Priestly Texts, Recensions, Rewritings And Paratexts In The Late Egyptian Period

Abstract

This chapter looks in detail at the question of the composition of Egyptian priestly texts. It examines the transmission methods used by Egyptians in traditional literary production, in particular relating to the funerary texts which constitute the corpus, whose textual mass is the most extensive in ancient Egypt. Then, in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, the chapter considers the principle which guided the rewriting of the main priestly texts, taking the example of an important text - the Myth of Horus at Edfu - which led to a mural text which constitutes a multi-dimensional paratextual space. Finally, it presents certain aspects of later documents, from the Jumilhac Papyrus to the Tebtunis Papyri. These latter papyri have generated philological and didactic paratexts. This leads the author to determine the impact of the spoken language on the written language of these periods, by way of a brief analysis of late phonological encodings implying a transliteration transfer. Keywords: Egyptian priestly texts; funerary texts; Myth of Horus at Edfu ; paratexts; Ptolemaic period; Roman period