Les textes de la pyramide de Pepy Ier.

• Author: Ayad, Mariam F.
• Position: Book Review

Les textes de la pyramide de Pepy Ier. By CATHERINE BERGER-EL NAGGAR, JEAN LECLANT, BERNARD MATHIEU, and ISABELLE PIERRE-CROISIAU. 2 vols. Memoires de l'Institut francais d'archeologie orientale, vol. 118/1-2. Cairo: INSTITUT FRANCAIS D'ARCHEOLOGIE ORIENTALE, 2001. Pp. viii + 325, plts. (paper).

This publication, a product of the collaborative effort of members of the French Archaeological Mission to Saqqara (MAFS), chronicles the mission's work on reconstructing the texts of Pepi I, an ambitious project started in 1965. The first of this two-volume set is devoted to providing a detailed description of the content and layout of the funerary texts inscribed in the Pyramid-tomb of Pepi I. It is comprised of an introduction and seven chapters, each exclusively devoted to a room or corridor in Pepi I's Pyramid-tomb: the funerary chamber, the passage between the funerary chamber and the antechamber, the antechamber, the passage between the antechamber and the serdab, the serdab, the vestibule, and the descending corridor. Six extensive indices at the end of the first volume provide a concordance, a complete listing of all the texts inscribed for Pepi I (these are further subdivided into "identified," "unidentified," and "new" texts), and a list of "unplaced" fragments. A list of fragments currently in museum collections is also included. A clearly marked plan of Pepi's pyramid-tomb and forty-eight photos help the reader to understand the layout of the texts and to appreciate the challenges associated with this kind of work. The second volume contains forty loose-leaf plates of facsimile copies of Pepi I's texts.

The pyramid of Pepi I is not the oldest known pyramid, but it is here that Maspero first discovered the Pyramid Texts. The Pyramid of Pepi I is also the first in which funerary inscriptions are not limited to the funerary chamber, but extend into the antechamber and onto the walls of the access corridor. When the pyramid was initially excavated, many of its inscribed walls, including the long walls of the funerary chamber, were very damaged, with many of the original blocks surviving only in the debris filling the pyramid's rooms. This had effectively hindered scholars from fully studying the texts of Pepi I.

The French mission painstakingly collected and recorded more than two thousand inscribed blocks recovered from the debris with the ultimate goal of restoring them to their original places on the pyramid's walls. Each block was...