Antonio J. Morales

Text-building and Transmission of Pyramid Texts in the Third Millennium BCE : Iteration, Objectification, and Change

The emergence of ancient Egyptian mortuary literature in the third millennium BCE is the history of the adaptation of recitational materials to the materiality of different media. Upon a gradual development, the transformation of the oral discourse into writing began with the use of papyri for transcribing the guidelines of ritual performances as aide-memoire , and culminated with the concealment of sacerdotal voices and deeds into the sealed-off crypt of king Wenis ( ca . 2345 BCE ). The process of committing ritual and magical recitations into scriptio continua in the Pyramid Texts was subject to several stages of adaptation, detachability, and recentering. Investigating how the corpus emerged through the combination of recitations from different settings elucidates the transformation of oral written discourse into literary style, the traces of poetic and speech elements in the corpus, and its flexibility to disseminate and adapt to different mortuary practices, beliefs and contexts in the second millennia BCE and beyond.

Iteration, Innovation und Dekorum in Opferlisten des Alten Reichs

Summary The purpose of this paper is to illustrate early contexts for the rites conforming the offering Pyramid Texts of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. Although the original form of the recitations in the mortuary cult was oral, a process of entextualization came to fix these recitations in writing, first as aide-mémoire for ritualists and then as ‘actualisations monumentales’ for the deceased. A comprehensive analysis of the process of formation of the offering list from the Second Dynasty to the reign of Unas reveals a cogent association of the involved priestly services and items with the offering rites in the Pyramid Texts. In fact, it is suggested that the canonization of the offering list by the mid-late Fourth Dynasty resulted from an attempt to standardize the structure of offering services in Giza and Saqqara that later extended to the royal mortuary corpus.