Ancient Egyptian Concepts of Bodily Decay in the Old Kingdom Part 1, PT 684

Summary Old Kingdom descriptions of bodily decay are surrounded by assertions of revivification and the maintenance of a proper offering ritual. Thus, the contexts of lines describing bodily decay are first examined, focusing on Pyramid Text (PT) Utterance 684. The problems of preventing the decay of the corpse, and curing conditions of the living body associated with decay were interrelated in ancient Egyptian thought. Already in the Old Kingdom, terminology surrounding wet, drippy decay (r ḏ w, fdt, ḥ wꜢ and ḥ wꜢꜢ.t) was clear and well developed; sometimes incorporated into the offering ritual through association with libations; and paralleled in medical literature. In contrast, terminology which appears to refer to dry decay (jmk, rpw) is rare, and does not have more general uses outside of mortuary literature.

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-mémoire, 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.