Das Totenbuch pBerlin P. 10477 aus Achmim (mit Photographien des verwandten pHildesheim 5248).

• Author: Mosher, Malcolm
• Position: Book Review

Das Totenbuch pBerlin P. 10477 aus Achmim (mit Photographien des verwandten pHildesheim 5248). By BARBARA LUSCHER, with contributions from Ursula Rossler-Kohler and Maria-Theresia Derchain-Urtel. Handschriften des Altagyptischen Totenbuchs, vol. 6. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2000. Pp. xiv + 50, plates.

This sixth publication from the Book of the Dead Project at the University of Cologne is a welcome edition to scholars of the Late Period (LP) traditions from the Book of the Dead (BD) in Egypt. In particular, it not only provides reproductions of two of the six papyri currently known to have been produced at Akhmim during the Late Period, but also includes a thorough description of the contents of these two documents. In the discussions concerning content, the author demonstrates an exceptionally keen eye for detail, and she provides several valuable tables to accompany these discussions.

In the introduction, the author provides a number of general comments about the Book of the Dead tradition at Akhmim, a tradition that produced documents with hieroglyphic script in Style 3 format. She observes that two subtraditions can be observed at Akhmim, with P. Berlin 10477 belonging to the subtradition I have identified as B and P. Hildesheim 5248 belonging to A. She points out the problems with the dates that Peter Munro proposed for two of the documents, and she agrees with me in stating that the dates proposed by Munro for the stelae also need thorough re-evaluation. She cites my proposed date of the late first century B.C., but she follows a proposed date of the late first century A.D. given by M.-Th. Derchain-Urtel, which I shall address further below. She then touches on all of the interesting issues that can be observed in the papyri: corrupt texts, dittographies, haplographies, omissions, and portions of the texts of some spells arranged out of order, to name just a few. She observes that the texts of the Akhmim papyri clearly came from a common source because the six papyri are very similar to each other in all key aspects, with even the corruptions being essentially identical.

The main body of the study is devoted to the content of P. Berlin 10477, which consists of a set of BD spells as well as a unique text associated with the ba that is only otherwise found in P. MacGregor, also from Akhmim.

The author breaks down the BD portion of the document into nine main sections, as I have also done (Papyrus of Hor [London: British Museum Press, 2001]). In the table wherein she lists the specific texts found in each section, she also lists the specific subsections of lengthy spells like 17 and 144, information that is particularly valuable. In my own publication, I provided a graphic representation for the relative placement of texts and vignettes across the six documents, but I only listed the texts by spell number and did not identify the subsections. Hence this table is a valuable complement to my schematic diagrams and provides valuable details that I omitted.

Next, the author provides a thorough statistical profile for the different representations of the names and titles of the deceased and her parents. She also adds a short and useful discussion regarding some of the cursive hieroglyphs used in the document, one that complements a similar discussion by J. J. Clere in his publication of the Nesmin papyrus from Akhmim.

Luscher provides general discussions and observations about corruption and peculiarities in the texts, and this is accompanied by an excellent, hand-drawn, hieroglyphic transcription for the BD texts in P. Berlin 10477, with annotation marks that refer to the specific observations she makes. The text of Spell 1 is singled out for a thorough study and is accompanied by a synoptic transcription that contrasts the texts of all six Akhmim documents with that of P. Turin 1791, the text published by Lepsius and alternatively known of the Papyrus of Iwefankh. The author covers the remaining texts, however, in much less detail, preferring only to remark on a small subset of some of the interesting issues. This is not a shortcoming, however, for to have listed every issue in the text of every spell would have been an enormous undertaking and in the end would have had little critical value. For a detailed analysis of parts of other spells, one can see my publication.

Luscher points out two demotic numbers located under the lower margin of the document, and this invites me to ask how one should number columns in LP BDs. Specifically, should one number only those columns that contain text, or should one also include columns that contain only vignettes? This issue pertains to the Akhmim documents, where one finds eight vignettes for spells that consume entire columns, those associated with Spells 16, 18, 110, 125, 143, 148, 151, and 161. The author chose to number only the columns containing text, whereas in my publication I included the columns with these vignettes. Both methods are valid, and it would be intriguing to see how the Egyptians themselves numbered the columns. This can be done, I think, by virtue of these two demotic numbers at the bottom of P. Berlin 10477. Under column 320, the number 16 is written in demotic (Plate 14)...