Okay, I'll post some articles up about this, if it helps you. (All <10% of volumes, in complaince with copyright).
'Funerary Literature.' - Leonard Lesko
The funerary literature of the ancient Egyptians includes various collections of texts associated with elite burials from almost all of Egypt's historic periods. These texts were copied in many ways on the walls of tombs, and occasionally on temple walls, as well as on various objects placed inside tombs—principally coffins and papyri. The term does not cover the biographical texts, formulaic offering texts, and texts that are essentially hymns to various deities, which may also be found in tombs. Some ritual texts are included, but others—such as the Opening of the Mouth ritual, often found in tombs—are not generally included. Some mythological and cosmogonic texts found in tombs, such as the
Book of the Heavenly Cow or the
Birth of the Solar Disk, are included, but the Jumilhac Papyrus and Bremner-Rhind Papyrus, which are largely mythological, are not. The emphasis of funerary literature is on eschatological works, principally those that deal with life after death in the company of the gods—that is, guidebooks to the beyond. Despite the narrowness of the topic, such works were popular in all periods of Egyptian history and represent the largest genre of texts that survive, and also the group that is represented by the largest number of copies.
The Old Kingdom's Pyramid Texts, the Middle Kingdom's Coffin Texts, and the New Kingdom's
Book of Going Forth by Day (
Book of the Dead), as well as certain guidebooks to the beyond, such as the
Book of That Which Is in the Underworld (
Amduat), the
Book of Gates, and the
Book of Caverns, are the principal works of this genre, and there is a certain amount of overlap among them. The Old Kingdom's Pyramid Texts include some variants found on Middle Kingdom coffins as well as on the walls of a few Saite period priests' and priestesses' tomb-chapels at Thebes that date from almost two thousand years later. The Middle Kingdom's Coffin Texts include some variants of Pyramid Texts as well as other Old Kingdom material and early versions of chapters of the
Book of Going Forth by Day. Copies of the
Book of Going Forth by Day are essentially papyrus documents, but many individual chapters are found on tomb walls and even on the walls of at least one royal mortuary temple; since this is the New Kingdom mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, the last large and the only well-preserved pharaonic temple, such texts could also have occurred on others now lost. Some of its chapters are also found on scarabs,
shawabtis, linen strips, and hypocephali, and in many forms these continued to be very popular well into Roman times.
In the case of the Pyramid Texts, there is a clear chronological order to the surviving documents; the burial chamber of Unas, last king of the fifth dynasty, held the earliest known copy. Earlier examples might have been on perishable materials placed in tombs that were later robbed and despoiled. Most of the funerary literature has in common the reconciliation of the two principal cults involved with death and the afterlife, and both are related to the myth of divine kingship. They come down to us first and foremost in the royal context: the Pyramid Texts within the kings' burial chambers. Considered a living king from earliest times was the divine Horus—son and avenger of his father, Osiris—who at death became Osiris, with all the mythological connections involved. In the fifth dynasty's Pyramid Texts, the king has also become the “son of Re,” who at death joins his father on the sun's bark in his daytime and nighttime voyages through the sky. The cyclical nature of these cults, as well as their death and rebirth motifs, makes it possible for them to be assimilated together even if not always entirely reconciled. All three collections of texts have certain sections that show total separation, others showing some syncretism, and still others that show complete assimilation of the two deities, their cults, and their descriptions of the afterlife. What is remarkable is that these kings' texts were almost immediately used in queens' tombs, and thereafter were quickly taken over by nonroyals, then eventually made available to almost anyone.
The earliest examples of funerary literature in Old Kingdom pyramids were not all created specifically for the purpose of accompanying those royal burials. Judging from their contents, which refer to both pyramids and desert burials, and both royal and nonroyal owners, these texts indicate that they were composed from various sources dealing with death and the afterlife and were compiled by priests, generally of the Heliopolitan persuasion. The language and orthography of the texts also seem to indicate that the texts came from different time periods and perhaps from different places as well.
One interesting feature is that many if not all of the Pyramid Texts (and the Coffin Texts, too) were written originally in the first person, and an attempt (not always successful) was made to change the pronoun references to the actual names of the intended owners. This personalization or customizing of the texts was deemed essential to ensure that the owner was fully incorporated into the texts, but the effort involved hundreds of substitutions for each document. Coffins were occasionally reused with incomplete substitution of names, which seems to indicate that some individuals were more interested in the convenience or attractiveness of a second-hand coffin than in personalized textual content.
Manuscripts of the
Book of Going Forth by Day include not only the name of the deceased with the title of Osiris prefixed to it but also, often, his or her official title in the bureaucracy, with filiation as well. Perhaps because of individual preferences, but also to keep the books' customized appearance, they were generally written to order from beginning to end rather than produced as anonymous shelf copies with spaces left for names to be filled in later. The few drawings or paintings of the deceased in the books can hardly be considered portraits, but with the names and titles of the deceased appended, and their correct gender and proper dress for the time depicted, the purchasers would probably have been satisfied. The cost of the books probably varied considerably, based on the length and height of the scrolls and on the details of workmanship, but the proliferation of short versions, especially from the Late period, suggests that some such guide was available to almost anyone who could afford any burial expenses at all.
The
Book of Going Forth by Day is perhaps best known for the vignettes that accompany many of its chapters. Some of these drawings, such as the judgment scene of chapter 125, are very elaborate and provide the focal point of the book even when they are not the logical heart of the work. (This vignette, without accompanying text, survives alone on a very late papyrus.) The number of vignettes is far from uniform from copy to copy. In the case of the high priest Pinedjem of the twenty-first dynasty, there is no vignette for any of the chapters following the single introductory depiction of him at the beginning of the book, while in the book of his daughter Nesitanebetisheru, almost every chapter has a rather large though sketchy drawing.
Some manuscripts seem to show that artist and scribe worked separately (even if these tasks were done by the same person), and most frequently the layout of the whole with drawings was done before the texts were added. This, of course, resulted in some dislocation of drawings, and also in the omission or abbreviation of some texts because of lack of available space. There probably were manuscripts that were carefully collated, but there were also texts that had duplications and misreadings or were otherwise garbled; presumably the latter were provided by scribes who knew that the appearance of the document was enough to satisfy a buyer who either would not or could not read it.
It is reasonably clear that some of the utterances in the Pyramid Texts contain labels that were not intended to be complete sentences or part of the text proper. Some of these may have been titles or filing entries to identify the texts, and others were there to label the deities or objects in plans or vignettes that were not depicted in these pyramid sources. It is, of course, possible that the sources (perhaps on papyri) of the Pyramid Texts had rubrics or some vignettes or both, but the Coffin Texts provide the earliest examples of real rubrics written in red; they also have the earliest vignettes, some of which continued into the
Book of Going Forth by Day.
Today, there are editions and translations of these bodies of texts available for study, but there are problems with each of the publications of the edited versions. For the Pyramid Texts, Kurt Sethe (1908–1922) first collected the utterances from the sarcophagus and burial chamber, then worked out toward the antechamber and entrance. Since it is now clear that the texts were originally set forth to follow the funeral procession into the tomb, Sethe's numbering of the spells essentially goes backwards. The pyramid of Unas (being the earliest to have these texts) was taken as a starting point, but it had only about a third of the known texts, and the new texts found in succeeding pyramids were tacked onto the first lot with little regard to where they belonged logically. R. O. Faulkner's translation in this numerical order, though fairly literal, makes no real sense of the whole. A. Piankoff's translation of the Unas texts is closer to the proper order in proceeding from the entrance inward, but he followed the texts around each room, rather than taking the texts of opposite walls to complement each other, and his translations are in some cases a bit free.
One interesting characteristic of some of the Pyramid Texts, which also survived on some coffins, is the mutilation of most of the hieroglyphic signs representing animate objects. In some cases, these individual hieroglyphs are actually carved as two separate pieces divided by blank space, and in others, the snakes, animals, and other creatures have knives in their backs. These were two practices intended to ensure that the intact animal representations would be unable to offer any threat to the deceased person buried in proximity to them.
In editing the Coffin Texts, A. de Buck and his team had neither an established chronological order to help them, nor beginnings or endings that were consistent from one place to another, or even from one coffin to another from the same place. De Buck logically started with one fairly long sequence of spells that occurred on a comparatively large number of manuscripts. He followed this with succeeding sequences that had the best representation, until eventually he had picked up all the loose ends. Exceptions to this method were the texts on papyri included with the corpus, which were quite logically taken in order, and also the
Book of the Ways of Rosetan (modernly known as the
Book of Two Ways), which was recognized as a complete unit regardless of where it occurred on the coffins, though it was generally on the inside bottoms of the coffins from Bersheh. These two lots were numbered and included at the end of the whole collection, though clearly the latter at least should not have been relegated to this position, and a few spells that belonged with this group had earlier been mistakenly edited separately. Again, a reading or translation of these Coffin Text spells in numerical order has no relation to the arrangement or order of the spells on any manuscript from any of the many places where they were found. Admittedly, it is no easy task to establish an order to these spells: they occur on all six inner faces of the coffins, and in some cases they can be shown to proceed from one side to its opposite parallel wall, and in other cases from one to another contingent sides, while the tops and bottoms generally seem independent.
Among the most difficult problems to resolve in dealing with the Coffin Texts is to establish the precise chronological order of the actual manuscripts, which would probably help in producing stemmata of the texts themselves which would help us better understand the differences among them. Although much development could have taken place in papyrus versions before the texts reached what are essentially definitive versions on the coffins, until the stemmata are worked out, any changes, major or minor, can be seen as going in either direction. Of special interest in the Coffin Texts is the diversity of the texts and their layout in documents from different places, especially since they were found at so many sites throughout Egypt. The coffins from Bersheh have been studied most, but the large number from Meir, and the huge size of the coffins from Siut, make these two sites particularly attractive for further research.
It would seem that the
Book of Going Forth by Day would have been the easiest of these collections to edit properly; however, the very early publication of one Late period papyrus established an order for the chapters that was not relevant at all to earlier manuscripts. When E. Naville published a number of parallel versions of the much earlier eighteenth dynasty manuscripts, his desire was to establish the best early text of each chapter, but when he numbered them following Richard Lepsius's publication of the Turin Papyrus, he succeeded in destroying the logical arrangement of all the early documents. When newly discovered chapters are merely tacked onto the end of a growing collection, it is clear that translations of the chapters in numerical order keep getting further from any logical order; indeed, modern translators are in no agreement on where to end the
Book of Going Forth by Day.
Division of the texts into units of varying size was indicated in the original manuscripts in several ways. The vertical columns of hieroglyphs that are the Pyramid Texts generally have horizontal line breaks with small squares atop and to one side of these dividing lines to turn them into “houses” (
ḥwt) and thus to indicate textual units, which in this collection are usually termed “utterances.” For the Coffin Texts written in cursive hieroglyphs without lines to divide the vertical columns, the unit (known as a “spell”) could be indicated either by a bent arm in red or black, or by single or double horizontal strokes. These are often accompanied by rubrics (headings in red) which can either name a spell at its conclusion or otherwise introduce a spell in some form at its beginning. In the
Book of Going Forth by Day, the units are likewise spells, though commonly termed “chapters” by Egyptologists and these are regularly headed by their assigned rubrics.
Of the three major collections of funerary literature, it is generally clear that these were not separate books in the Egyptian sense, though each could contain books or portions thereof. Many would say that the modern names given to these collections of funerary literature are inaccurate and should be discarded in favor of the ancient names, which survive at least in some cases. The old designation the
Book of the Dead derives from a label in Arabic that refers to the fact that the books were commonly found with mummies. “The Beginning of the Spells for Going Forth by Day” is the way this “book” starts chapter 1 (and also chapter 17), and even though it is not clear that this describes all the spells rather than merely those at the beginning of the book, it is clear that the ancient Egyptians thought that it applied to the bulk of the work. Because chapter 163 is preceded by “Spells taken from another papyrus as additions to Going Forth by Day,” it is fairly clear that in the Late period the original book of that name included the spells through chapter 161. Chapter 162 regularly follows 165 and should be considered part of that added group. It is also clear, then, that this ancient name should not properly be applied to the present entire corpus of 192 chapters.
With respect to the numbering of chapters, it can only be said that any total can be quite misleading. Many chapters have variants that are labeled “A,” “B,” and so on, but sometimes the variants were actually additional, newly discovered chapters given the number of the preceding identifiable chapter (e.g., chapter 41B). Sometimes the same chapter was given two different numbers, as in the case of 52B and 189; but totally different chapters can have the same numbers as well. The whole series of W. Pleyte's chapters 166–174 have no relationship to the standard chapters with those numbers. It is also clear that many of these supposed additions actually had the titles of other works. Similarly, the rubric title of Spell I, found on perhaps three coffins of the entire Coffin Texts corpus, labels this as the “beginning of the Book of justifying a man in the necropolis.” If this were indeed the title for the bulk of the texts, it is strange that no form of “judgment scene” is to be found anywhere in that corpus. It can also be pointed out that there are other books in the Coffin Texts, including the
Book of the Ways of Rosetau (otherwise known as the
Book of Two Ways), which is both labeled as a book and has a typical colophon at its conclusion. A similar colophon is found on one coffin after Spell 467, indicating that this
Field of Ḥetep spell or spells may also have been considered a book.
The book of the
Field of Ḥetep is one of the more interesting units included in both the Coffin Texts (Spells 464–468) and the
Book of Going Forth by Day (chapter 110). Ḥetep can be singular or plural and determined by either a deity or a bookroll or offerings, which means that it can refer to the god named Ḥetep, who presides over this field, or it can mean “peace” or “offerings.” There are references to the field in the Pyramid Texts, and the earliest description of the place, which seems to have been located in the western sky, presents it as a place where the deceased person lives and works for the god Osiris. The field has an abundance of water and is very productive, and in the Coffin Texts it was a sort of Elysian fields, or a paradise, where the deceased can enjoy a pleasant existence in the hereafter. The spells in the Coffin Texts that deal with the
Field of Ḥetep are essentially different versions of the same text and vignette. On some coffins from Bersheh, the plan of the field seems to mark the starting point for the whole collection of texts. The
Book of Going Forth by Day version, which can be much more elaborate than any version of the Coffin Texts, is for some reason found preceding the judgment scene (chapter 125) in the standard order of chapters on Late period manuscripts.
Some chapters in the
Book of Going Forth by Day had a life of their own. One example is chapter 30, the heart spell, which is carved on stone amulets placed within the mummy's thoracic cavity before wrapping. Another is chapter 6, found on countless
shawabtis, which were mummiform statuettes intended to act for the deceased with respect to any task that he might be called on to perform in the afterlife. In the Late period, chapter 162 was used separately under the head of the mummy to provide warmth.
Chapter 17 of the
Book of Going Forth by Day has one of that work's most unique and interesting features—glosses. The development of these glosses can be traced fairly clearly in a large number of Middle Kingdom coffins with essentially the same material (i.e., Coffin Texts, Spell 335). This particular text has a number of rubrics, with questions about the meaning of each phrase, and it includes two or three quite different interpretations as answers to each question. These glosses indicate the difficulty that the Egyptians would have had in understanding some of the mythological and theological allusions in these texts; they also show how the proponents of different temples, gods, or religions could read and understand the same words entirely differently, entirely from their own perspectives. Some answers are strictly solar and others are Osirian, and some are less clear, but all these interpretive glosses, which may originally have been marginal notations, became part of the standard text and remained with it for the next two thousand years of Egyptian history.
Clearly, the fact that the standard text had occasionally become unintelligible would have been recognized by some scribes who could have corrected it—but apparently they did not dare to change it. For the really intractable sections of the
Book of Going Forth by Day, most modern translators have opted to translate any available earlier parallels in the Coffin Texts, which generally make much better sense; but these were, of course, not the actual words copied for so many centuries.
The
Book of That Which Is in the Underworld (
Amduat) is generally a New Kingdom guidebook to the beyond that takes on significance as the principal such work in the royal tombs of the eighteenth dynasty. A portion of the work was included in the
Book of Two Ways, which is dated at least to the early Middle Kingdom and probably earlier; and its inclusion of Sokar, the funerary god of Saqqara, the necropolis at Memphis, would seem to point to an Old Kingdom origin. Novelty, antiquity, and the illustrative nature of the work may all have helped bring it to the fore. The work itself is not a unity but has at least two and probably three or more versions. Two versions appear first in Thutmose III's tomb in the Valley of the Kings: one is the well-known painting of an enlarged papyrus roll surrounding the walls of the burial chamber, and the other comprises individually named deities in more than seven hundred boxes drawn on the walls of the antechamber to the tomb. The King's “papyrus roll” version has a cosmological plan that depicts the voyage and daily rebirth of the sun, with registers, passages with doors and keepers, and Sokar's mound—all to illustrate what was to be encountered in the afterlife journey. Shorter versions of this plan on actual papyri in different sizes belonging to the elite became fairly commonplace, especially in the twenty-first dynasty, and there are also a number of what are termed the “real”
Amduat papyri, which have long rows of standing anthropomorphic deities.
The
Book of Gates is the principal guidebook found in nineteenth dynasty royal tombs. The emphasis is on the gates with guardian deities, whose names must be known in order to pass them. This is an elaborate representation of what was a very old tradition, dating at least to the
Book of Two Ways in the Coffin Texts, where there are seven gates with three keepers each, which became two different lists that survived separately as chapters 144 and 147 of the
Book of Going Forth by Day. The Ramessid versions have twelve gates corresponding to the twelve hours of the night, which are also depicted in the star-clocks on the ceilings of the burial chambers.
The
Book of Caverns is a later Ramessid (twentieth dynasty) underworld book that shows people in holes or caves, as well as some drowning in water or bound to stakes. As if everything before had been too easy and all the worthy deceased had succeeded in attaining their goals, this guidebook seems to be trying to show that not everyone makes it. It is certainly more threatening, and perhaps it is appropriate that it appears in very elaborate tombs just before the end of pharaonic Egypt.
The
Book of the Heavenly Cow (its earliest version coming from Tutankhamun's tomb) begins as a mythological text, which relates how the aging sun god Re, distressed by the plotting of humans against him, takes counsel with the eldest gods and sends his eye, Hathor, to diminish the number of people on earth. Hathor was enjoying her task too much, but Re had a change of heart and provided beer as a substitute for blood to bring an end to her slaughtering. This is an etiology for the feast of Hathor and the concomitant beer-drinking, the propitiation for evildoing, and the sacrifice to ward off suffering—all are involved in this part of the text. In the next episode, Nut is the cow on whose back Re goes forth to overthrow his enemies. Riding high in the sky, Re makes Nut a multitude, and stars come into being, along with the Fields of Ḥetep and Iarru (“reeds”). Re gets Shu (“air”) and the Ḥeḥ gods to support the wobbly sky goddess, providing a picturesque cosmological description. The next scene brings in Geb the earth god, snakes, and the need for magic spells as protection against them. When eventually it is said that he who knows these divine words and spells will go forth and come down from the sky, it is clear that like the other funerary books, this is a guidebook for the deceased who joins Re and who must know the heavenly topography, names, spells, and so on, as magical means for “going forth by day.” The book has clear ties to the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, and the
Book of Going Forth by Day; what sets it apart is its unity, its humanized deities, and its picturesque literary style. There is also the aspect of divine punishment for the evil that people do.
Stelae are generally much better sources for information on personal piety than for funerary literature, and even instructional literature such as the
Instructions for Merikare can provide much better ethical material. The one section of the funerary literature that provides the closest thing we have to a code of ethics or morality is the so-called Negative Confession, which is really a protestation of innocence (
Book of the Dead, 125). As part of the judgment scene, where the heart of the deceased is weighed against the Feather of the goddess Maat (truth personified), these claims of innocence are addressed to forty-two judges—the number is presumably related to the number of nomes or districts of Upper and Lower Egypt. Of the divine judges from perhaps two dozen identifiable places, however, the vast majority are from the northern half of the country, with several locations mentioned twice. In addition to Heliopolis and Memphis as sites of major importance for the creation and compilation of funerary literature, Hermopolis and Herakleopolis may also have been particularly important for several of the books found in the Coffin Texts, and also for the
Book of Going Forth by Day, chapters such as 64 and 175. The evils that the deceased says were not done by him or her in the Negative Confession include several generalizations such as “evil” or “wrongdoing”; many evils, such as robbery, killing, lying, cheating, stealing, doing violence, reviling the king or “god,” or committing adultery; some less serious crimes, such as being ill-tempered, eaves-dropping, being garrulous, inspiring terror, dissembling, gossiping, being puffed up or being loud-voiced; and some we cannot clearly understand as evils, such as wading in the water or washing the god. The practicing of homosexuality was a specified evil, though nothing was said about the mistreatment of either parents or children. Certain of the evils were specifically excepted when done in self-defense.
Of course, much of what has been said about the individuality of these collections of texts and their association with different periods is based on what has survived and how this material was published. Thus, the Pyramid Texts on Middle Kingdom coffins were omitted from the Coffin Texts publications—even when in some cases these were predominant—and these and almost all other later occurrences of the Pyramid Texts still remain unpublished.
It is clear that new discoveries could considerably change our thinking about the origins and applications of the various texts. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun revealed no papyri and comparatively little of a documentary nature, but the four golden shrines that were nested to encase his sarcophagus and coffins contain excerpts from a whole cross-section of the funerary literature. Texts that we identify specifically as Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, and
Book of Going Forth by Day, as well as the
Book of That Which Is in the Underworld and the
Book of the Heavenly Cow, all occur together on these shrines. The distinction between royal and nonroyal texts was probably not strictly maintained at any time, although it appears to us that certain texts first used for royalty later became more proletarian and that this led the priests serving the royals to seek out and, in some cases, produce new and different texts for their patrons.
All in all, ancient Egyptian funerary literature is far from being exhaustively studied. Many documents have not been published, and most have still not been studied as logical entities. Only after these basic first steps have been taken can the interrelationships of the various texts be analyzed and perhaps understood, at least a little better.
Bibliography
Allen, T. George.
Occurrences of Pyramid Texts, with Cross Indexes of These and Other Egyptian Mortuary Texts. Chicago, 1950.
Allen, T. George.
The Book of the Dead: or, Going Forth by Day. Chicago, 1974. The translation.
Buck, Adriaan de.
The Egyptian Coffin Texts. 7 vols. Oriental Institute Publications, 34, 49, 64, 67, 73, 81, and 87. Chicago, 1935–1961. This is the standard edition of the transcribed texts.
Faulkner, Raymond O.
The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. Oxford, 1969. Translation of Sethe's edition.
Faulkner, Raymond O.
The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts. 3 vols. Warminster, 1973–1978. Translation of the de Buck edition.
Faulkner, Raymond O.
The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Rev. ed. London, 1985. The translation.
Goyon, Jean-Claude.
Rituels funéraires de l'ancienne Égypte. Paris, 1972.
Hornung, Erik.
Das Amduat: Die Schrift des verborgenen Raumes, Ägy, 7 and 13. Wiesbaden, 1963–1967. Text and translation of the
Book of That Which Is in the Underworld.
Hornung, Erik. Andreas Brodbeck, and Elisabeth Staehelin.
Das Buch von den Pforten des Jenseits. Geneva, 1979–1980.
Hornung, Erik.
Ägyptische Unterweltsbücher.
2d ed. Zurich, 1984. Translations of New Kingdom royal funerary literature.
Hornung, Erik.
The Valley of the Kings: Horizon of Eternity, translated from German by David Warburton. New York, 1990. Description of funerary literature in New Kingdom royal tombs.
Lesko, Leonard H.
The Ancient Egyptian Book of Two Ways. Near Eastern Studies, 17. Berkeley, 1972. Translation and commentary on one part of the Coffin Texts.
Lesko, Leonard H.
Index of the Spells on Egyptian Middle Kingdom Coffins and Related Documents. Berkeley, 1979. Arrangement of the spells on the individual documents, including parallels to the Pyramid Texts.
Neville, Edouard.
Das ägyptische Todtenbuch der XVIII. bisXX. Dynastie. 3 vols. Berlin, 1886.
Niwinski, Andrzej.
Studies on the Illustrated Theban Funerary Papyri of the 11th and 10th Centuries B.C. Orbis biblicus et orientalis, 86. Freiburg, 1989.
Piankoff, Alexander.
Le Livre des Portes. 3 vols. Mémoires publiés par les membres de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale du Caire, pp.74–75, pp.90. Cairo, 1939–1962. The edited text of the
Book of Gates.
Piankoff, Alexander.
Le Livre des Querets. Cairo, 1946. The edited text of the
Book of Caves.
Sadek, Abdel Aziz.
Contribution �* l'étude de l'Amdouat: Les variantes tardive du Livre de l'Amdouat dans les papyrus du Musée du Caire. Freiburg and Göttingen, 1985. Deals with the short (nonroyal) examples of
Amduat.
Sethe, Kurt,
Altägyptischen Pyramidentexte. 4 vols. Hildesheim, 1960. (Orig., Leipzig, 1908–1922.) The standard edition of the Pyramid Texts.
Leonard H. Lesko
How to cite this entry:
Leonard H. Lesko "Funerary Literature"
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. Ed. Donald B. Redford.
Copyright © 2001, 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt: (e-reference edition). Oxford University Press. 7 June 2007
http://www.oxford-ancientegypt.com/entry?entry=t176.e0260