CHAPTER LVII.
Project Gutenberg EPUB edition
Renouf, P. Le Page (Peter Le Page) and Naville, Edouard
Chapter for breathing air and command of water in the Nether world.
Let the Great One(1) be opened to Osiris; let the two folding doors of Kabhu(2) be thrown wide to Râ.
O thou great Coverer(3) of Heaven, in thy name of Stretcher(4) [of Heaven], grant that I may have the command of water, even as Sut hath command of force(5) on the night of the Great Disaster: grant that I may prevail over those who preside at the Inundation, even as that venerable god prevaileth over them, whose name they know not. May I prevail over them.
My nostril is opened in Tattu, and I go to rest in Heliopolis, my dwelling, which the goddess Seshait(6) built, and which Chnum raised on its foundation.
If the Sky is at the North I sit at the South; if the Sky is at the South I sit at the North; if the Sky is at the West I sit at the East; and if the Sky is at the East I sit at the West.
And drawing up my eyebrows(7) I pierce through into every place that I desire.
Notes.
This chapter and the following are recensions and combinations of extremely ancient texts.
The first portion of the present chapter follows the ancient text of Horhotep. Even at that early period two recensions were in existence, and are copied one after the other. The translation here given is the nearest possible approach to the original text.
The second portion (beginning with My nostril) dates from the papyri of the Theban period, though we must depend upon later authorities for the entire Section.
1.The Great Oneurit—Heaven.
2.Kabhu, literally the Cool (water) is another name for the Sky,[66] and is here in parallelism with the Great One.
3.Coverer, a name applied both to the Nile, as covering the land during the inundation, and to the Sky as the covering above us. Cf. my paper on Nile Mythology, P.S.B.A., November, 1890.
4.Stretcher, which I consider as a nasalised (perhaps the original) form of stretch. The papyri read āt pet ‘Cleaver of the Sky,’ but the word āt, without the determinative , may also mean stretch, as in the expression .
5.Force, , like the Latin vis, may, but need not, be of a criminal nature. The name of the goddess in this place is a manifest blunder of the more recent scribes.
6. The goddess Seshait commonly but erroneously called Safch, through an error against which Lepsius (Aelt. Texte, p. 3) and Brugsch (Zeitschr., 1872, p. 9) have both spoken. The real name of the goddess, as I have elsewhere[67] shown by actual variants, is Seshait (Teta, l. 268) or (Louvre, A. 97). She is so called from the root , , writing, that being one of her occupations.
7.Drawing up my eyebrows, in scornful pride, superciliously, like the Greek τὰς ὀφρῦς ἀνασπᾶν.
Source notes
66. The name occurs repeatedly in the Pyramid Texts, and even the very expression e.g. Unas, 375, and the Litany at Pepi I, 631.
67. On some Religious Texts of the Early Egyptian Period in Trans. Soc. Bibl. Arch., Vol. IX, p. 303.