The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth

[ikhet_sekhmet]

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:

• 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.

Comments

[lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com]

It's a great book; I splurged on this because it appeared hot off the presses while I was working on the Book of Thoth article. I didn't end up using much of it in the article, but did take some notes, Tweeted about it a little, and will probably do something with it down the line. Stricker, you know, had a very weird thesis about this book, that it details the return into flesh, a kind of esoteric embryology, as it were. Nobody really buys that, but it is clearly a different sort of book than the other afterlife literature, and there is work to be done understanding its significance.