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

Abstract

The colophon of BD supplementary chapter 166 states that the text had been found at the neck of Ramses II’s mummy. Dahms, Pehal, and Willems had argued in JEA 100 (2014) that the original document had not formed part of the original tomb equipment of Ramses II, but had been added in the course of the Twenty-First Dynasty after the tomb robberies in the Valley of the Kings. In 2016, J. Quack raised fundamental criticism against this interpretation, arguing that the text dates to the early Ramesside Period and had probably been applied in Piramesse to the mummy of Ramses II. The present article offers a critical reassessment of Quack’s paper. The linguistic register of funerary texts, the development of the negative aorist, and contextual indications strengthen the idea that the text was written in Thebes in the Twenty-First Dynasty in the social context of the Amun priesthood.