Explanations or other interesting matter occurring in the manuscripts of the later Empire will be referred to in the notes.
The title in the early copies is the simple one here heading the chapter. In those which begin at the XVIIIth dynasty the title is very like that given for the first chapter. The chief additions are that the deceased person “takes every form that he pleases, plays draughts, and sits in a bower, comes forth as a soul living after death, and that what is done upon earth is glorified.”
[1.] It would be difficult for us to imagine that the very remarkable opening of the chapter is an addition. Yet it is unknown to the primitive recension on the walls of Horhotep’s tomb, though found everywhere else. The texts however which contain it do not agree. “I am He who closeth, and He who openeth, and I am but One.” ‘He who closeth’ is
Tmu, ‘He who openeth’
Unen. As the god who closes and who opens is one and the same, ‘I am but One,’ is a very natural ending of the sentence, and for its sense the whole may appeal to classical, and higher than classical, authority.
“Modo namque Patulcius idem
Et modo sacrifico Clusius ore vocor.”[[25]]