CHAPTER CXXIV.
Chapter whereby one cometh to the Divine Circle of Osiris.
My soul buildeth for me a Hall([1]) in Tattu and I flourish in Pu.
My fields are ploughed by those who belong to me: therefore is my palm tree like Amsu.
Abominations, abominations, I eat them not. I abominate filth, I eat it not.
[Peace offerings are my food, by which I am not upset.]
I approach it not with my hands; I tread not upon it with my sandals; for my bread is of the white corn and my beer of the red corn of the Nile.
It is the Sektit boat, or it is the Atit boat, which bringeth them to me, and I feed upon them under the foliage of the Tamarisk.([2])
I know how beautiful are the arms which announce Glory for me([3]) and the white crown which is lifted up by the divine Uræi.
O thou Gate-keeper of him who pacifieth the world, let that be brought to me of which oblations are made, and grant that the floors may be a support for me, and that the glorious god may open to me his arms, and that the company of gods be silent whilst the Hammemit([4]) converse with me.
O thou who guidest the hearts of the gods, protect me and let me have power in heaven among the starry ones.
And every divinity who presenteth himself to me, be he reckoned to the forerunners of Rā: be he reckoned to the forerunners of Light and to the Bright ones who deck the sky amid the Mighty ones.
Let me have my will there of the Bread and Beer with the gods; that I enter through the Sun-disk and come forth through the Divine Pair, that the gods who follow may speak to me, and that Darkness and Night may be terrified before me in Mehit-urit, by the side of him “Who is in his Sanctuary.”
And lo I am here with Osiris. My measure is his measure([5]) among the mighty ones. I speak to him the words of men and I repeat to him the words of gods.
There cometh a glorified one, equipped, who bringeth Maāt to those who love her.
I am the Glorified one and the Equipped. And better equipped am I than any of the Glorified.
Notes.
[1.] Hall
,
[,
, or
ḫent, the πρόναος, πρόδομος, ‘Vorsaal,’ first room of a temple or palace. The sense of harîm which has been ascribed to it in certain texts is entirely erroneous. The temple inscriptions (see Brugsch, Zeitschr., 1875, p. 118, and fol., and Mariette, Denderah, I, 6) leave no doubt on the subject. If there were “ladies of the royal antechamber,” it by no means follows that they were wives or concubines of the king, and hall or antechamber convey a very different idea from that of the most reserved portion of the house.[[110]]
Pictures and inscriptions on mummy cases identify the term mythologically with that portion of the sky whence the first rays of the rising sun are visible.
The mention of the word in the Pyramid Texts (Pepi, I, 672) is in connection with the notion of food,
.
[2.] We have here a repetition of passages to the same effect as in Chapters 53 (A and B) and others. The Pyramid Texts (Teta, 344) have a section nearly identical.
[3.] The arms which announce Glory for me. The clue to the meaning of this passage is to be found in
, which is a relative form implying an antecedent, which can only be “the arms.”
The arms which announce Glory for me are to be explained by the usages of the ancient ritual, which prescribed certain postures or attitudes in the ceremony of
, as in other forms wherein the arms played a great part. These religious ceremonies it must always be remembered, were considered as dramatic representations of what was done in the invisible world.
[4.] The Hammemit,
, or
,
, the generations of human beings yet unborn.
[5.] My measure is his measure. The meaning of
or
can only be inferred from the form
which occurs repeatedly in the great Harris Papyrus and some other documents.
The scribe of the Turin Todtenbuch carelessly omitted the second part of the phrase, and therefore altered the grammatical construction. This is how M. Pierret came to conjecture the sense ‘proclaim,’ which is not suggested by any of the ancient authorities, or even by the later ones. The reading of the Leyden Papyrus T, 16 is identical with that of the oldest papyrus.
[109]. “The amount of this motion by which the equinox travels backward, or retrogrades (as it is called), is per annum an extremely minute quantity, but which, by its continual accumulation from year to year, at last makes itself very palpable, and that in a way highly inconvenient to practical astronomers, by destroying, in the lapse of a moderate number of years, the arrangement of their catalogues of stars, and making it necessary to reconstruct them.” Herschel, Astronomy, chapter 4.
[110]. The
mentioned in the tablet of Pa-shere-en-Ptah are not concubines, as Brugsch and others have thought, but female children, as Birch rightly asserted. Cf. my Hibbert Lectures, p. 79, note. It is the feminine form of
.
There is also another word,
, applied on the walls of tombs to persons (male as well as female) executing certain gymnastic movements.