Some Notes Concerning the Texts on the Two Brothers’ Coffins in Context

Abstract

This paper discusses the so-called ornamental use of texts on the late Middle Kingdom coffins belonging to Nakht-ankh and Khnum-nakht, the famous “Two Brothers”. The texts include heavily shortened versions of Pyramid- and Coffin Texts spells that the copyists apparently did not attempt to include in their entirety. Yet they can be seen to have made a number of conscious editorial decisions and selected the texts from a small closed set of spells, suggesting that their intent was not merely decorative. It is argued that the ornamental use of funerary texts represents a local religious tradition where the excerpts served as tokens and magical substitutes for the larger compositions from which they derive.