Description

The second phase of the evolution of the Book of the Dead leads to the standardization of the texts of this corpus in the 26th Dynasty. The largest part of them was already known during the New Kingdom and stemmed from oldest funeral corpora. These texts underwent naturally some reworking and several new spells were added. Among these are the "supplementary chapters" 162 to 167Pleyte, the insertion of which into the Book of the Dead took place between the second part of the Third intermediate Period and the 26th Dynasty. This was a period of great intellectual creativity following the seizure of power by the High Priests of Amun in Thebes and the instauration of the amonian theocracy at the end of the New Kingdom. The present book analyses these six texts, which differ linguistically, stylistically and conceptually from the rest of the Book of the Dead. The main feature of these formulae is to confer to Amun-Re and his wife the status of funerary deities. This testifies to the ingeniousness of the Egyptian theologians who constructed a universal god ruling over mankind, as well as over the world of the gods and of the deceased. Through these six formulae, we can follow the evolution of the Theban theology during the Libyan and the Kushite dominations.