Property of Sekhmet

Gotta tidy away some of these photocopies randomly lying around.

Cássio de Araújo Duarte. "Scenes from the Amduat on the funerary coffins and sarcophagi of the 21st Dynasty." in Rosati, Gloria (ed). Proceedings of the Eleventh International Congress of Egyptologists. (2015: Florence, Italy) Oxford, Archaeopress Publishing, 2017.

"... the appearance of actual Amduat motifs on coffins and sarcophagi is attributed to the last years of the government of the high priest Menkheperre, and to the beginning of the 22nd Dynasty under the high priest Iput." On papyri, too. Papyri labelled "Amduat" appeared at the start of the 21st Dynasty, but their content actually came from the Litany of Re; the actual Amduat turns up on papyri "around the middle of the dynasty", with an emphasis on the last four scenes of the book.

Duarte says "the artisans were conscious of the meaning of what they were painting and, instead of producing mechanical 'copies' [of the various funerary books], they created many fascinating variations that conversed one to the other." For instance, the funeral scene in the Book of the Dead and the solar barque from the Amduat were paralleled (hoping to grab Duarte's chapter about this later in the week for more detail). Duarte points out that the interplay between these scenes combines the divine and human worlds, as well as "the last moments of decisive narratives", the conclusion of the funeral and the sun's preparation to rise. He wonders if the "sacerdotal classes" "perceived their land to bve materially populated by divine subjects and their territory to be the actual landscape of the sun god's trajectory."

He also mentions those weird diagrams where the sun falcon's head is upsidedown, and that this derives from an image in the Book of Caverns. Well stap me vitals. I'll try and post an example.

ETA, from the papyrus of Padiamun:



Also hilariously about the, erm, varying abilities of different artists: "We cannot risk idealising the scenery too much."

Onto Nut in a bit.


Nils Billing. "Text and Tomb: Some spatial properties of Nut in the Pyramid Texts." in Hawass, Zahi Abass, Brock, Lyla Pinch (eds). Egyptology at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century: Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Egyptologists, Cairo, 2000. American University in Cairo Press, Cairo; New York, 2003.

There were two themes that caught my eye in this chapter. One, the importance of the reintegration of the body, in the form of the mummy. "The body disintegrated through death has been reintegrated, an ultimate precondition for rebirth." So the deceased and their parts are identified with Atum, whose name suggests tm, "complete".

The second theme is Nut as embracer and container -- analogous to the coffin that holds the mummy. Nut "extends herself over her son [Osiris/the king]": "This theme was to be repeated throughout Egyptian history in numerous variations on coffins, canopic equipment, tombs, and papyri." Nut is called "great embracer / she who embraces the Great One", "she who embraces the frightened". Billing says: "Nut represents a principle of integration. She is the all-containing waters of the sky, a celestial womb. She manifests the act of bringing together in order to give life." This role suits the "all-encompassing sky". "The dismembered pieces, themselves signs of disorder and death, are made hale and alive within her embrace." Nut is equated with the sarcophagus chamber, and the sarcophagus itself.

Alexander Piankoff. The Sky-Goddess Nut and the Night Journey of the Sun. JEA 20(1-2) 1934 pp 57-61.

Nut swallows the sun in the evening and gives birth to it in the morning: if the deceased can identify themself with the sun god, they too can rise again. Hence the goddess of the sky became "the protector of the dead, the personification of the coffin". Not surprisingly, inscriptions refer to the rebirth but seldom to the swallowing, death. (Later though, rather than not being mentioned, the West becomes the symbol of new life.) What's the geography of this journey? In the PT it's through the sky: "the dead sun was conveyed on the waters above the firmament". In later times, the creation of the universe was reenacted every morning, with the sun god rising from the waters of Nun.
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