Decoding the Pyramids

By EZRA IVANOV

THE PYRAMID TEXTS

The king offers an offering! Anubis gives the offering! From the highlands come to thee your thousand young antelope with bowed heads. What a gift!

Anubis gives this offering! Thank you for your thousand loaves! Thank you for your thousand beers! From the palace hall, you sent forth a thousand incenses! Everything pleasant in thy thousand! There are a thousand cattle in your herd! Everything thou eatest you eat in a thousand, on which thy desire is set!

In addition to his work on the Berlin dictionary, Sethe's most significant contribution to Egyptology was an edition of hand-copied hieroglyphs, translations, and commentaries of all texts engraved in pyramids at the time. Sethe's edition has been the foundation of virtually every discussion of the readers of the pyramids: he is, in fact, the one who first named those texts, collectively, 'Pyramidentexten' - Pyramid Texts.

For each verse of the pyramids' texts in Maspero's Les inscriptions des pyramides de Saqqarah, he provided a translation of its meaning based on his understanding of the funerary texts of later ages since there was nothing else with which to compare them. Due to their mysterious nature, Maspero's work was quite subtle, but one which he readily acknowledged was primarily based on intuition derived from extensive studies of ancient Egypt and its religion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DTTV PUBLICATIONS
• Release date: Jun 16, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201651626

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EZRA IVANOV

THE PYRAMID TEXTS

The king offers an offering! Anubis gives the offering! From the highlands come to thee your thousand young antelope with bowed heads. What a gift!

Anubis gives this offering! Thank you for your thousand loaves! Thank you for your thousand beers! From the palace hall, you sent forth a thousand incenses! Everything pleasant in thy thousand! There are a thousand cattle in your herd! Everything thou eatest you eat in a thousand, on which thy desire is set!

In addition to his work on the Berlin dictionary, Sethe's most significant contribution to Egyptology was an edition of hand-copied hieroglyphs, translations, and commentaries of all texts engraved in pyramids at the time. Sethe's edition has been the foundation of virtually every discussion of the readers of the pyramids: he is, in fact, the one who first named those texts, collectively, 'Pyramidentexten' - Pyramid Texts.

For each verse of the pyramids' texts in Maspero's Les inscriptions des pyramides de Saqqarah, he provided a translation of its meaning based on his understanding of the funerary texts of later ages since there was nothing else with which to compare them. Due to their mysterious nature, Maspero's work was quite subtle, but one which he readily acknowledged was primarily based on intuition derived from extensive studies of ancient Egypt and its religion.

The long columned texts of engraved hieroglyphs were set into letterpress hieroglyphics by Maspero, abandoning the vertical columns of the ancient originals as Sethe had done; in the manner of Western writing, they are arranged in horizontal lines from left to right. Ancient texts, too, give no indication as to the order in which they were intended to be read; in their editions of the pyramids' old verses, Maspero and Sethe began with the list of offerings inscribed on the north wall of the pyramids' burial chambers, then moved outwards towards the pyramid entrances, Organizing the texts according to how they were placed in successive corridors and rooms. Sethe also based his edition on Wenis' pyramid on the texts in Maspero's edition; among all of them, these examples were and still are the oldest and best-preserved. The interior of the pyramid was covered but only partially preserved. They seem to be the primary versions of the longer sets of texts found in later pyramids, the editio princeps. There, however, the similarities between the two versions ended since Sethe's method of analysis and explanation was based on nineteenth-century German classical scholarship and Biblical scholarship.– By adopting the term 'Sprüche' - 'Proverbs,' he neatly highlights his borrowings– The texts' different verses are called by different names. In addition, Sethe arranged the verses in numerical order following the order of his presentation, from burial chamber to doorway, a system devised initially by another of the seminar's Egyptologists, Count Hans Schack-Schackenburg, and still widely used today.

Similarly, in Göttingen's classical seminars, Its primary goal was to analyze various, often damaged versions of a single text to establish its earliest date; Sethe placed different variations of the verses from all of the then-known pyramids in sequential order within his numerical sequence, adding new poems as they were discovered under the latest numbers at the end of his list, a process that has continued to this day as hundreds of new verses have been found as well as variations of well-known older ones.

In Wenis' pyramid, Maspero presents and numbers the various verses in order they appear to visitors. Maspero's verse number one is presented in five different versions by Sethe. Here are a few passages from Maspero's and Sethe's editions of the Pyramid Texts.

As a result of Sethe's study of the Pyramid Texts combined with the leap in understanding of ancient language experienced in the Berlin seminars, his copies, translations, and commentary reached a level of coherence unheard of before. Due to the extraordinary nature of this achievement, only in 1968 was a single pyramid's text - that of Wenis - published and translated separately as a separate work.

Despite that, the transference of the dark columns of engraving from the walls of pyramids into the ordered processes of a European seminar profoundly influenced their modern understanding. Through Sethe's 'Pyramidentexten,' the ancient verses were indexed, cross-referenced, analyzed and ranked, and categorized like never before, allowing the modern world to read them as if they were book chapters. There was an effect in that the numbered verses encouraged a search for connecting narratives. Pyramid Texts were also used as an esoteric encyclopedia from whose many indices and strange lines could be extracted as if from a pudding to explain everything ancient Egyptian, from grasshoppers' sacredness to colored stones found in temples. The Pyramid Texts were therefore considered full of metaphors and symbols when analyzed according to classical and Bible scholarship methods. While accurate metaphors or symbols are ambivalent in nature and change meaning with their purposes, metaphors are not. In the pyramid texts, simple beliefs were believed to be represented through ciphers. According to Breasted's commentaries, for example, specific passages could serve as a guide to understanding the genesis of Western moral and ethical behavior; alternatively, they could be myths telling the story of the origins and constitution of the universe, while others again could be a description of the rituals performed at royal funerals, similar to the Book of Common Prayer. Having gained considerable academic pedigree and a language of their own, such approaches have a long literary history.

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Professor of classical philology at the University of Basel