Siut-Theben: Zur Wertschatzung von Traditionen im alten Agypten.

• Author: Muhs, B.P.
• Position: Reviews of Books

Siut-Theben: Zur Wertschatzung von Traditionen im alten Agypten. By JOCHEM KAHL. Probleme der Agyptologie, vol. 13. Leiden: BRILL, 1999. Pp. xi + 401. HF1 209, $123.

This book reconstructs the transmission history of a group of ancient Egyptian funerary texts, autobiographical inscriptions, titles, and epithets first attested in the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom tomb chapels of the nomarchs of Siut. These texts were later frequently copied or paraphrased in New Kingdom and Saite Period tomb chapels, sarcophagi, statues, and stelae in Thebes, presumably as a conscious display of archaism. The book also provides a fine introduction to text criticism, a tool with considerable potential for Egyptology, particularly for the study of Pyramid and Coffin Texts, Books of the Dead, and other canonical funerary texts.

The first chapter (pp. 1-11) establishes that there is no consensus regarding the means by which these texts were transmitted from Siut to Thebes. New Kingdom and Saite Period scribes and architects could have copied these texts directly from the monuments in Siut, or indirectly from textbooks preserved in libraries and pattern books containing indications of scenes as well as texts, or both. Furthermore, these hypothetical textbooks and pattern books could have in turn been copied directly from monuments in Siut, or produced from still earlier textbooks and pattern books which served as models for the monuments in Siut.

The second chapter (pp. 12-27) gives a history of Siut and its surviving monuments, concentrating on the First Intermediate Period tombs of the nomarebs Khety I (Siut V), Itibi (Siut III), and Khety II (Siut IV), and the Middle Kingdom tombs of the nomarchs Djefahapi I (Siut I), II (Siut II), and III (Siut VII). The focus here on Siut seems odd, given that this hook deals with the transmission of texts from Siut to Thebes, but the author prefers to discuss the monuments in Thebes in the fourth chapter, which examines the relationship between the texts from Siut and those from Thebes.

The third chapter (pp. 28-52) outlines the techniques of text criticism that the author uses to reconstruct the transmission history of these texts. These techniques were originally developed in Classical and New Testament studies to help reconstruct lost original texts from surviving copies. The surviving copies are compared and divided into common text (readings which are the same in all the surviving copies) and variant...