CHAPTER XVII.

--------------------- _a._ Berlin Museum. No. 1470. _b._ British Museum. No. 9901. --------------------- _See_ NAVILLE, “Book of the Dead,” I, Plate. [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NOTES. The seventeenth chapter is one of the most remarkable in the whole collection, and it has been preserved from times previous to the XIIth dynasty. The very earliest monuments which have preserved it have handed it down accompanied with scholia and other commentaries interpolated into the text. Some of the monuments enable us to some extent to divide the original text from the additions, in consequence of the latter being written in red. But there is really only one text where the additions are suppressed, and which therefore offers the most ancient form, as far as we know it, of the chapter. This is the copy on the wall of the tomb of Horhotep. The sarcophagus itself of Horhotep contains a copy of the text along with the additions. The chapter must already at the time have been of the most venerable antiquity. Besides these two copies of the chapter we have those from the sarcophagi of Hora and Sit-Bastit (published, like those of Horhotep, by M. Maspero[24]), two from the sarcophagi of Mentuhotep, and one from that of Sebek-āa (the three latter published by Lepsius in his _Aelteste Texte_). The British Museum has Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s copy of the texts inscribed on the coffin of Queen Mentuhotep of the XIth dynasty, and also a fragment (6636 a) of the coffin of a prince named Hornefru. Here then we have an abundance of witnesses of the best period. They unfortunately do not agree. The progress of corruption had no doubt begun long before, and the variants are not simply differences of orthography but positively different readings. The differences however are chiefly in the scholia. Even when the explanations of the text are identical, the form differs. The latest recensions have retained the form ⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂; the ancient added the feminine ⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂. _What is that?_ But some of the ancient texts give the equivalent words ⁂⁂⁂⁂, and Horhotep does without them altogether. These words were evidently additions not merely to the text but to the scholia. The text of the chapter grew more and more obscure to readers, and the explanations hitherto given were so unsatisfactory as to call for others. The texts of the manuscripts of the new empire furnish a good deal of fresh matter, much of which is extremely ancient, though the proof of this is unfortunately lost through the disastrous condition of literature in the period preceding the XVIIIth dynasty. The XVIIIth dynasty and its immediate successors inherited but did not invent the new form of the Book of the Dead, with its succession of vignettes, which however differing in detail bear the stamp of a common traditional teaching. The manuscripts of a later period bear witness, with reference to this as well as to other chapters, to a recension of an authoritative kind. The text becomes more certain though perhaps not either more true or more intelligible, and the notes and explanations have here reached their fullest extent. It would take an entire volume to give the translations of all the forms the chapter has assumed. It must be sufficient here to give the earliest forms known to us of the text and of the first commentaries. These are printed in characters which show the difference between text and later additions; all of which, it must be remembered, are of extreme antiquity—some _two thousand years_ before any probable date of Moses. Explanations or other interesting matter occurring in the manuscripts of the later Empire will be referred to in the notes. The title in the early copies is the simple one here heading the chapter. In those which begin at the XVIIIth dynasty the title is very like that given for the first chapter. The chief additions are that the deceased person “_takes every form that he pleases, plays draughts, and sits in a bower, comes forth as a soul living after death, and that what is done upon earth is glorified_.” 1. It would be difficult for us to imagine that the very remarkable opening of the chapter is an addition. Yet it is unknown to the primitive recension on the walls of Horhotep’s tomb, though found everywhere else. The texts however which contain it do not agree. “I am He who closeth, and He who openeth, and I am but One.” ‘He who closeth’ is ⁂⁂ _Tmu_, ‘He who openeth’ ⁂ _Unen_. As the god who closes and who opens is one and the same, ‘I am but One,’ is a very natural ending of the sentence, and for its sense the whole may appeal to classical, and higher than classical, authority. “Modo namque Patulcius idem Et modo sacrifico Clusius ore vocor.”[25] “I am Alpha and O, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord.”[26] The meaning of the Egyptian is quite plain, but the readings most probably through the absence of determinatives in the oldest style are somewhat different. Horhotep and other texts have ⁂⁂⁂⁂, apparently as one word (compounded of _tmu_ and _unen_), which may signify the ‘closer and opener,’ but Sebek-āa and later texts have ⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂. The papyrus of Nebseni has ⁂⁂, in the third person, which does not alter the meaning, but this is quite an isolated reading. The later recension, as represented by the Turin _Todtenbuch_ and the Cadet papyrus, has ⁂⁂, which only prominently brings forward, what is implied in all the other texts, that the Opener is a god.[27] The absence of the determinative ⁂ after ⁂ is no objection to the sense ‘opener,’ especially after ⁂⁂. It is absolutely necessary when dealing with mythology to look to physical rather than to metaphysical meanings. I have sufficiently discussed the meanings of the word ⁂ in my essay on the Myth of Osiris Unnefer. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PLATE III. BOOK OF THE DEAD.