Other religious texts

The Coffin Texts (Faulkner 1973; 1978a; 1978b) are a large and heterogeneous body of magical utterances that were inscribed on coffins (and other funerary objects) primarily from the Eleventh Dynasty to the late Twelfth Dynasty. They incorporate some material from the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts corpus, though there is also much that is new. Most of the surviving coffins inscribed with these texts come from the nomarchal cemeteries of Middle Egypt, though examples have been found throughout the country, including the cemeteries clustered around the royal residence at Lisht (Allen 1996). The overall aim of these texts was functional, to ensure the successful burial of the deceased and their subsequent journey to becoming a blessed spirit the afterlife. Some of the utterances relate to the liturgy of the burial of the deceased, while others focus on overcoming the obstacles in the underworld, where the inhabitants try to trap and trick the deceased. A number of these utterances have passages with a marked dramatic and literary flavor, such as the speeches by Isis and Nephthys mourning for the dead Osiris in the mortuary liturgies (e. g. Coffin Text utterance no. 51). Another important development within the Coffin Texts is the appearance of one of the first illustrated guides to the underworld with its accompanying text, called the Book of the Two Ways (Backes 2005). At the climax of this there is an utterance (no. 1130) containing a declaration by the creator god of the ‘‘four good deeds’’ he did for humanity at the beginning of the universe, to ensure that humanity could thrive: he made the air, the inundation, he made all men equal, and he made men remember death so as to be pious. With lapidary concision, this speech expresses the religious thought underpinning Egyptian concepts about the universe, and it can in some ways be read as a riposte to the kind of theodic questioning expressed in some literary texts such as the Dialogue of Ipuwer and the Lord of All (see Sitzler 1995).

While not strictly literary, another ritual text which deserves mention is the ‘‘Dramatic Papyrus’’ from the Ramesseum tomb (Quack 2006h). This contains a series of vignettes illustrating some kind of enthronement ritual enacted for Senwosret I, with each scene accompanied by brief labels explicating the mythological significance of each ritual action.