EGYPTIAN
Egyptian religion,giving access to works by the two most influential writers in the field, Erik Hornung (notably Valley of the Kings,1990,and The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, 1999), and Jan Assmann, with The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, 2001, and now this translation of his 2001 volume Tod und Jenseits im alten Ägypten. The Egyptologist David Lorton has again translated with great fluency of style; he and Cornell Press deserve the warm thanks of readers for giving us these opportunities. Like other Assmann books, Death and Salvation introduces a vast range of ancient Egyptian writing of a content utterly impenetrable without some guidance. Of course Raymond Faulkner long ago provided direct entry into the main bodies of funerary literature, with English translations of the ‘Pyramid Texts’, the ‘Coffin Texts’ and the ‘Book of the Dead’. Yet modern numbered sequences of ‘spells’ and ‘chapters’, however convenient for reference, obliterate context. I wonder how many Egyptian Archaeology readers have, like me, consulted a ‘CT spell’ or a ‘BD chapter’, read the words, and understood nothing.We need guidance:Egyptologists sometimes offer it for a single object, or object type, as Harco Willems did for Middle Kingdom coffins, in Chests of Life, 1988, and The Coffin of Heqata, 1996, but Assmann aims more ambitiously at the entire architecture of the afterlife and everything ever written and depicted in it. And he has his eye on more than Egypt, stating his three aims as to introduce the thought world of ancient Egyptian mortuary religion, then to
ARCHAEOLOGY
show how this is the centrepoint of its ‘cultural consciousness’, permeating everything in daily thought and action, and, finally, to consider this for ‘insights into the relationship between death and culture’, using ancient Egypt in the comparative study of human individuals and societies – showing how we can understand ourselves through ancient Egypt.The challenge seems irresistible. In philosophic style, the pages and even titles are full of new words and terms from Greek and Latin, as the author evidently finds contemporary language insufficient.Yet any reader unable to stomach unio liturgica or ‘resultativity’ is missing out on a uniquely detailed guide to ancient Egypt. Although the book follows a logical path, its chapters can also stand as individual lectures, or conversations which the author invites us to start with the Egyptians through their ancient writings. In chapter 12, for example,we are guided through the Middle Kingdom liturgies that lurk within volume 1 of the Faulkner ‘Coffin Texts’ translation. For this kind of reading, it is a pity that this abridged English version had to leave out the indices (in the 2001 German edition, you can look up, and quickly make sense of, any ‘Book of the Dead’ chapter or other composition covered in the book). The German version also used illustrations extensively; much ancient writing is embedded in visual sources, and it is easier to follow the author through these visually as well as in printed text. Another loss is the quantity of translation, as with the discussion (pp.36-37) of ‘Book of the Dead’ chapter 172.
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Yet, the substance of the argument is there, in another of those acts of revelation that Assmann performs on such writing:‘chapter 172’ turns out to belong to a world of‘deification of limbs’ that crosses from the laments of Isis to the love songs of the New Kingdom, and somehow enters the Bible as the ‘Song of Songs’. So we move from ‘chapter 172’: ‘your lashes last forever, your eyelids are of fast lapis blue’ to Solomon: ‘your eyes are doves behind your veil, your hair like a herd of goats descending Gilead’s slopes’. Here, we discover why we need Assmann for these writings, even if we may argue with him over the ‘truth’ of his very philological view of Egypt. We must not put away our books on burial customs, or forget the archaeology that can tell us more - for example, it is the pottery repertoire which will tell us whether they used ‘Letter to the Dead’ plates for offering water (so Assmann, p.161) or food, as seems more practical.Yet we have to come back to this book and others if we are to find our way through the extraordinary visual and written world that the Egyptians STEPHEN QUIRKE Robyn Gillam, Performance and Drama in Ancient Egypt. Duckworth Publishing, 2005. (ISBN 0 7156 3404 6). Price: £16.99. In the ‘Introduction’ to this unusual book, Dr Gillam notes the present-day blurring of distinctions between archaeology, ‘a scholarly, scientific pursuit’ and performance, as seen in television documentaries about ancient Egypt which feature ‘imaginative (some may well say over-