and later texts have
⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂. The papyrus of Nebseni has ⁂⁂, in the
third person, which does not alter the meaning, but this is quite an
isolated reading. The later recension, as represented by the Turin
_Todtenbuch_ and the Cadet papyrus, has ⁂⁂, which only prominently
brings forward, what is implied in all the other texts, that the Opener
is a god.[27] The absence of the determinative ⁂ after ⁂ is no
objection to the sense ‘opener,’ especially after ⁂⁂. It is
absolutely necessary when dealing with mythology to look to physical
rather than to metaphysical meanings. I have sufficiently discussed the
meanings of the word ⁂ in my essay on the Myth of Osiris Unnefer.
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PLATE III.
BOOK OF THE DEAD.