The mystery of the Great pyramid : traditions concerning it and its connection with the Egyptian Book of the dead : with numerous illustrations

MYSTERY OF THE GREAT PYRAMID

According to Sir Wallis Budge, there is no evidence that the aboriginal inhabitants of Egypt possessed any collection of religious writings which could be regarded as the original from which the various recensions of the Book, as known to-day, could have been derived, while they cannot be regarded even as the authors of the earliest one, because it “ presupposes the existence of ideas they did not possess, and also refers to an elaborate system of burial they did not practise ”’.

“Tt is clear that those who introduced the Book of the Dead into Egypt claimed to be able to protect the dead from calamities of every kind . . . and that the indigenous peoples of the country accepted their professions and adopted many of their funeral customs, together with the beliefs that had produced them. They never succeeded wholly in inducing them to give up many of their crude notions and fantastic beliefs and imageries, and we see . . . the ideas and notions of the semi-barbarous element in the Book of the Dead contending for recognition with the superior and highly moral and spiritual beliefs which it owed to the presence of the Asiatic element in Egypt.” (Budge.)

The oldest form in which the Book of the Dead is known is represented by the Pyramid Texts, that is, texts inscribed on the walls of pyramid burial-chambers and relating to the future life, and its compilation seems to have proceeded slowly and in a singularly piecemeal fashion. During the first three dynasties but one chapter alone has a dim claim to have been written or ‘‘ found ” in the reign of Hesepti, a king of the First Dynasty (see Rubric to chapter Ixiv), though the same chapter from another papyrus—that of Nu, the oldest copy of the Book known on papyrusstates in its Rubric that it was ‘“‘ found ” during the reign of Menkaura of the Fourth Dynasty.

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