Lecture VIII. The Sacred Books. 169
But the Book of the Dead is a composite work. Not only
are the religious conceptions embodied in it composite and
sometimes self-contradictory, on the literary side it is composite
also. It was, moreover, a work of slow growth; glosses have
been added to it to explain passages which had become obscure
through the lapse of time; the glosses have then made their
way into the text, and themselves become the subject of fresh
commentary and explanation. Chapters have been inserted,
paragraphs interpolated, and the later commentary combined [184]
with the original text. The Book of the Dead as it appears in
the age of the Theban dynasties had already passed through long
centuries of growth and modification.^151
The Pyramid texts show the same combination of the doctrines
of the Osirian creed with those of the solar cult as the Book of
through long periods of time is illustrated by certain of the Pyramid texts,
which are reproduced word for word down to the close of the Egyptian
monarchy. Thus passages at the beginning of the inscriptions in the Pyramid of
Unas are repeated in the Ritual of Abydos, and another portion of the same text
is found on a stela of the Thirteenth Dynasty, as well as in one of the courts of
the temple of queen Hatshepsu at Dêr el-Bâhari, where, as Professor Maspero
remarks,“we have three identical versions of different epochs and localities.”
The invocations against serpents (Unas300-339) recur in the tomb of Bak-n-
ren-ef of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. See Maspero,Recueil de Travaux, iii. pp.
182, 195, 220. The fact gives us confidence in the statements of the Egyptian
scribes, that such and such chapters of the Book of the Dead had been“found”
or written in the reigns of certain early kings.
(^151) There is much to be said for the view of Professor Piehl, that we have in it
an amalgamation of the rituals and formulæ of the various chief sanctuaries of
Egypt, which have been thrown side by side without any attempt at arrangement
or harmony. One of such rituals would be that mentioned on the sarcophagus
of Nes-Shu-Tefnut, where we read of“the sacred writings of Horus in the city
of Huren”in the Busirite nome (Recueil de Travaux, vi. p. 134). On the
sarcophagus of Beb, discovered by Professor Petrie at Dendera, and belonging
to the period between the Sixth and the Eleventh Dynasties, we have not only
“early versions”of parts of the Book of the Dead, but also chapters which do