Out of a conversation I had with Epimethean, I realized that scholars and laymen alike know nothing of the Egyptian funerary texts which are the oldest and largest collection of archaic texts.
When the hieroglyphic script was deciphered, the translators of the funerary texts knew of the Egyptian religion, tradition and beliefs what the ancient Greek philosophers and historians had been told by the Egyptian priesthood.
The translators were absolutely certain that the Egyptians believed in life after death and so they forced their translations to agree with their beliefs.
In the texts, however, a life after judgment is described and not a life after death.
The judgment the texts are referring to is a judgment of living people, of people alive, not dead.
Reading the translations one comes across dead people who behave as normal living ones: they work, eat, drink, get angry and make sex.
The excuse the translator gave was: “These are magical texts.”
It is evident that the Book of the Dead is a book of magic. (Myriam Lichtheim)
The Book of the Dead is the name now given to sheets of papyrus covered with magical texts (R.O.Faulkner)
With time, however, they understood that something was wrong. Souls do not build houses neither is there any meaning in referring to the neighborhood where a soul resides.
So they came up with the perfect solution: translate without translating.
James Allen writes: The crucial terms bA, kA, and Ax, are rendered as “ba,” “ka,” and “akh,” respectively, rather than by a translation, because they each carry a wealth of connotations that is often impossible to capture in a single English word (see the Glossary). In a few cases, our knowledge of the Egyptian language has not (yet) made it possible to know the meaning of a verb or noun; such words are represented in the translations by a transliteration of the Egyptian term.
Not knowing the meaning of a few verbs or nouns does not make much difference. But not knowing the meaning of crucial terms, which were previously rendered as “soul” and “spirit, it does make a lot of difference. It means we do not know (yet) what the funerary texts are about.
Here is an example derived from the Pyramid texts:
Utterance 436 §789
Translated by Faulkner: “This mighty one has been made a spirit for the benefit of(?) his soul.
Translated by Allen: “ this controlling power has been akhified for his ba.
The hieroglyphic text reads:
sAx (purified) sxm (divine being) pn (this) bA (supervisor) =f (his)
Purification means that the person who is recognized as pure is automatically elevated socially.
The supervisor of the man who was found –during the process of the judgment- to be a divine being, was promoted to a supervisor of a higher class because he was the one who prepared, so successfully, the man for the requirements of his judgment.
The man became a divine being (or an image of god) and the supervisor from a supervisor of men became a supervisor of divine beings.
The funerary texts, when properly translated, will completely ridicule the concepts of soul and immortality.
When the hieroglyphic script was deciphered, the translators of the funerary texts knew of the Egyptian religion, tradition and beliefs what the ancient Greek philosophers and historians had been told by the Egyptian priesthood.
The translators were absolutely certain that the Egyptians believed in life after death and so they forced their translations to agree with their beliefs.
In the texts, however, a life after judgment is described and not a life after death.
The judgment the texts are referring to is a judgment of living people, of people alive, not dead.
Reading the translations one comes across dead people who behave as normal living ones: they work, eat, drink, get angry and make sex.
The excuse the translator gave was: “These are magical texts.”
It is evident that the Book of the Dead is a book of magic. (Myriam Lichtheim)
The Book of the Dead is the name now given to sheets of papyrus covered with magical texts (R.O.Faulkner)
With time, however, they understood that something was wrong. Souls do not build houses neither is there any meaning in referring to the neighborhood where a soul resides.
So they came up with the perfect solution: translate without translating.
James Allen writes: The crucial terms bA, kA, and Ax, are rendered as “ba,” “ka,” and “akh,” respectively, rather than by a translation, because they each carry a wealth of connotations that is often impossible to capture in a single English word (see the Glossary). In a few cases, our knowledge of the Egyptian language has not (yet) made it possible to know the meaning of a verb or noun; such words are represented in the translations by a transliteration of the Egyptian term.
Not knowing the meaning of a few verbs or nouns does not make much difference. But not knowing the meaning of crucial terms, which were previously rendered as “soul” and “spirit, it does make a lot of difference. It means we do not know (yet) what the funerary texts are about.
Here is an example derived from the Pyramid texts:
Utterance 436 §789
Translated by Faulkner: “This mighty one has been made a spirit for the benefit of(?) his soul.
Translated by Allen: “ this controlling power has been akhified for his ba.
The hieroglyphic text reads:
sAx (purified) sxm (divine being) pn (this) bA (supervisor) =f (his)
Purification means that the person who is recognized as pure is automatically elevated socially.
The supervisor of the man who was found –during the process of the judgment- to be a divine being, was promoted to a supervisor of a higher class because he was the one who prepared, so successfully, the man for the requirements of his judgment.
The man became a divine being (or an image of god) and the supervisor from a supervisor of men became a supervisor of divine beings.
The funerary texts, when properly translated, will completely ridicule the concepts of soul and immortality.
