While I was hypomanic recently I became obsessed with the "
yellow coffins" and
mythological papyri of Ancient Egypt's Third Intermediate Period -- the stretch between the New Kingdom (Akhenaten, Hatshepsut, Ramesses the Great, etc) and the Late Period. Especially at the start of the TIP, during the Twenty-First Dynasty, there was a burst of innovation in religious art.
The New Kingdom had been a time of "highly centralized authority", writes Beatrice L. Goff. but towards its end, "respect for the royal office was very low". Royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings were plundered, and there was conflict in the court, including the "harem conspiracy" to assassinate Ramesses III. During the Third Intermediate Period, there were often two rulers, one in the north, one in the south; and the priests rivalled the king in power and prestige.
The New Kingdom gave us so many beautifully decorated tombs, but in the TIP the decoration moved to coffins, papyri, and stelae made of wood. For those who could afford it, two coffins plus a mummy-board (a wooden cover) was de rigeur. The "yellow coffins" have brilliant colours, with a bright yellow background, scenes painted in rich reds, blues, and greens, and a thick varnish. The insides of the coffins were also vividly decorated. Hundreds of them were found in a cache at Deir el-Bahari.
The coffins and the mythological papyri, were a sort of summary of the afterlife books. Rather than lots and lots of text illustrated with "vignettes", the vignettes took over, with little or no accompanying hieroglyphic text. Scenes from the Book of the Dead, the Amduat, the Book of Gates, and Book of Caverns, the Book of Aker (lost to us), and the Litany of Re were used, as well as completely new scenes and even new deities. (One of the latter,
Hepet-Hor, captured my crazed imagination, and became a much-needed symbol of
Hope during a very confusing time.) The coffin lids are jam-packed with scenes and symbols and get even more so over time. (Things cool off again in the Twenty-Second Dynasty.)
IIUC around this time Osiris and the sun god (Re, Ra-Horakhty, etc) were becoming identified; the coffins and papyri draw on the mythology of both of them, with scenes of the solar barque, sunrise and sunset, the weighing of the heart, the forms of Re, and a new scene showing Osiris enthroned on a double staircase which represents the primeval mound -- a fusion of both myths. (It's in this scene that my girl Hepet-Hor typically appears, guarding the staircase alongside a huge snake.) Surprisingly, Amun doesn't get much of a look-in. Other popular scenes include the tree goddess who nurtures the deceased, the separation of Nut from Geb, and the Hathor cow coming out of the mountain.
The first time I clapped eyes on a mythological papyrus, many moons ago, it was this extraordinary image of Osiris from the papyrus of Ta-shed-khonsu, which Kyla showed me in a book:
That led me to Alexandre Piankoff and Natacha Rambova's book
Mythological Papyri, which contained the weirdest Egyptian art I'd ever seen*. Egyptian art, like its religion, is a mix of conservativism and innovation; the deeper you dig, the more surprises you find -- like Osiris represented with a donkey face looking out at the viewer, wielding a lizard as though it's a knife. It's shocking, and yet, in the context of the papyrus, it's intelligible.
While I was up af I had a very minor
clash with an Egyptology student, who accused me of finding Ancient Egypt "spooky", "mysterious", and "exotic", in the vein of the occultists of Victorian times**. tbh I don't think I've ever found AE any of these things, probably not since I read
Asterix and Cleopatra as a small child, certainly not since publishing fiction set there. After writing about Egyptomania for the
Pyramids of Mars non-fiction book I could understand where she was coming from, but ultimately the Egyptians were human beings who had to solve the same philosophical and spiritual problems we do. To do so, they copied, borrowed, and made stuff up, no different to anyone.
When I first saw those mythological papyri, they were incomprehensible, bizarre, random. "There was no fixed form of either text or picture," writes Goff "since every individual sought each his own special form to ensure that its potency was directed towards him." And yet, if I'd simply sat down and done the reading, they'd have made sense to me. Not as much sense as they made to a Twenty-First Dynasty Theban priestess, admittedly. But because the coffins and the papyri rely so heavily on illustration, they become meaningful to a modern reader in the same immediate and powerful way that a tarot card or a Surrealist painting can punch you in the brain. (Goff suggests that, when the vignettes were first developed in the NK, it was to increase the magical power of the spells.) Well, I've done the reading now -- or started to, anyway.
Are there parallels to be drawn between the intense religious creativity of the 21st Dynasty, the modern impulse to create and recreate ancient religions, and the god-making fever of my own disordered mind?
* Hibis temple and its wild parade of gods was a similar shock to the system.
** She seems to have deleted it subsequently. Perhaps I'm forgiven? ... nope, still Blocked. XD
ETA:
Connecting Coffins and Papyri -- a poster which summarises how the political situation affected burials.
__
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.
Taylor, John H.
Egyptian Coffins. Aylesbury, Bucks, Shire, 1989.
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