CHAPTER LXV.
Chapter whereby one cometh forth by day and prevaileth over the adversaries.
Oh thou who shinest forth from the Moon, thou who givest light from the Moon, let me come forth at large amid thy train, let me be revealed as one of those in glory. Let the Tuat be opened for me. Here am I: let me come forth upon this day, and be glorified. Let the glorified ones grant to me that I live and that mine adversaries be brought to me in bonds before the divine Circle; may the Genius of my mother be propitiated thereby, as I rise up upon my feet with a sceptre of gold in my hand, and lop off the limbs. May I rise up, a Babe [from between] the knees of Sothis, when they close together[together].([1])
Notes.
The first part of this chapter is nearly identical with Chapter 2. No copy of it is found in the papyri of the older period. In place of it M. Naville has published a chapter bearing the same title, and which is found in five ancient papyri. These texts however are extremely discordant and corrupt, and in the more difficult, and to us more interesting, passages must have been quite unintelligible to the copyists. The second word, for instance, of line 8 is ri in Ca, the corresponding word is .. ḥtu in Ta, ṭāi in Pb, rāu in Ia and ḥti in Aa. A discrepancy not less violent is encountered after the next three words. The oldest extant form of the chapter is that of Aa, the papyrus of Nebseni; it is also the shortest, and the other forms appear to me to exhibit signs of interpolation. But M. Naville was quite right in taking the text of Ca as his basis for the collation of the texts.
[1.] This whole passage, as it stands, in the MSS. is extremely obscure, and I can only make sense of it by conjecturing that a preposition has been omitted by the copyists.
The knees of a goddess are frequently mentioned in connection with the birth of a divinity. Here the Babe is mentioned (cf. opening of Chapter 42), and the closing of the knees. The word ānḫ, ‘live,’ has for its primitive meaning ‘rise up,’ and it is in this sense that I translate it here.