Egyptian funerary texts

[dtango]

I find it ironic that you're actually creating a myth with all of this.

My good friend, I’ll tell you what I find ironic.
You were brought up (not you personally, I am addressing the atheists who share your beliefs) in a culture where spiritual gods, immortal souls and afterlife are part of the every day life, you are used to them, you have philosophers devoting their thoughts to them and so at the end you come to think of them as thoughts that naturally occur to men (No university ever dared teach they are laughable).

As an atheist, however, you know they are laughable!
Yet, you ascribe them to cultures unknown to you.
You learn of the beliefs of those cultures, you realize that they are different from yours but you apply corrections in order to smooth out differences and be able to find excuses for the one you are unable to account for: their words, the myth!

Immemorial imagination, the source of myth for Cambell!
Magical incantations, the funerary texts according to teachings of Campbell!!

Their sand-made fortress is coming apart!
They stopped translating the texts! Surely you were not aware of this fact but you need have no doubts because no Egyptologist will deny it.

Egyptian hieroglyphs were deciphered almost 200 years ago. Thousands of documents and scriptures have been translated since then and suddenly we stop translating the funerary texts because we have eventually realized that we do not know what they are about. We can no longer use the excuse which the supposed magic offers.

I think we are not here to just pass our time or to entertain ourselves by arguing. I came across the texts because it is here that the study of the myth leads. I was used to the translations of Faulkner, full of spirits and souls, and suddenly I discover James Allen and gone are the spirits and the souls.

Well, this is a fact I am bringing to your attention. We all know the proper way to investigate something. Do you want to investigate and test the soundness of your beliefs? There is your chance: Why spirits and souls up to now, but now only “akhs” and “bas”? Hm?

Egyptian, as I recall ( and its been a while ) , is a combination of phonetic symbols, morphemes, and something else similar to punctuation which modifies the others.

You are referring to the determinative sign about which Allen writes the following:

In Middle Egyptian, words spelled with phonograms usually have an ideogram added at the end. This extra sign, called a determinative, has two functions: it shows that the signs preceding it are to be read as phonograms rather than ideograms, and it indicates the general idea of the word.
Thus, the word meaning “ascend” is usually written with the “walking legs” sign (a V turned upside down) which indicates that this is a word having to do with motion.

Thanks for the info about the ostracon. I did not know about it.

To be honest, I think this tango guy is either into hokey history or there is a language barrier here. No offense, new guy.

No offence taken, young lady.
With age you’ll get more careful and learn not to jump too quick to conclusions.

You see, it is you who is the new guy here.

[Minimalist]

You are referring to the determinative sign about which Allen writes the following:

Yes, correct. Thanks for supplying the term.

[Shell B]

No offence taken, young lady.
With age you’ll get more careful and learn not to jump too quick to conclusions.

You see, it is you who is the new guy here.

You are new to me. Nonetheless, how I refer to you has no bearing on the discussion. You may make valid points on the languages aspects of this discussion. I am no expert on the topic. However, I am of the opinion that you are jumping to conclusions in regard to your topic. You cannot assert a lack of belief in the afterlife based solely on a few texts that do not sufficiently describe it for you. That is like me reading a note from someone that does not mention New Jersey and jumping to the conclusion that the author does not believe in New Jersey.

[The Grand Nudger]

Tango-

Is there such a thing as a thought that "unnaturally occurs" to men? We have their stories, we have their artifacts. The evidence we have available to us suggest that human beings have believed in an afterlife for a very long time. Longer than we've been writing down our beliefs (much longer, and this has already been pointed out to you several times by several people). You have an alternative translation of a text that you then use to make sweeping claims about the culture (and all other cultures, hilariously). You just don't have a very strong case here. You're unable to deal with criticism, instead changing the subject (asking us if we've read the Golden Bough? or flat out ignoring criticism by way of handwaving). I'm sorry, I don't see it. I don't think you've argued for your position very well, and you don't seem to have any evidence to support the conclusions that you believe the text would imply. Our current understanding of all of the subjects you've touched upon; which your theory contradicts, is based on scholarship and evidence of a much higher quality and qauntity than what you've offered.

[Epimethean]

Mind you, Rhythm, Campbell was a child and all academics who think at crossed odds with tango are liars and cheats.

Bullshit, thy name be context.

[The Grand Nudger]

LOL, rgr that. Academia is constantly suppressing the truth.

[dtango]

We do not find any religious texts until the pyramid of last king of the 5th Dynasty, Unas. In spite of what the Egyptologists claim therefore, all of the prior pharaohs of Egypt, including Djoser, Sneferu, Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure did not seem to have any magical incantations guiding them to the "afterlife."

So when this idea popped into Egyptian consciousness is open to speculation but it seems very odd that the majority of the Old Kingdom did not act on it.

.
You are quite right!
As regards the idea of soul there is evidence that it appeared at about 2400 BCE.
Thank God(!!), there are the Pyramid Texts. In there the term “ba”, traditionally translated as “soul,” occurs 59 times out of which only in two passages (definitively, with no doubt at all, in just one) the term occurs with the meaning of “soul.”

The “ba,” being a supervisor, is reported to be “above” the man undergoing judgment thus guarantying protection.
After judgment, when the man is considered a god he is also promoted to a “ba” (in various passages it is said to the man: “you are now a ba”, “you became a ba”) and so… the power of the “ba” is “all around him.”
The last stage of evolution that brought the “ba” from “around” to “inside” of the man was recorded for the first time in approximately 2300 BCE in the Pyramid of Pepi I.

Translation by Raymond Faulkner”:

O King, go, that you may be a spirit and have power as a god,
As the successor of Osiris;
You have your soul within you.

Translation by James Allen:

Ho, Pepi! You have gone that you may become akh and take control as a god,
as Osiris’s replacement.
You have your ba within you.

All 59 passages I have collected and presented in a study which unfortunately is in Greek. However, both the translations of Faulkner and Allen are cited in English and so much the hieroglyphic text as the transliteration are there and if you want to have an idea this link will take you directly to the pdf file. The first passage, of the Pyramid of Unas, appears on page 10.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's an endless loop...lol.

[Epimethean]

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

[Minimalist]

As regards the idea of soul there is evidence that it appeared at about 2400 BCE.

I wonder if this does not simply reflect the growing aggrandizement of the monarchy? You know the old Monty Python routine in Holy Grail? One guy says "He must be a king or something." The other says "How do you know that?" The first guy answers "He ain't got shit all over him."

It's a long way from that to the "L'etat c'est moi" style of king.


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. Everyone else was relegated to some sort of holding tank similar to the Greek Hades. One can easily see the idea expanding as the nobility and the priests got a little more full of themselves, though. 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.