Accompanying illustrations give an idea of the appearance of the work under discussion, sometimes with detailed diagrams of the layout of illustrated funerary compositions.
Each chapter covers the sources for the work under discussion the history and current state of research on the composition, its structure and language and a summary of its contents. The author modestly introduces his book as a “survey and orientation for nonspecialists,” but even specialists in Egyptian funerary literature will find much of interest in this volume.Īfter a brief preface on the history of scholarship, the author presents a series of chapters on individual texts, some grouped into thematic sections. In a relatively brief book, the author provides detailed descriptions and summaries of the major Egyptian funerary texts, along with extensive bibliography to provide a valuable and useful guide. There has long been a need for a thorough English language survey of this material, a need that is well met by the present volume. Modern titles assigned to ancient collections of funerary texts, such as “Pyramid Texts” or “Book of the Dead,” often give little hint of their contents, which are often obscure to modern readers even when available in translation. It has also been viewed as thematically similar to more developed accounts of the destruction of mankind in the Mesopotamian and biblical stories of the flood.Ancient Egyptian funerary literature is a complex subject, sometimes as daunting to the Egyptologist as to the nonspecialist. The work has been viewed as a form theodicy and a magical text to ensure the King’s ascent into heaven.
The “Book of the Heavenly Cow” may have originated from the Pyramid Texts dawn myth accounts but by the New Kingdom the idea was developed to explain death and suffering in an imperfect creation.
Though the text is recorded in the New Kingdom period it is written in Middle Egyptian and may have been written during the Middle Kingdom period. The supreme god now changes into many heavenly bodies, creates the “Fields of Paradise” for the blessed dead, perhaps appoints Geb as his heir, hands over the rule of humankind to Osiris (Thoth ruling the night sky as his deputy) with Shu and the Heh gods now supporting the sky goddess Nut. With this “fall” suffering and death came into the world along with a fracture in the original unity of creation. Divine punishment was inflicted through the goddess Hathor with the survivors suffering through separation from Ra who now resided in the sky on the back of Nut the heavenly cow. The “Book of the Heavenly Cow”, or “The Book of the Cow of Heaven”, is an Ancient Egyptian text thought to have originated during the Amarna Period and, in part, describes the reasons for the imperfect state of the world in terms of humankind’s rebellion against the supreme sun god Ra.
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