Text-building and Transmission of Pyramid Texts in the Third Millennium bce: Iteration, Objectification, and Change

Abstract

The emergence of ancient Egyptian mortuary literature in the third millennium bce is the history of the adaptation of recitational materials to the materiality of different media. Upon a gradual development, the transformation of the oral discourse into writing began with the use of papyri for transcribing the guidelines of ritual performances as aide-mémoire, and culminated with the concealment of sacerdotal voices and deeds into the sealed-off crypt of king Wenis (ca. 2345 bce). The process of committing ritual and magical recitations into scriptio continua in the Pyramid Texts was subject to several stages of adaptation, detachability, and recentering. Investigating how the corpus emerged through the combination of recitations from different settings elucidates the transformation of oral written discourse into literary style, the traces of poetic and speech elements in the corpus, and its flexibility to disseminate and adapt to different mortuary practices, beliefs and contexts in the second millennia bce and beyond.