From Thebes to Piramesse — and Back: On the Text History of Supplementary Chapter 166 of the Book of the Dead

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In 2014, Jan Dahms, Martin Pehal, and I offered a fresh translation and interpretation of supplementary chapter 166 of the Book of the Dead. ¹ Although the text had been published already in 1886 by Willem Pleyte ² and had been translated several times, its content had hardly elicited any detailed comment ³ despite the fact that it includes a number of quite unusual features, which we wished to explain.

Foremost among these is the colophon preceding the text, according to which it had been found at the neck of a pharaoh designated in some versions as Weserma‛atre, and in one as Weserma‛atre Setep<enre>. ⁴ Earlier authors had always assumed this refers to the most notorious bearer of these names, Ramses II, and we saw no reason to argue otherwise. ⁵ However, the importance of this colophon had not been been fully realised. Its claim that the text now known as BD supplementary chapter 166 had been discovered at the neck of Ramses II implies that it came to be known only after his mummy had been violated by robbers and come to the attention of the people who reburied the mummy. ⁶

This reading of the evidence suggests the following scenario: 1) Ramses II is buried, and on this occasion is supplied with a papyrus containing the text of BD supplementary chapter 166. ⁷ 2) During the tomb robberies of the late Twentieth Dynasty, his tomb is looted, and the mummy is unwrapped. 3) After the discovery of the tomb violation, the pharaoh is reburied. During the preparations for this, the papyrus is discovered, and taken out of the tomb or copied on the spot. 4) Versions of this text are later brought into circulation for use by private people. The earliest versions are small papyri attached to the mummies of members of the family of the Amun priests in the second half of the Twenty-First Dynasty. ⁸

However, we pointed out that the first recorded reburial of Ramses II took place in year 6 of Herihor, at the very start of the Twenty-First Dynasty, whereas the texts, as far as the evidence suggests, only came to be used by the Amun priests about 75 years later. Moreover, it is known that, after Herihor, subsequent high priests of Amun also reburied Ramses II. This happened in year 15 of Pinodjem I, ⁹ twice in year 10 of Siamun in the mid-Twenty-First Dynasty, and at least once more when the mummy was brought to its final resting place in the so-called Royal Cachette (TT 320). Accordingly the papyrus allegedly discovered at the neck of Ramses II, could have been discovered, not only by Herihor (scenario I), but also by Pinodjem I (scenario II) or in the reign of Siamun (scenario III). ¹⁰

The three scenarios have different implications for the textual history of BD supplementary chapter 166.

In scenario I, Herihor (or rather, a person working for him) finds the document attached to the body of Ramses II. This reading of the evidence implies that the papyrus formed part of the original funerary equipment of Ramses II and can therefore only have been written at the end of the Nineteenth Dynasty. Of course, the date of composition of the text could be earlier. Secondly, it implies that the document was retrieved and kept in storage for about 75 years, after which it suddenly attracted attention in the mid-Twentieth Dynasty, when it was widely brought into circulation for use in burials of members of the family of Amun priests.

In scenario II, Pinodjem I (or rather a person working for him) discovers the text on the mummy of Ramses II. In this case, it is still possible that the text belonged to the original burial equipment of Ramses II, only to be discovered when his mummy was prepared for being rewrapped, something that Pinodjem I undertook according to the dockets on Ramses II’s secondary coffin. It is however also possible that, in preparing the reburial of Ramses II, Herihor had added a fresh papyrus to the king’s mummy, which was rediscovered in Pinodjem I’s time. It was taken from the mummy or copied, and brought into circulation about 60 years later for use by members of the family of Amun priests. In this latter case, the formulation of the document would go back, not to the late Nineteenth Dynasty, but to the beginning of the Twenty-First Dynasty.

In scenario III, the document was found in year 10 of Siamun, causing such an interest that it was immediately brought into circulation among the Amun priests’ families. In this case the document could still have been written under Ramses II, but it would then have to be assumed that it survived, attached to the king’s neck, after several reburials of the king involving at least one rewrapping event. More likely, therefore, it would have been added in the time of Herihor (who is known to have made available new funerary equipment to Ramses II) or of Pinodjem I (who is known to have had the mummy rewrapped). That would force us to assume the text dates to the early Twenty-First Dynasty. Therefore, all three variants are possible, but scenarios II and particularly III are the most likely.

In support of this, we argued that BD supplementary chapter 166 is a funerary text written in Late Egyptian, whereas New Kingdom funerary texts are usually in Middle Egyptian. Therefore, it would, in our opinion, be more likely for the text to have been written after the New Kingdom. This would rule out scenario I and make scenarios II and particularly III more likely. ¹¹

We then moved on to the interpretation of the text, which addresses not only the private person owning the papyrus, but also a person referred to as ḥm=k ‘Your Majesty’. Whereas previous authors had assumed the latter designation would refer to the private owner of the papyrus, our study suggested it could only designate a king or a god, and therefore that the private papyrus owner and ‘Your Majesty’ were different persons, the latter being Ramses II, on whose neck the text was discovered. ¹² Based on this interpretation, we argued that the first part of the text, with ‘Your Majesty’ as the addressee, would be a text originally composed with the aim of resuscitating Ramses II by identifying him with a form of Osiris. The second part, in which the private papyrus owner is in the centre of interest (it raises concerns about his having duly paid for his shabtis), would present this person as reciting the first part of the text (resuscitating Ramses II) with the aim of solliciting the king’s assistance in gaining a good afterlife. ¹³

In 2016, Joachim Quack reacted to our article, expressing doubts against the general drift of our argument. ¹⁴ His criticism concerns the following points:

1) Our article would argue that the colophon describes a historical event: the find of the papyrus on the neck of the mummy of Ramses II, and the text would have been brought into circulation for use by private people only after this document had been copied. Subsequently, we argued, a second part was added to the text. Quack, however, deems unlikely that the content of the text would not have been available in the Twenty-First Dynasty to the Amun priesthood through archives in Thebes if earlier Theban priests had effectively adapted the text. ¹⁵ Moreover, he raised doubts as to our interpretation that the referred to king Weserma’atre Setep<enre> was Ramses II. ¹⁶

2) The idea that funerary texts in New Kingdom tombs are generally in Middle Egyptian rather than in Late Egyptian is incorrect. ¹⁷

3) Historical linguistics suggests that the text was written before the end of the Nineteenth Dynasty, and more specifically in the late Eighteenth or early Nineteenth Dynasty. Also, the text would not consist of two different parts (as we had suggested), but constitute one single composition consisting of three addresses to the same papyrus owner. By implication, the private papyrus owner and ‘Your Majesty’ are the same person. ¹⁸

4) Therefore our interpretation of the entire text would not hold. BD 166 is one of the supplementary chapters of the Book of the Dead. The colophon to this group of texts states that they were discovered, before being added to the BD, in an archive in Tanis. In Quack’s opinion, this renders likely that BD supplementary chapter 166 was found in an archive that had been transported to Tanis after Piramesse had been abandoned. Originally, the texts had been conceived there, in or before the reign of Ramses II. When Ramses died, he was embalmed in Piramesse and his mummy was provided with the text we are currently discussing. It was buried with this text, wich was discovered either by Herihor, Pinodjem I or Pinodjem II before it was brought into circulation for use by members of the high Theban clergy. ¹⁹

In some respects, Quack adduced evidence we had failed to consider. Yet I do not think that his most essential arguments stand the test of closer scrutiny. Moreover, a fresh study of the text in the light of his remarks resulted in the find of supplementary indications of relevance to the interpretation of BD supplementary chapter 166. I will address these issues with reference to the numbers in the preceding listing of Quack’s points of criticism.

1) We did not state that the contents of the colophon (‘the book that was found on the neck of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Weserma’atre Setep<enre>‘) necessarily reflects historical reality. Our article considered two options without making a choice for either one. On the one hand, it could reflect how the papyrus was found in reality after one of the lootings of the tomb of Ramses II. On the other, we also mooted the possibility that the text was composed only after the tomb robberies had occurred. In this case, a fictitious, but historically credible account could have been invented to enhance the value attributed to the text. ²⁰ If we are facing a fictitious account, then the described find history would not need to correspond to something that really happened, and the text could have been written and stored anywhere. Since the colophon explicitly refers to the text being found on the mummy of Ramses II, it presupposes knowledge of the first looting of that king’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Stated differently, if the account of the text being found at the neck of the king is not a historical reality, then the text must have been composed after the looting of Ramses II’s tomb in the late Twentieth Dynasty or early Twenty-First Dynasty. The other option is that the colophon is historically reliable. In this case one has to accept the basic fact that the colophon attributes knowledge of the text to it having been discovered on a mummy, not to the consultation of an archive.

I prefer not to speculate on whether or not there may have been archives where the text was kept. It is not unlikely that it was deposited in some archive once it had been composed. However, it is well known that documents in archives were prone to being devoured by rodents or insects, and the archiving system was certainly not of such a kind that each document kept there could always be easily retrieved. Whether or not the colophon is historically correct, the statement it makes is likely to have at least sounded credible. And it explicitly states that BD supplementary chapter 166 had become known only after the looting of the tomb of Wesermaʽatre Setep<enre>.

We argued that, after his tomb had been looted, the early Twenty-First Dynasty high priests demonstrably made the effort to supply Ramses II with some basic necessities for the afterlife. His mummy was rewrapped and was supplied with new objects like shabtis and a Ptah-Sokar-Osiris statuette made from an earlier shabti. We argued that the addition of a small papyrus containing an early version of BD supplementary chapter 166 could be explained in the same way. Quack rejects this since the ‘Aufwand’ of writing an entirely new text would go far beyond what is otherwise encountered in reburials of the royal mummies. I doubt whether this objection should be taken seriously. We know for certain that Ramses II was supplied with new equipment, but due to the frequent displacements of his mummy it is quite unclear how extensive the set of objects given to him was. In any case, for the high priests of Karnak, writing a short papyrus of the kind we are discussing here could not have posed an insurmountable obstacle. ²¹

In regards to the identity of Weserma‛atre Setep<enre>, we admitted in our article that it is not certain that this name refers to Ramses II. We also considered Ramses VII, but we agreed with all previous authors (including Quack) ²² that Ramses II was the most likely candidate. In his review of our article, Quack effectively argues from the same assumption, thus in this matter, there is apparently no serious difference between us.

2) When we stated that New Kingdom funerary texts are generally in Middle Egyptian, whereas examples of such texts written in Late Egyptian only date to the post-New Kingdom era, we were thinking in regards to the former group of the great masses of texts found both in private and royal burials: the Books of the Dead (both on papyri and subterranean tomb walls) and the Books of the Netherworld. For the Twenty-First Dynasty, we referred to the Decree of Nesikhons, written in year 5 of Siamun and found in TT 320, which is written in Late Egyptian. ²³

Much of Quack’s rebuttal of our article concerns this point. First, he shows that large amounts of religous texts in Late Egyptian were written during, and even before the Ramesside Period. I will not go into all of the evidence marshalled by Quack, however, as we were talking only about funerary texts intended for use in underground burial apartments. We did not have in mind tomb autobiographies, tomb chapel inscriptions like harpers’ songs, or juridical texts of a non-funerary nature like the inscription of Mose. Referring to documents of these kinds and written in Late Egyptian in no way can be considered valid evidence against our claim.

As regards the funerary texts (BD, Books of the Netherworld), Quack also adduces arguments from historical linguistics against our hypothesis. While these texts are admittedly written in Middle Egyptian, he argued that they were already old at the time they were copied for inclusion in New Kingdom tombs. ²⁴

Unfortunately, he is here again criticising a point we were not trying to make. We were not suggesting that a funerary text added, for instance, to a Nineteenth Dynasty tomb like that of Ramses II was composed in Middle Egyptian in the Nineteenth Dynasty. ²⁵ We only argued that, in a period when Late Egyptian had become the vehicle of most written communication, the preferred kind of Egyptian for use in the underground apartments of tombs remained Middle Egyptian. The amount of texts of this kind both in royal and private tombs is staggering when it comes to wall inscriptions, and there are also numerous BD papyri from the same period. This is something that cannot be denied on the basis of Quack’s argument from historical linguistics. Moreover, we referred to an article by K. Jansen-Winkeln who suggested, in our opinion convincingly, that the Book of Amduat in its currently known version had been composed in the early New Kingdom in Middle Egyptian, in which the numerous archaising writings underscore the status of early stages of Egyptian. Quack disagrees with this on two counts. The first is that, if Jansen-Winkeln’s dating was correct, the earliest attestations of Amduat in the early Eighteenth Dynasty emerged long before the reign of Ramses II which interests us here. An alleged early New Kingdom creation of Amduat would not necessarily be of relevance for the way funerary texts were created and transmitted in the Ramesside era.

Moreover, he disagrees with Jansen-Winkeln’s ideas on the date of origin of Amduat, but is unable to go into his arguments for reasons of space. The latter point must be respected, but for the time being I have to admit I still find Jansen-Winkeln’s arguments quite convincing. In regards to the former point, Quack is again not reacting to our argumentation. We were not referring to the moments texts were composed, but to the period they were used.

Among all the texts referred to by Quack, only one belongs to the category we had in mind. It is a very short passage in a hymn to Osiris added to the BD papyrus of Nakht-Amun and datable to the reign of Ramses II, and it displays Late Egyptian traits. ²⁶ The rest of the papyrus, however, is in Middle Egyptian.

A possible second example quoted by Quack is O. DeM 1441, ²⁷ an ostracon containing a sȝḫ.w text written for the benefit of a dead person referred to as ‘the Osiris N’. That this text has a funerary purpose is clear. According to H.-W. Fischer-Elfert’s analysis, it is a Vorlage for an inscription to be applied to a tomb wall, which has certain similarities with BD chapter 137A. ²⁸ It displays clear Late Egyptian influence. It is unfortunately not as clear if this text version was intended for being inscribed in an underground burial apartment. ²⁹ Chapter 137A is known to have been used in the daily temple ritual, and also in the Middle Kingdom ka house of Heqaib. Arguably, the text on the ostracon may therefore have been intended for being inscribed in the cult place in the superstructure of a tomb. The ostracon does not offer a literal copy of BD chapter 137, and it is not certain whether it was intended for inclusion in the subterranean burial apartments. Therefore it is also uncertain to what extent this example is relevant for our concern. Although this DeM ostracon certainly dates back to the New Kingdom, it could moreover be a late New Kingdom text.

Our idea that funerary texts in Late Egyptian have some currency in the Third Intermediate Period was countered by Quack by stating that texts in Middle Egyptian also occur in that period (in the form of BDs and the so-called Mythological Papyri). ³⁰ However, we never suggested it was no longer customary to write funerary texts in Middle Egyptian in that era. We only stated that Late Egyptian funerary texts occurred then as well, pointing in this context to the Decree of Nesikhons. ³¹

On this text, Quack remarks that the religious parts are mostly in Middle Egyptian, and that Late Egyptian only occurs in the ‘legal part’ of the text. ³² However, I do not believe it is correct to separate the ‘legal part’ of the text from the ‘religious part’. The text is a coherent oracle text which deploys Late Egyptian throughout, and which exclusively concerns the afterlife of Nesikhons and her post mortem behaviour to her surviving husband and other relatives. ³³ A similar decree, also in Late Egyptian and also written for Nesikhons, occurs on the McCullum and Rogers tablets. Again these are decree texts by Amun Re for the benefit of Nesikhonsu. In this case they concern the effectiveness of her shabtis. ³⁴ All of these divine decrees concern funerary topics and were deposited in the tomb of the deceased. Nothing of this kind is known from the New Kingdom. I will return to this point at the end of this article.

3) Another argument from historical linguistics concerns the use of the negative aorist ỉw bw ṯȝy.t<w>dm.t r=w ‘while not (even) a sword is taken up against them’. ³⁵ Quack insists that this form of the negative aorist is characteristic of the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Dynasties. For this reason, BD supplementary chapter 166 would have been composed in that period, and most probably was used for Ramses II at the time of his death (with a possibly even earlier date of composition). ³⁶

Of course we were aware that current grammars agree that the negative aorist in early Late Egyptian takes the form bw sḏm=f, whereas it was replaced in later Late Egyptian by bw ỉrỉ=f sḏm. For this reason, our article presented a large amount of references to the earlier form of the negative aorist spanning the period of the early Twentieth Dynasty into the Third Intermediate Period. On this basis we argued there is no grammatical obstacle to attributing a text with the early form of the negative aorist to the Twenty-First Dynasty.

Here a word is in order about the history of this form. The Middle Egyptian ancestor of the negative aorist took the form n sḏm.n=f. In Late Egyptian, two developments can be observed. On the one hand, the negation n is gradually replaced by the form bw (which could be just a different graphematic rendering of the same morpheme), on the other, the morpheme .n is gradually dropped from the older form sḏm.n=f. This leads to several different writings of the same grammatical form: n sḏm.n=f, n sḏm=f, bw sḏm.n=f, and bw sḏm=f. In a later development, bw sḏm=f is replaced by the periphrastic construction bw ỉrỉ=f sḏm.

In our article we considered the first four variants as allographs of one grammatical form, although we did not go into this particular point at length. In any case we were able to muster no fewer than seventeen attestations ranging in date between the early Twentieth Dynasty and the early Twenty-First Dynasty for the four forms that would allegedly have died out early in the Nineteenth Dynasty. One of our examples dates even to the Thirtieth Dynasty. ³⁷

Quack qualifies our decision not to distinguish between the four forms as ‘unpräzise’. In his view, the forms n sḏm.n=f and bw sḏm.n=f are older, and if they still occur in texts dating to the Twentieth Dynasty, this would imply the textual programme incorporated borrowings from older texts, deploying the form n sḏm.n=f. This would hold true even for the more ‘recent’ form bw sḏm=f, for which contemporary Egyptian would have deployed bw ỉrỉ=f sḏm.

Underlying Quack’s approach there must be the assumption of a unilinear development both in language and writing. This enables him to explain all examples of n sḏm.n=f (or bw sḏm.n=f, or n sḏm=f, or bw sḏm=f) as literal later copies of texts composed much earlier. Also, he takes for granted that later scribes had lost competence in deploying forms considered to reflect earlier phases of the language.

This assumed unilinear development implies that, at any given stage, only one form was in regular use. This does not correspond to my personal experience of how language is used by the people around me. Within living communities of speakers and writers, different people can use different modes of expression, including grammatical forms reflecting heterogeneous stages of linguistic development. Also, one and the same language user is likely to use different kinds of language depending on context and custom. It would be quite remarkable if such variability would not have existed in Egypt as well. For this reason, we expressed doubts in our article against the unilinear approach. ³⁸

Although it is likely that in a community of speakers certain grammatical constructions would be dominant at a given point in time, one has to reckon with variability caused by dialect differences, and by the different degrees to which individuals accept linguistic innovations. Written communication is likely to be more conservative in this regard than spoken comunication, but it is unlikely that the written form spectre was homogeneous. The nature of the written discourse is likely to have had an impact on the kind of language used. If earlier linguistic forms are still encountered in later times, this could have been caused by a scribe directly copying an already existing source, the only process seriously considered by Quack. However, scribes could also consciously or unconsciously continue to use old-fashioned ‘survivals’, or could formulate new texts in consciously used, no longer current constructions (‘revivals’). ³⁹ The latter is more likely to occur in culturally charged expressions than in, for example, letters.

T. Gillen has convincingly argued that, in a group of closely comparable expressions, ⁴⁰ the negative aorist is simultaneously expressed in the Madīnat Habū inscriptions of the time of Ramses III by the forms n sḏm.n=f, bw sḏm.n=f, n sḏm=f and bw sḏm=f. He concludes from this: ‘For constructions such as the bw sḏm.n=f, the implication is significant, since in the Medinet Habu corpus it does not appear to be an intermediate form in a linear grammatical evolution, but rather a hybrid form emerging only in certain phrasological contexts’. ⁴¹ The forms explained by Quack as representing successive stages in a linear grammatical evolution accordingly turn out to be something different entirely: a wide variety of different writings in the early Twentieth Dynasty, which all qualify as correct renderings of one and the same verb form. Here it happens in the culturally charged context of a major temple, roughly half a century or more after the time when the construction would, according to Quack, have ceased to be used.

This has important implications. There is now no obstacle to assume that all five forms of the negative aorist were known and in use in the time of Ramses III. Furthermore and far more importantly, it raises significant questions about the ease with which Quack attributes other ‘late’ attestations of bw sḏm=f and its cognate forms to simple copying from earlier sources. I favour the approach to accept that scribes were to an extent capable of correctly using earlier forms of Egyptian. Therefore, I am more readily inclined to accept what the date of the sources suggests without directly resorting to the assumption that all ‘late’ attestations of ‘early’ forms are due to copying. ⁴²

That scribes were still able to actively deploy the earlier form of the negative aorist can be demonstrated from two examples we did not mention in our article. Both occur in the Instruction of Amunnakht, of which the earliest attested version dates to the reign of Ramses IV. ⁴³

In some cases Quack protests that forms we had interpreted as negative aorists are effectively negated past tense statements and such a case would occur in Horus and Seth 14,12. ⁴⁴ I do not think this is a correct assessment of the passage. The creator god here makes the following statement: ‘I was the one who created barley and emmer …. with no god or goddess finding himself (able) to do it’ (ỉw bw gmỉ sw nṯr nb nṯr.t nb<.t> r ỉrỉ<.t>=f). This passage, describing a general inability on the part of the divinities and not a concrete past event, is quite evidently a negative aorist, and as such it is usually translated. ⁴⁵ The example is important, as it occurs in P. Chester Beatty I, a document dated between Ramses V and XI, much later than Quack would consider admissible for a negative aorist of this form. When we wrote our article, we did not realise that P. Chester Beatty I also contains numerous other instances of the negative aorist (of the forms we are interested in) in the various love songs. ⁴⁶

The example from P. Turin Cat. 1886, rt. y+1,7, a hymn to Ramses VII, is accepted as a negative aorist by Quack. ⁴⁷ However, since a parallel of this text occurs on O. DeM 1655, in which the beneficiary is Ramses VI, Quack deems likely that the text may be older, and perhaps much older. Moreover, the occurrence of the toponym Khatti in P. Turin Cat. 1893, verso 1,6 would offer an argument for dating the source to the Nineteenth Dynasty. In fact, however, the papyrus contains numerous different hymns, and the part mentioning Khatti is not from the hymn where the negative aorist occurs. ⁴⁸ Even if one of these texts contains a passage borrowed from (or inspired by) an earlier text, it does not follow that all the rest of the group of texts is slavish copying.

Other examples we adduced were from the late Twentieth Dynasty Papyrus Lansing and from the Instruction of Ani, of which several sources date to the late Twentieth and Twenty-First Dynasties. Quack objects that these documents transmit texts, many of which are known to have been composed earlier than the date of the sources themselves. This argument has to be accepted at least for Papyrus Lansing. However, in the Instruction of Ani, no source is identical to any other. Quack himself stressed the ‘open transmission’ of this composition, i.e. a form of transmission allowing adaptation on the part of the scribe. If, in such a context of dynamic transmission, an older, no longer common grammatical form is retained, this must be due in part to the form being considered correct. Moreover, large parts of the Teaching of Ani are known only from late versions like P. Bulaq 4. If here, in a context of open transmission, old forms like the negative aorist bw sḏm=f are retained and perhaps even introduced in newly formulated passages, this suggests that no need was felt to actualise the grammar of the text.

Quack rightly criticises our conviction that the text in O. Louvre 698,6 can only be a negative aorist; it could also be a negated past tense. ⁴⁹ However, the same letter contains frequent exclamations stating about a dead woman called Ikhtay: ‘Woe, Ikhtay does not prosper!’ ⁵⁰ These passages clearly deploy negative aorists. More examples of this phrase are known, so that it could concern an older expression, ⁵¹ but its frequent use in the context of a letter proves that we are witnessing a form that was still spontaneously used at the time the text was written: the very late Twentieth Dynasty or the early Twenty-First Dynasty. Intriguingly, the letter writer himself, Butehamun, had a name which is not attested in other periods, and which only makes sense if read as a negative aorist: ‘Amun cannot act wrongly’ (bw thỉ ʿImn). A likely further, Twenty-First Dynasty case is mentioned in footnote 75 below.

Taking all these indications together, I see no reason to abandon our opinion that the negative aorist bw sḏm=f could still be used in the late New Kingdom and even after. This undermines the key argument in Quack’s rebuttal.

4) Quack supports his claims by arguing that the original source of BD supplementary chapter 166 is unlikely to have come from Thebes, and that it would instead have been kept in an archive in Tanis. This is based on a postscript to some of the supplementary chapters (161–165), stating that these are ‘spells taken from another scroll in addition to the “Coming forth into daylight”’. ⁵² The colophon in Papyrus Marseille 291, D77,1 provides the additional information that these supplementary spells were found on a papyrus in the temple of Amun at Tanis. ⁵³

Quack bases a number of speculations on this. Firstly, this note, found on a Theban funerary papyrus, but referring to the origin of certain texts in a Tanite archive, suggests to him ‘daß in Theben selbst dieses Textgut nicht verfügbar war’. ⁵⁴ This reasoning is highly questionable. The papyrus from Marseilles dates to the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty. It is true that it states that a manuscript containing the supplementary chapters was found in Tanis, but this late tradition in no way rules out the possibility that similar texts were in existence hundreds of years earlier a thousand kilometers further south in Thebes. Texts could have been kept in different archives, and could have surfaced from there at different points in time. More damagingly, BD supplementary chapter 166 does not occur in the Marseilles papyrus, so that the find history recorded there may be irrelevant. This is all the more likely since chapter 166 has its own colophon, which implies that the text was found in the Valley of the Kings (and not in Tanis). The fact that the chapter was already in wide circulation in Thebes in the Twenty-First Dynasty, ⁵⁵ centuries before the colophon of pMarseille 291 was written, warrants doubts against the scenario proposed by Quack.

For these reasons, the rest of his argumentation (the text arrived in Tanis from archives in Piramesse; it had been used there when the mummy of Ramses II was embalmed) is highly tenuous to say the least.

Moreover, Quack’s account pays no attention to the well-known fact that many pieces of funerary equipment used in the royal tombs at Tanis were reused items that derive from the looted royal tombs at Thebes. It is likely that the suppliers were the Theban high priests who were implicated in these lootings. Probably the best-known case of such reuse is the sarcophagus of king Merenptah, which was reused for the burial of king Psusennes at Tanis. ⁵⁶ Yoyotte referred to a less spectacular case that is, for our story, even more interesting: the tomb of the vizier Wendjebauended, dated to the reign of Psusennes (Twenty-First Dynasty), which contained ‘notamment un scarabée de coeur qui avait appartenu à un roi Ousimârê et qui avait pu être prélevé sur sa momie en même temps qu’était découvert, “au cou du roi Ousimârê”, le texte du futur chapitre 166.’ ⁵⁷ For other objects, the same origin has been mooted. ⁵⁸ Quack does not reflect on the potential relevance of these indications for how a funerary text may have ended up in a Tanite temple archive.

One passage in the text leads to further complications: phrase 20b according to Wüthrich’s edition, which refers to the toponym Djeme. ⁵⁹ Admittedly there were places with this name in several parts of Egypt. One, apparently located in Asyūṭ, is mentioned on a Middle Kingdom coffin from that site. ⁶⁰ There are a number of Eighteenth Dynasty references to a Djeme in the wider area of Giza. ⁶¹ There is also a reference to a Djeme in Letopolis, dated to the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty. ⁶² Since Letopolis is part of the region where C. Zivie would situate the Djeme mentioned in Giza, this might be a reference to the same place. But the overwhelming majority of references to this toponym (and to the god named after it ⁶³ ) derive from Thebes, where it designates the small temple of Madīnat Habū and, in the Late Period, a wider area around it. ⁶⁴ This place is mentioned for the first time in two passages in a document dated to the time of Pinodjem I. ⁶⁵

Until the publication of Quack’s paper, researchers always considered self-evident that the theology of the supplementary chapters is of Theban origin. ⁶⁶ From this point of departure, it is easy to understand why the earliest attestations of the text occur most frequently in Thebes, ⁶⁷ and why Djeme is mentioned in the text. It is much less evident to find a convincing explanation for this on the assumption that the text derives from Piramesse. It cannot be proven that there was not a Djeme there, but there is not a shred of evidence for this hypothesis (which, to my knowledge, no one has thus far even made). Assuming that the archival material in Piramesse would be referring to the Djeme in Asyūṭ or Giza/Letopolis would be amounting to special pleading. ⁶⁸ On the other hand, if the Theban Djeme would be the one referred to, the earliest attestation of this toponym under the pontificate of Pinodjem I would render difficult an attribution of our text to Piramesse, as the city was in the process of being dismantled around this time. ⁶⁹ In any case, this was long after the burial of Ramses II, for which the text would have been used according to Quack.

Taking this all into consideration, there is little to commend the idea that BD supplementary chapter 166 was written in the late Eighteenth or early Nineteenth Dynasty in Piramesse. The associations are rather with a Theban environment, and with the Twenty-First Dynasty.

To end this article, I return to the issue of the linguistic register of funerary texts. In our article we suggested that funerary texts were, before the Twenty-First Dynasty, in Middle Egyptian rather than Late Egyptian. The counterevidence brought forward by Quack above has been shown to boil down effectively to one brief Late Egyptian passage in a New Kingdom funerary text (P. Berlin 3002), and to another which may not have been intended for use in a subterranean burial apartment, and of which the date is not very clear, although it must predate the end of the New Kingdom (O. DeM 1441). Other examples of occasional Late Egyptian influence in New Kingdom funerary texts can be cited, ⁷⁰ but we were thinking rather of cases where Late Egyptian is a significant feature of the texts in question, as is the case in BD supplementary chapter 166.

I must admit that the amount of comparative material we referred to was also rather small. Assuming that we were recalling a well known phenomenon, we only mentioned the oracular decree for Nesikhons. ⁷¹ However, this decree was written in two different versions, ⁷² and elsewhere in the article we also referred to the Rogers and McCullum tablets, written likewise for Nesikhons. ⁷³ To this can be added a papyrus written for Nesikhons’ husband Pinodjem II. ⁷⁴ All these sources include numerous Late Egyptian features. So this would amount not to one, but to five texts. BD supplementary chapter 166, numerous instances of which begin to turn up in the record in the course of the Twenty-First Dynasty, is a further example. One can add the funerary P. Berlin 3031, which includes BD supplementary chapters 162 and 166, as well as a number of otherwise unattested texts written in Late Egyptian, or the late Egyptian addition to BD chapter 125 in P. Cairo JdE 95881, datable to the tenure of the high priest of Amun Menkheperre (Twenty-First Dynasty). ⁷⁵

This does not imply of course that Late Egyptian was routinely used for funerary documents in the Third Intermediate Period. We merely suggested that it was apparently not unusual, something that cannot be said of the New Kingdom.

But there is one aspect of the problem that we did not realise at the time we wrote our article. This aspect is the fact that the use of Late Egyptian for funerary texts seems to occur with significant frequency in the case of the funerary equipment of Nesikhons and her husband Pinodjem II: she had at least four texts written in Late Egyptian, he had at least one. Some of the other sources also derive from the context of the Amun priesthood. We may accordingly be looking at a custom particularly cherished within that social context.

In the religion of these circles, oracular decrees played a major role; witness the ubiquitous oracular names (of types like Djedkhonsuiufankh) and oracular amuletic decrees. ⁷⁶ The texts given to Nesikhons and Pinodjem II extend this religious custom into the netherworld. Three of the decrees concern oracular statements by Amun to the effect that the dead will have a good afterlife, and will not cause nuisance to their surviving relatives. On the other hand, the Rogers and McCullum tablets concern divine support ensuring that payment for Nesikhons’ shabtis, which had apparently only partly been paid for at the moment they were given to the family, would be transferred to the artisans.

The reason why these two texts needed to be added has been much discussed, and is not easy to understand. Surely the family of the Theban high priests should have had no problems in raising the money required for the payment. Whatever the concrete background may have been, it is clear that the issue was of major concern, and that a divinity warranted that the payment would be effectuated, making the shabtis functional for the deceased.

The same remarkable concern appears in what we called part II of supplementary chapter 166, which we believe was added to the ‘royal part’ of the text in the Twenty-First Dynasty. The deceased is here said to have paid the required sum for his shabtis. ⁷⁷ Our impression that the two texts derive from the same cultural context, and may be close in date, is strengthened by this similarity. A notable feature is, moreover, that the passage on the purchase of the shabtis in BD supplementary chapter 166 deploys the expression ỉnỉ m sn.w ‘to acquire in compensation’ = ‘to purchase’, for which only one direct parallel exists, in the oracular decree for Ma‛atkare in Karnak (Twenty-First Dynasty). ⁷⁸ There are further similarities between our chapter and the oracular decrees of Nesikhons and Pinodjem II. In the former, the king (ḥm=k) is asked to give the deceased ‘a plot of land in the Field of Rushes’. ⁷⁹ Closely similar formulations occur in the oracular decrees for Pinodjem II ⁸⁰ and Nesikhons. ⁸¹ All of this suggests that the sources emerged in a common cultural context: that of the Amun high priesthood of the mid-Twenty-First Dynasty. This suggests that part II was added to supplementary chapter 166 of the BD around the lifetime of Nesikhons and Pinodjem II, and shortly before this text came into circulation for the burials of other Amun priests.

Conclusions

The present study suggests that the arguments brought forward by Quack against our earlier article can be criticised on various points. The text we studied does not have to be a historical account, but if it is not, then it must be alluding to the looting of the tomb of Ramses II. This implies an earliest possible composition date at the very end of the Twentieth Dynasty. If the colophon does refer to a real historical event, then it becomes hard to deny that the little text containing part I of BD supplementary chapter 166 forms part of the tomb equipment secondarily supplied to the mummy of Ramses II.

The occurrence of the negative aorist in the form bw sḏm=f in a text composed early in the Twenty-First Dynasty is regarded by Quack as highly problematic. However, I do not share his linear views on linguistic development. On the assumption that linguistic expressions can vary depending on language user or linguistic register, later usage of old-fashioned grammatical constructions could be due to direct copying of earlier texts (the only option considered by Quack), but it could also be what Stauder termed linguistic ‘survivals’ or ‘revivals’ deployed by language users who were well versed in earlier stages of Egyptian. It should be noted that the form concerned, the negative aorist, occurs in the divine epithet ‘the one who kills the enemies of his father, although not (even) a sword is taken up against them’ (pȝ smȝ … nȝ ḫft.y.w n ỉt(=f) ỉw bw ṯȝỉ.t<w> dm.t r=f). In such an expression, deployment of archaising expressions can be expected; in fact, the clause semantically resembles the one deployed in various forms in Madīnat Habū and studied by Gillen. The fact that examples of this form of the negative aorist continue to occur throughout the Twentieth Dynasty and into the Twenty-First suggests there is no need to rule out, based on this argument, that the text must have been composed late in the New Kingdom or even later.

Quack also argued against our idea that funerary texts written in Late Egyptian are characteristic of the post-New Kingdom era. However, in almost all cases, he was reacting against points we were not trying to make. Moreover, he was effectively able to produce only one counter-example and an uncertain second one.

Far more important than his argument on historical linuistics is the fact that BD supplementary chapter 166 suddenly begins to turn up (and then in significant numbers) towards the end of the Twenty-First Dynasty. The stress it lays on the economic fact that the owner of the papyrus has duly paid for his shabtis is highly unusual in funerary texts, but exactly the same concern is raised in the Rogers and McCullum tablets, dated to year 5 of Siamun. This similarity suggests both texts are rooted in the same cultural context (i.e. that of the Theban Amun priesthood of the later Twenty-First Dynasty).

Other indications point in the same direction. Most notably, the text refers to Djeme. If, as seems the most likely, this is the oft-referred-to Djeme in Madīnat Habū, first attested textually in the early Twenty-First Dynasty, then we have a new and very strong argument to assign the spell to the cultural context of the Amun priesthood of the Twenty-First Dynasty. On the other hand, Quack’s suggestion to attribute the text to Piramesse is based exclusively on one rather indirect indication concerning the find spot of the supplementary chapters of the BD. The fact that this only occurs in a Saite papyrus which does not contain chapter 166 suggests that this argument is of doubtful value.