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The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth
Freshly available at the uni library, it's The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth by Joshua Aaron Roberson, packed with all the Duaty insanity you could want - from an upside-down shrewmouse-headed god called "He who is upside-down" (248) to Atenet (!) to "a giant female mummy, the corpse of 'She-who-annihilates'" (278).
It's a huge, comprehensive study of the text and its vignettes from multiple sources, so I'm only going to jot down a few points of interest:
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Roberson, Joshua Aaron. The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth. Atlanta, Lockwood Press, 2012.
It's a huge, comprehensive study of the text and its vignettes from multiple sources, so I'm only going to jot down a few points of interest:
- In the tomb of Ramesses IX, a parade of shrewmice-headed gods adore the sun (278). "The Egyptians conceived of the shrewmouse, along with the ichneumon, as one of the sightless gods associated with the blinded Horus of Letopolis." (177n331).
- The Mysterious Lady (št3.t) (253), a form of Nut, makes six known appearances. In the tomb of Ramesses VI she's accompanied by three snakes and a crocodile, all on tippy-toe; her head is in the upper Duat, her feet in the Lower Duat, and the forms of the sun god march over her body - "a concise representation of the solar journey".
- Atenet, the female sun disc, appears in a complicated diagram of the creation of the solar disc (198), along with Amaunet; perhaps they've taken the places of the goddesses of the east and west respectively. There are two sun discs, one twice as big as the other - they might be the sun and the moon, but these are "rarely paired in Egyptian mythology". The vignette also includes twelve smaller sun-discs and twelve stars in an alternating pattern, presumably the hours of the day and night.
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Roberson, Joshua Aaron. The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth. Atlanta, Lockwood Press, 2012.