![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
More on the Twenty-First Dynasty
Nov. 5th, 2018 10:01 pmMore on my obsession with the yellow coffins and papyri of the Twenty-First Dynasty, and their rich repertoire of religious symbols.
The coffins were made out of wood, covered in plaster, sometimes modelled into shapes, such as hands and breasts. Every bit of space was jammed with symbols. The coffin was typically covered in orange varnish, and the decorations might be gilded. Men got a blue-and-yellow headdress, women a plain blue one, sometimes with the vulture-headdress. Usually a winged figure, typically Nut, spread protective wings over the body. The most usual set-up was an inner and an outer coffin, with a "cover-plate" over the mummy.
ETA: Kathlyn M. Cooney writes that there are about 900 of these coffins around the world -- about 300 in Egypt, and the others in North America or Europe. (There are at least 2 in Australia too.)
The papyri are different in their sizes, contents, and where they were placed -- most commonly, between the mummy's legs, but also elsewhere else on the body (wherever an amulet might be placed), or in a wooden figure of Osiris next to it. (It occurs to me that there must be a ton of papyri which are still inside unwrapped mummies; perhaps a future technology will be able to read them without disturbing the mummy.)
Why so much variation in the decoration of the coffins, and the contents of the papyri? Goff's explanation is that, for the workshops that produced funerary papyri, "it was a matter of pride with them to introduce variants" into the patterns available to them, "and to shuffle pictures and texts so that their works of art were individual". (p 124) [clients could also choose] [coffins didn't reproduce contents of accompanying papyri]
Why did funerary papyri stop being large sheets of text with some illustrations, and become long bands of illustrations with some (or no) text? Because papyrus was expensive! The practice of shortening the Book of the Dead had already begun in the New Kingdom; after the Amarna period, pictures start to dominate. (There was no standard BD, with different papyri containing different selections of chapters, and some chapters being added late in the Book's history.)
Alexandre Piankoff discusses what he calls the principle of pars pro toto, where a part of the Book of the Dead (or another text) could stand for the whole thing -- a chapter could be replaced by a summary, or by its vignette or illustration. One vignette could illustrate two or three chapters. An incorrect or muddled version of the text would still do the job.
__
Cooney, Kathlyn M. "Coffin reuse: Ritual materialism in the context of scarcity". in Proceedings of the First Vatican Coffin Conference. Vatican Museum, Vatican City, 2017. pp 101-112.
Goff, Beatrice L. Symbols of ancient Egypt in the late period: the twenty-first dynasty. The Hague; New York, Mouton, 1979.
Piankoff, Alexandre and Natacha Rambova. Mythological Papyri. New York, Pantheon, 1957.
The coffins were made out of wood, covered in plaster, sometimes modelled into shapes, such as hands and breasts. Every bit of space was jammed with symbols. The coffin was typically covered in orange varnish, and the decorations might be gilded. Men got a blue-and-yellow headdress, women a plain blue one, sometimes with the vulture-headdress. Usually a winged figure, typically Nut, spread protective wings over the body. The most usual set-up was an inner and an outer coffin, with a "cover-plate" over the mummy.
ETA: Kathlyn M. Cooney writes that there are about 900 of these coffins around the world -- about 300 in Egypt, and the others in North America or Europe. (There are at least 2 in Australia too.)
The papyri are different in their sizes, contents, and where they were placed -- most commonly, between the mummy's legs, but also elsewhere else on the body (wherever an amulet might be placed), or in a wooden figure of Osiris next to it. (It occurs to me that there must be a ton of papyri which are still inside unwrapped mummies; perhaps a future technology will be able to read them without disturbing the mummy.)
Why so much variation in the decoration of the coffins, and the contents of the papyri? Goff's explanation is that, for the workshops that produced funerary papyri, "it was a matter of pride with them to introduce variants" into the patterns available to them, "and to shuffle pictures and texts so that their works of art were individual". (p 124) [clients could also choose] [coffins didn't reproduce contents of accompanying papyri]
Why did funerary papyri stop being large sheets of text with some illustrations, and become long bands of illustrations with some (or no) text? Because papyrus was expensive! The practice of shortening the Book of the Dead had already begun in the New Kingdom; after the Amarna period, pictures start to dominate. (There was no standard BD, with different papyri containing different selections of chapters, and some chapters being added late in the Book's history.)
Alexandre Piankoff discusses what he calls the principle of pars pro toto, where a part of the Book of the Dead (or another text) could stand for the whole thing -- a chapter could be replaced by a summary, or by its vignette or illustration. One vignette could illustrate two or three chapters. An incorrect or muddled version of the text would still do the job.
__
Cooney, Kathlyn M. "Coffin reuse: Ritual materialism in the context of scarcity". in Proceedings of the First Vatican Coffin Conference. Vatican Museum, Vatican City, 2017. pp 101-112.
Goff, Beatrice L. Symbols of ancient Egypt in the late period: the twenty-first dynasty. The Hague; New York, Mouton, 1979.
Piankoff, Alexandre and Natacha Rambova. Mythological Papyri. New York, Pantheon, 1957.
