Property of Sekhmet

"The Book of the Dead was used throughout the New Kingdom and Twenty-first Dynasty, and then, following an apparent hiatus in its use in the Twenty-second and Twenty-third Dynasties, from around 700 BCE to Ptolemaic times." -- Nicola J. Adderley, Personal Religion in the Libyan Period in Egypt, p 42 n211 (which leads to:)

"In the ninth century BC the detailed decoration of Theban coffins gave way to a plainer style without texts and the local practice of placing funerary manuscripts in he burial vanished altogether. At Tanis in the north meanwhile we find for the first time since Ramses XI royal burial chambers inscribed with scenes and texts extracted from the Book of the Dead and the Underworld Books. The occurrence of both startling reversals in the surviving record at the two governing centres of Egypt suggests that there may be a link to wider historical developments; the reign of Osorkon II brought a reimposition of northern control over Thebes, which resisted with force according to the Karnak inscription of the general Osorkon, a prince in the royal house. Yet the link may not amount to a direct royal clampdown on Theban use of texts because the Thebans did not resume their earlier coffin and manuscript traditions under the weak successors of Osorkon II. It is also significant that the disappearance of funerary texts involved not only those reserved before 1100 BC for the king but also.the Book of the Dead which had always been available to his subjects. Therefore the renewed vigour of the north under Osorkon II may have caused the change in Theban burial customs more indirectly, by promoting the spread of northern textless funerary traditions to the southern city, much as funerary customs altered abruptly in the nineteenth century BC without any obvious political motivation.

"Whatever the reasons for the change, for over a century no funerary literature survives..." -- Stephen Quirke, Ancient Egyptian Religion, pp 167-8

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Nicola J. Adderley. Personal Religion in the Libyan Period in Egypt. OmniScriptum, Saarbrücken, Germany, 2015.
Stephen Quirke. Ancient Egyptian Religion. British Museum Press, London, 1992.

A few notes. (Not a definitive summary of the book, just whatever caught my eye. Which I admit was a lot.)

(p3) The artists who worked on the 21st Dynasty funerary papyri and coffins must have worked from "artists' patterns". As often happens, that detail seemed to bring them alive in my mind's eye.

(p3-5) With some exceptions, in the New Kingdom, middle- and upper-class Egyptians and even queens could only use the Book of the Dead, while other funerary texts like Amduat and the Litany of Re were reserved for the king.

(p 7) Post-Amarna, funerary papyri started being contained in elaborate "papyrus sheaths" such as this one.

(p 8) When researchers started studying BD they thought it was like the Bible, with a standard, immutable text, so they took the best copy they could find (belonging to a Ptolemaic Egyptian named Iufankh) and divided it up into the chapters still in use. (I need to get my head around the different "redactions" / "recensions".)

(p 13) "Most of the funerary papyri begin with such a big adoration scene before a god sitting in a chapel. We will designate the initial scene, where a legend with the titles and names of the deceased and his spouse is usually encountered, with the term 'etiquette'." (Example here?) In the NK this is on the leftmost end of the scroll, in the 21D on the right.

(p 17) "Papyrus was rather expensive, and the value of a ready exemplar of the Book of the Dead... was 1 deben of silver, according to some materials from Deir el-Medina." Papyrus was sometimes reused (p76).

(p 18) Books of the Dead were pre-made and the owner's name filled in after purchase; but some were made to order, sometimes by the owner themselves, so they might have chosen which chapters and vignettes to include. (I've wondered if something similar happened with the yellow coffins.)

(p 19) In post-Amarna / Ramesside times, vignettes get bigger and better drawn, while text has more errors. (Hilariously, the start of the scroll tends to be the best-drawn, coloured, and written, which suggests only the start was shown to the customer!) Niwiński argues that the Egyptians were following a principle he calls pars pro toto -- a part for the whole -- wherein just part of the book can stand for the entire thing. So scrolls have a selection of chapters, summaries of chapters, shortened chapters, and vignettes taking the place of the text. A single spell might stand for two or even many spells. Even texts with errors, or that had been combined and no longer made sense, counted as the real thing. (This approach wasn't due to indifference or lack of ability. (p 44))

(p 32) Decorations from the BD on the tomb walls could probably substitute for a papyrus. In the 21st Dynasty, tombs were undecorated, with all the decoration going to papyri and coffins: at Thebes, "tombs of the Third Intermediate Period have the form of rock caches containing the shaft, the corridor and one or more rough chambers, the walls of which are even not smoothed." (p 35) But tomb robberies continued. "Better results were assured only through the founding of a well-protected cemetery with some huge mass tomb-caches (like Bab el-Gusus) in later years of the Dynasty." (p 37)

(p 37) For economic reasons, 21st Dynasty funerary papyri were shorter and about half as tall as their New Kingdom equivalents. (Mostly 22-25 cm high, and mostly less than 2 m long, p 74.) This made it necessary to use the pars pro toto rule to represent chapters by a fragment of text, a title, or just a vignette. The title was usually written on the back on the right-hand side (p 76).

(p 38) "A series of new iconographic compositions were then created, which represented complicated conceptions of cosmogony, cosmology and eschatology by means of a limited number of figural symbols. All these scenes were an illustration of the principal theological idea of the period: the solar-Osirian unity of the aspects of the Great God, with whom the deified deceased was identified... During the travel the deceased as a form of the Sun passed through an infinite number of transformations that were at the same time understood as multiplex creations of Osiris 'with many faces' (ꜥš3 ḥrw) , or 'with many forms' (ꜥš3 ḫprw) , or else 'with many names' (ꜥš3 rnw)". The idea of Osiris with many forms, and an eternal journey with the sun, reflects the contents of the Litany of Re and other books. Papyri didn't have enough room to hold all of this; so the inner coffins were covered in vignette. (Outer coffins continued to be decorated with traditional motifs (p 42).

(p 39) The new scene included
-- Shu lifting Nut
-- Osiris on the Double Staircase protected by the Great Serpent
-- the solar barque above chopped-up Apophis
-- the Sycamore Goddess
-- the Cosmic Cow going forth from the Western Mountain

(p 42) "Since the early years of the Dynasty, until at least the middle of the 9th century B.C. each typical funerary ensemble comprised two papyri: the BD-manuscript in the papyrus-sheath, and the 'Amduat' -papyrus bandaged together with the mummy, usually placed between its legs." The need for two papyri per burial meant an increase in the number of workshops. Some of the workers were better than others, and some clients might have been able to pay for better quality products than others. They worked from many different patterns of the texts and pictures. (p 43)

The papyri are very various, in size, length, and content.

(p 44) "some papyri entitled pry m hrw do not resemble the Book of the Dead of the New Kingdom at all... often one finds himself faced with quite new texts and scenes without any analogy."

(p 45) "There are coloured papyri with their vignettes painted red, white, blue, green, brown, pink and even gilded ones, and the figures and some other papyri of the same period are only outlined in black." Some are mostly text; some are almost entirely pictures.

(p 71) After a discussion of the history of the study of the papyri, Niwiński concludes we should drop "mythological papyri" as a third category (after Book of the Dead and Amduat). Not sure I follow this yet.

(p 77) For some papyri, such as those depicting the BD or the Amduat, the artist didn't have a lot of choice about content. But they did control some details, such as the border decoration.

(p 93) The texts on the papyri fall into these groups: (a) BD excerpts, (b) hymns and "litany-like incantations" illustrated by "the Great God in his different forms": Osiris, Re, the door guardians, the judges; (c) Amduat excerpts; (d) excerpts from the Books of the Underworld (the Book of Gates, Book of Caverns, Book of the Earth, etc); (e) offering formulas.

(p 95) The illustrations fall into these groups: (a) BD vignettes; (b) illustrations to hymns and litanies; (c) Amduat illustrations; (d) Books of the Underworld illustrations; (e) the original 21st Dynasty images.

(Never seen the door guardians and the judges of the weighing of the heart referred to as aspects of Osiris-Re before, though I suppose it makes sense!)

(p 97) Most papyri included an "etiquette", a large opening vignette with the deceased's name and titles, often with a portrait of the deceased worshipping a god (most often Osiris (p99)). (Here's Pinedjem II's, which includes no other illustrations. And here's Maatkare's, with the God's Wife depicted as a divinity herself, receiving offerings.)

(p 105) Papyri which were given a title might be entitled the Book of Coming Forth by Day (ie the Book of the Dead), or the Amduat. Book of the Dead papyri included those where images take up 90% of the decorated space, including the newly devised images, which don't illustrate BD chapters. Niwiński calls these "the new redaction of the 21st Dynasty (p 123). (There are also new images added to the traditional Book of the Dead illustrations, such as Amentet with a hieroglyphic head and the mouse-headed god who holds a hand to his snout. (p 123).

This way to part two of my notes!
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Andrzej Niwiński. Studies on the Illustrated Theban Funerary Papyri of the 11th and 10th Centuries BC. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 86. Göttingen, Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1989.

Right then. The moon and the sun are linked as the eyes of a god in various places in Egyptian myth - I'll stick a bunch of notes behind the cut - but if my rummagings are correct, how the right eye, the solar Eye of Re, the ferocious goddess, overlaps with the left eye, the lunar Eye of Horus, is this: Thoth brings them both back.

I was familiar with two stories involving Thoth and an eye - the myth of the Distant Goddess, in which the Eye of Re decamps to Nubia in a huff, and Thoth (or Onuris, or Shu) is dispatched to get her back; and the healing of Horus' eye after Set's assault.

What I didn't know is that there's also a myth in which Horus's eye wanders off and Thoth returns it to him:

The eye of Horus sprang up as he fell on yonder side of the Winding Watercourse, to protect itself against (or, free itself from) Set.
Thot saw it on yonder side of the Winding Watercourse.
The eye of Horus sprang up on yonder side of the Winding Watercourse, and fell upon the wing of Thot on yonder side of the Winding Watercourse.
O ye gods, ye who ferry over on the wing of Thot to yonder side of the Winding Watercourse, to the eastern side of heaven, to speak with Set about that eye of Horus, may N. ferry over with you on the wing of Thot to yonder side of the Winding Watercourse, to the eastern side of heaven, that he, N., may speak with Set about that eye of Horus.
- Pyramid Texts 594-596

It'd make a great animated cartoon - Horus' eye either leaping out of his face (or perhaps off Set's forehead) and Thoth spotting it in time to catch it and fly it back to its owner. (Hmmm. I wonder if this is an image of the changeable moon travelling through the sky.)

Various other bits of the PT touch on the same story. Patrick Boylan discusses all this in a footnote:

"The legend of the flight and return of the eye is obviously similar in many respects to the legends of the Destroying Eye of Re, of the angry eye which becomes the serpent on the diadem of the sun-god, of Onuris who fetched the divine lioness from the eastern desert, and of Hathor of Byblos. All these legends are intricately interwoven - so much so, indeed, that it is often difficult to decide to which of them a particular feature or motif primitively belongs. Thoth is certainly associated primitively with the astral legend of the moon-eye that vanished and was found again. The primitive astral myth contains no suggestion of an angry eye of Horus. Thoth's function as pacifier of the eye is connected with the more reflective legends of the Eye as Serpent on the crown of Horus (in which Sechmet appears as the Eye in her form nsr.t, and Thoth is the shtp nsr.t). (p 32, fn 1)

It's a bit slack to just quote chunks of Boylan, but I'm knackered and he explains it so simply:

"The name of [Onuris] Ini hri.t, 'He who brings the one who was far away', refers probably to the bringing to Egypt from the mountain lands of the eastern deserts of a goddess in leonine form who was forced or induced to leave her desert home by an ancient battle-god in lion or falcon form. This ancient god was Horus the warrior-god who, because he brought to Egypt the stranger goddess, received the epithet Ini hri.t (Onuris) - 'He that fetches her that was far away'. Later this Hri.t came to be identified with the wd3.t and Ini hri.t was explained as 'He that brings the Eye that was far away'. Thus, the name of Onuris came to be written (as Thoth's could be, and sometimes was, written) as a deity carrying the wd3.t. (p 35)

And as a footnote to that lot:

"In some cases, of course, Thoth brings back to Horus (or Re) the right eye, or the Sun. This activity seems to be secondary or borrowed in the legends of the sun-god Re: it is based on his more primitive activity in connection with the moon." (p 35 fn 1)

So there you go - multiple versions of basically the same story, the eye leaving and being returned, with slippage between just which eye is doing the round trip.

( More notes )

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Andrews, Carol. "The Boar, the Ram-Headed Crocodile and the Lunar Fly". in Studies in Egyptian Antiquities: A Tribute to T.G.H. James (Occasional paper 123). London, British Museum, 1999. pp. 79 - 81.

Boylan, Patrick. Thoth, the Hermes of Egypt. Chicago, Ares Publishers, 1987. (A reprint of this, I believe.)

Darnell, J. C. 1997. The Apotropaic Goddess in the Eye. Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 24, pp 35-48.

Troy, Lana. "Mut Enthroned". in van Dijk, J. (ed.), Essays on Ancient Egypt in Honour of Herman te Velde, Groningen, 1997, pp.301-315.

Willems, Harco. The coffin of Heqata (Cairo JdE 36418): a case study of Egyptian funerary culture of the early Middle Kingdom. Leuven, Uitgeverij Peeters en Departement Oriëntalistiek, 1996.