The Pyramid Texts: More Than One Hundred Years of Studies
The center affiliated to the Academic Research Sector in Bibliotheca Alexandria organizes a lecture via internet entitled “
The Pyramid Texts: More Than One Hundred Years of Studies".
This lecture will be delivered by Prof. Dr. Ibrahim Abd el Sattar.
The lecture will be held on sunday 6 June, at 7:00 pm on the following link:
https://m.facebook.com/Writings.Scripts /
The Pyramid Texts are not limited to the pyramids of the kings and queens of the Old Kingdom, but also transmitted and continued to appear in more than two hundred Middle Kingdom text sources including tomb chambers, coffins, sarcophagi, stelae, canopic chests, mummy masks, and statues. Moreover, some sarcophagi and tombs of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties as well as the funerary temple of queen Hatshepsut have several phrases taken from different sections of the Pyramid Texts. The transmission of the Pyramid Texts also extended to the shaft-tombs and Grabpalasten of the Twenty-Fifth and Twenty Sixth Dynasties at Memphite and Thebes, the tomb of the god’s wife, Amenridies, and the sarcophagus of Ankhenesneferibre. At the Sudanese Nubian site of Nuri, it was discovered the stela of the Meroitic King Anlamani in the pyramid chapel of the pyramid no. 6. From the Ptolemaic Period, some versions of the Pyramid Texts were found on many demotic papyri in the British Museum, papyrus no. 3057 in the Berlin Museum (Ptolemaic Schmitt Papyrus), and in the temple of Edfu. Finally, the hieratic papyrus of Nes-Min from the Roman Period, which is known now as Sekowski Papyrus has also part of the Pyramid Texts.
Since the discovery of the Pyramid Texts, most of the Pyramid Texts studies focused on where these texts originate and how they develop. Over more than a century (almost 120 years), the studies that dealt with these text corpora could be divided into three stages: The first phase began from the beginning of the twentieth century until the seventies of that century. It includes the primary publication of these texts, the numbering of their spells, lines, and paragraphs. Also, a large movement of translation of those texts appeared in the English, German, and French languages, including commentaries on each spell. In addition, the orientation of its reading from the entrance to the funerary chamber or from the funerary chamber to the entrance was the principle for a long debate. Furthermore, the relation between the funerary rituals performed for the deceased king in accordance with their textual monumentalization has been also a matter of argument. This matter continued as a subject of argument in the next two phases. At this phase, it was noticed that these texts had a textual sequence (genres sequences or groups- Spruchfolge).
The second phase started from the eighties of the twentieth century until now. The studies of that phase have continued to focus on the relation between the funerary rituals performed for the deceased in accordance with their textual monumentalization. all scholars agreed that the orientation of the hieroglyphs is closely connected with the direction of reading and the layout of the texts. In that respect, they pointed that the
location of spells physically plays a role in the choice and the meaning of each text, namely, the relation between the text and its location on the walls. In this phase, It became clear that every textual corpus is an independent textual program consisting of many genres; every genre includes many spells that have the same theme.
As for the third phase, it coincides with the second phase, although its strong start began with the beginning of the 21st century. Pyramid Texts studies concentrate on how the genres of these texts were transmitted or reproduced through space and time. These studies have tried to identify the mechanism of these texts' transmission or reproduction, and the criteria of this process. Besides, The Pyramid Texts re-published, adding hundreds of new spells from the Pyramids of the kings Pepi I and Merenre, completing the paragraphs of some spells that were discovered before and missed some of their paragraphs, as well as the discovery of the Pyramid Texts of the two queens Ankhesenpepi II and Behenu the wives of King Pepi II.