Chapter V.
Chapter whereby work may not be imposed [upon a person([1])] in the Netherworld.
Here is N. He saith, I am he who raiseth the hand which is motionless, and I come forth at the hour.([2]) I am the living Soul,([3]) and there go before me the longings([4]) of those who bring salutation.([5])
Notes.
This chapter is found in several of the best MSS., but the text is extremely corrupt, and must have become absolutely unintelligible. The Turin text differs greatly from that of the older copies, and the transposition of words clearly shows how little the transcribers understood what they were writing. I follow chiefly the text of Aa, the papyrus of Nebseni.
[1.] These words only occur in the later copies.
is the older reading, but
seems to be the more correct.
[3.] The oldest text must have had simply the ideographic
, Ae gives
Ba, but Pd has
Ḫnemu. The ‘living Soul’ is that of the Sun, whether he is called Râ or Osiris.
[4.] ‘Desires, wishes, loves,’ literally, ‘hearts.’
signifies ‘salute,’ as in Chapter 12, 1, and 14, 1, and
,
(with various other forms) the ‘saluter,’ is the name of the Ape who is seen in the vignettes of the papyri saluting the rising of the sun. See M. Naville’s Todtenbuch, I, plates 21 and 22; the Papyrus of Ani, plate 2; the Todtenbuch of Lepsius, Chapters 16 and 126.
I do not know how far it is correct to illustrate this undoubted origin of the Egyptian name for the Ape, as ‘the saluting one,’ by the following extract of a letter to Cuvier from M. Duvaucelle, about the Siamang apes in the neighbourhood of Bencoolen in Sumatra. “They assemble in numerous troops ... and thus united, they salute the rising and the setting sun with the most terrific cries, which may be heard at the distance of many miles; and which, when near, stun, when they do not frighten. This is the morning call of the mountain Malays, but to the inhabitants of the town, who are unaccustomed to it, it is a most insupportable annoyance.”
In this place of the Book of the Dead the sign
is a mere determinative of the sound aān with the notion of salutation, just as the sign
is a determinative of the sound ȧb with the notion of thirst.
The ‘saluters’ of the rising sun are neither real apes nor men but the “Spirits of the East” who, as we are told in an inscription of the tomb of Rameses VI, “effect the rising of Râ by opening the door at each of the four portals of the eastern horizon of heaven. They it is who light him on both sides, and go forth in advance of him.... And when he arises they turn into six cynocephali.”[[10]]
The Egyptian words in the later texts are
the alternative reading being itself a proof that the difficulty of the text was already felt by some Egyptian scribe.
But if the scribe had consulted the oldest texts accessible in his day, he would probably have seen another way out. Our oldest MS., that of Nebseni, reads,
bes-kuȧ ȧbu ȧāā(n)u, which signify literally, “antecedunt me corda salutantium.” The word
bes is a very common one in pictures representing the introduction of a king or a god into a temple. It is the technical term used in the Tablet of Canopus for the inducting, by the king, of priests into their offices. The subject of this verb is
hearts; an independent word, instead of being the mere determinative of
. The object of the verb is the speaker—
—kuȧ, ‘me,’ as the papyrus Pa reads, like Aa. And it is easy to see how the later text, which is already found in Ax, has been corrupted out of the older.
[10]. Champollion, Notices, tom. II, p. 640.