Egyptian funerary texts

[dtango]

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.

[Minimalist]

I've often wondered about the veracity of hieroglyphic translations, too. The Rosetta stone, which formed the basis of our understanding of hieroglyphs was a 3'd century BC writing of the same decree in Greek and Demotic.

The assumption therefore is that there has been no change in the Egyptian language from the 24th century BC to the 3d. 2100 years is a long time. Consider the changes in English from Elizabethan times to the present - a period of 500 years and then think what 4 times that difference might be?

Unfortunately the translation of ancient documents does rest heavily upon the outlook of the translator.

[Anomalocaris]

Hmmm, I might suggest hieroglyphics is less susceptible to change than English. For one thing, it is not a every-day language, so it need not change with the evolving vocabulary needs of its society. So It's more like Latin than English in this sense. For another, it's style is independent of how it is pronounced, so it need not change with the evolving pronounciation of a spoken language. So it's more like Chinese than English in this sense.

So I might say the developmental properties of Hieroglyphics is more comparable to archaic written Chinese than any modern language.

[dtango]

Unfortunately the translation of ancient documents does rest heavily upon the outlook of the translator.

.
You are quite right! There are no difficulties with the script itself because modern translators are better acquainted with its grammar than ancient scribes were.
Alan Gardiner, the author of the “Egyptian Grammar,” wrote the following:

The only basis we have for preferring one rendering to another, when once the exigencies of grammar and dictionary have been satisfied – and these leave a large margin for divergencies – is an intuitive appreciation of the trend of the ancient writer’s mind.

The problem with the translation of the hieroglyphic script presents itself only in the rendering of the funerary texts because they are not the writings of one or various authors but recordings of immensely ancient popular oral traditions. No translator has difficulty in translating, for example, “The story of Sinuhe,” a narrative of the adventures of a common man. When, however, it comes to translating “The Dispute of a man with his Ba,” there are more than 60 or 70 or 80 official translations of the text but we still do not know what the text is about.

The translators suffer from preconceptions. The main one is that the gods were supposed at all times to having judged dead people, or their souls, something which, according to the texts, is not true.

Today’s atheists have their preconceptions too, of which the main one is (as per your signature) that man created God in his own image. That, according to the texts is also not true. It was indeed the gods who tried very hard to create men in their own image (and because of that had to judge them and kill those not made in their image).

Hmmm, I might suggest hieroglyphics is less susceptible to change than English. For one thing, it is not a every-day language, so it need not change with the evolving vocabulary needs of its society.

.
Correct! And on top of that there is the passion of the Egyptians for “the words of the ancestors.” They were constantly copying ancient documents. Lots of texts were found ending with a colophon that reads: It is finished from beginning to end, as it was found in writing.”

The problem rests with certain key words, as noted in the original post, and it is a problem common not only in the hieroglyphic and cuneiform script but in Greek too and most probably in Latin and up to modern languages.
The best example to illustrate this problem is the term “cow” (usually Wild Cow) which in all archaic texts means “Mother.” Some translators cannot bring themselves to render “cow” as “Mother” end so they end up mixing in their translations humans and animals.

Gilgamesh’ mother is also called a Wild Cow. According to the text she was “A Wild Cow of the enclosures” because the Wild Cows, aka Mother-wombs, were kept in enclosures where the gods (Bulls) were visiting them and raping them in order to produce humans in their image. Yet, one translator informs his readers that Gilgamesh’ mother is a Wild Cow of the steer-folds (my English is not so good but I think that no humans [gods by two thirds as Gilgamesh was] were thought to having been born into steer-folds).

[houseofcantor]

You are a fucking superhero. I have been "with tao" before even reading the tao te ching, now I keep ending up where I need to be. You keep doing what you're doing, I keep doing what I'm doing; and shit is gonna get fixed.

---

...and that reminds me. Is Ba meant to be untranslatable, like tao?

[dtango]

I have been "with tao" before even reading the tao te ching, now I keep ending up where I need to be. You keep doing what you're doing, I keep doing what I'm doing; and shit is gonna get fixed.

---

...and that reminds me. Is Ba meant to be untranslatable, like tao?

.
No! There is a fundamental difference between Tao and the Egyptian theology of the funerary texts.
Taoism is pure philosophy, a concept of a man or a group of men while what philosophy (theology) is found in the Egyptian texts is the result of misinterpretation, misrepresentation and falsification of the texts.

The term “Ba,” is not untraslatable but they avoid to translate it because if they render it always as “soul” then there are souls who own houses, who build houses and who are eventually killed in the slaughterhouses -which my good friend Rhythm mentions. If on the other hand they translate the word according to the requirements of the context, they would have to answer a lot of questions which they are not prepared or willing to answer.

“Ba” was originally the title of a person and it meant something like “supervisor.”
This supervisor was responsible for a group of men who had not yet been judged and when the time was coming for the judgment of each one of his men, he was accompanying them and was acting as a sort of witness of defense for them.

When the man undergoing judgment failed to pass the trial successfully he was exterminated, the Ba’s duty was over and so the Ba was going away.

When the man died, his Ba was going away!
When the man died, his soul was going away!!

[The Grand Nudger]

He didn't stick around to supervise all of the other peasants? Everyone was assigned their own supervisor? Speaking of which, find those execution chambers, or anything else which supports the idea? What exactly were they supervising?

[Shell B]

You don't need the funerary texts to know they believed in life after death. Just saying.

[houseofcantor]

Rhythm is your friend? Well, that settles it. I was wondering if me and him were gonna have problems, and the answer to that question seems to be no.

Thanks for the info on Ba; it was just an impression of the word I got from reading your work. Me and tao go way back; while I'm not a Taoist, they consider it the "source of all things." I'm just putting considerations together at this point.

[Erinome]

Thank you for sharing this!