The Egyptian Book of the dead

Hail, ye Doorkeepers of the Tuat, who guard this Strong one, and who bring the reports before Osiris; ye who protect them who worship you, and who annihilate the adversaries of Rā: who give light and put away your darkness: ye who see and extol your Great one, who live even as he liveth, and invoke him who is in his Solar disk.

The text which has been followed in the translation of this chapter is that of the Royal Tombs of Rameses IV and Rameses VI, called by M. Naville Chapter 127 A. The lost Busca papyrus, of which Lepsius had a tracing, furnishes a different text, (127 B), and the text of the Turin Todtenbuch has been enlarged by means of numerous interpolations. M. Naville has called attention to the close relationship between this chapter and the second part of the “Solar Litany.”

1.Book, properly a Roll; a title given to several of the chapters (125, 127, 129, 130, 140, 141, 142 and 148 in the Turin Todtenbuch), instead of the usual . Too much importance should not be attached to the difference of terms.terms. This chapter is called by the Busca papyrus; and Chapter 125, which is called in the earliest texts containing it whenever a title is given, is called ever since the time of Rameses IV.

2.Bounds, , in the dual form, though is not unfrequent, here and in other places. The English word is not a translation of the Egyptian one, which has to be explained before any equivalent for it can be proposed. And the explanation of it has to be sought in the ‘Solar Litany,’ first completely published by M. Naville.

The seventy-five Forms in question (each of which is a god) are, as the text itself shows, simply so many names of the Solar god or solar phenomena. Each of them is addressed as , ‘Rā, supreme of power,’ after which some attribute of the deity is mentioned, and the name of the deity is connected with this attribute.

In Greece, Apollo was called ἑκηβόλος, καταιβάσιος, ἀποτροπαῖος, νεομήνιος, and by ever so many other names expressive of the attributes with which he was credited. These names correspond to what Egyptian mythology called the of a god, and each of the names has but a limited application. The god is not always thought of as ‘Far-darting’; under the conception of ‘Neomenios,’ he dwells in what Egyptian mythology called another , which is the local habitation, or, as mathematicians would say, the locus of the concept.

M. de Rougé, without giving any reason, but probably guided by what Champollion had written, translates the word zone. M. Naville, who has carefully studied the word, prefers sphere. And no better word could be thought of, if we used it as we do in speaking of ‘moving in a certain sphere,’ ‘each in his own sphere,’ or, ‘the sphere of action;’ without applying a strict geometrical sense to the word. For the Egyptian was a hollow cylinder like a round tower, a chimney, or a deep well rather than a sphere.

The name was given to the fabulous Source of the Nile, supposed to be in the neighbourhood of Elephantine. The inscription of Seti I at Redesieh (Denkm., III, 140B) compares the abundance of water at the King’s cistern to that of the “the cavern of the double Well of Elephantine.”