Egyptian funerary texts

[dtango]

It's an endless loop...lol.

More of an endless poop. It's the human centipyramid.

.
I am disappointed!
I was expecting you to say that all this information you had from your classes at the university.

More to the point, though, I seem to recall that the earliest attribution of a real afterlife was only to the pharaoh who became one of the stars.

.
It all seems complicated because we do not respect the texts as we should.
The texts written in the Pyramids are not the work of the priesthood (the funerary texts in general were not inspired by the priests, or some theologians or philosophers), the texts were not composed for the first time there, into the chambers and corridors of the Pyramids. They are edited copies of some archaic originals on which the oral tradition was recorded.
The Pyramid texts, apart from the Cannibal Hymn, are much softer than the Coffin Texts that followed because they were prepared for the king and it should not be advertised that the king too was considered a subhuman creature before judgment.

The stars you are mentioning are priestly additions. They present the king to ascend to the sky by walking on paths of light but they also threaten with hunger any god who will refuse to set the ladder in order for the king to climb to the heavens (the ladder by which the gods ascended originally).

My point, I guess, is that it is not a static concept. It evolved....much as all religions evolve... but Egypt did so over a very long period of time. The best you can probably do is take a snapshot of what they believed in any given era and look for ancestors and descendants of that belief.

.
I quite agree and I do have a snapshot for you of the era of the Pyramid Texts.
It is the very interesting and very revealing story of a single word.
The word is “qbHw” and it means “ The land of cool waters”. It is the land where the gods live because in a passage we read “Oh you god who live in qbHw”.

The word consists of the four phonograms qbHw which are followed by four determinative signs: A water pot with water running from it, three zigzag lines (the sign for water), a bird that lives in rivers and lakes and an ideogram depicting sandy hill-country over edge of green cultivation.

When it was said that the gods ascended to the skies, the name of their home place was still known to the people as “qbHw.” The priests removed the last sign, that of the sandy hills, and substituted it with the sign for the sky!!
Clever guys, no?

What happens today?
Faulkner translates “qbHw” as “Firmament” and Allen as “Cool Waters.”!!

The scholars, dear friends Shell-B, Rhythm and Epimethean, do not know what the funerary texts are about.