THE WORLD OF

THE COFFIN TEXTS

PROCEEDINGS OF THE SYMPOSIUM
HELD ON THE OCCASION OF THE
1OOTH BIRTHDAY OF
ADRIAAN DE BUCK
Leiden, December 17-I9, 1992

Edited by

Hnnco WILLEMS

NEDERLANDS INSTITUUT VOOR HET NABIJE OOSTEN

LEIDEN
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A GHOST TOMB AND A TORN PAPYRUS WITH COFFIN TEXTS

AT TURIN
Alessandro Roccati

A ghost tomb, which had been almost lost, has turned up unexpectedly in a museum. It was Prof.
J.J. Clre who once called my attention to two old photographs in the collection of the Turin
Museum. They showed scarcely readable texts about which he knew nothing. On their back the
provenance "Qaw" was recorded, but nothing else was on file in the museum. Meanwhile a few
unlabelled plaster fragments inscribed with remains of cursive texts (i.e. neither hieroglyphic nor
hieratic) had long been on display in a room on the upper floor, but about twenty years ago they
were withdrawn from the exhibit as they did not make much sense to the public. An unforeseen
event has brought new evidence for our understanding of the whole.
During the clearance of the museum's basement a few cloths carrying fragments

of

what

of a wall decoration came to light. Unfortunately they were covered with dirt
and the upper face of the decorated plaster was glued on to the cloth. On they were properly
restored, the traces of inscription could not only be recognized as Coffin Texts, but they moreover
proved to be the originals still shown attached to the plastered wall in the photographs mentioned
above. A detailed study of these (the negatives could not be found) showed the inner aspect of a
chamber, so that the location of the originals on the walls or on the ceiling could be ascertained,
and they have recently been restored accordingly.r Certain though the shape of the original burial
chamber may appear, the search for it on the ground has remained unsuccessful until now. The
provenance from Qaw, where a mission of the museum was active under the guidance of E. Schiaparelli in 1905, is confirmed by several similarities between the reconstructed burial chamber and
the imposing remains of two coffins, recorded to have been dug out in Qaw, which are likely to
belong to an outer and an inner cofhn. Some Coffin Texts written on them have been included in
de Buck's edition as KlT. The owner's name was, however, misread,2 and its correct rendering as
"Henib" suggests that the owner was identical with the occupant of the burial chamber. De Buck in
his edition only speaks of "coffin fragments," without giving the owner's name, which is however
written in bold hieroglyphs on the outer face. Moreover there are characteristic spell sequences of
Coffin Texts3 which appear only on these coffins and on the tomb walls, so that their unity can be
considered as being definitely proved: 390-351-307-...-369 (uniform with B2L, BlC and B2P) are
on a coffin (inner short side). We shall see in a moment that a similar sequence occurs on the
walls of the burial chamber. It may be noted that the parallel coffins from Bersheh are all datable
to the reigns of Sesostris II or Sesostris III,a a dating convenient also for the Qaw texts.
On the left wall of the chamber we notice spells 75-390-351-307-... On the ceiling there
are 335 (left) and ... 154-155 (right); these latter are in retrograde writing. The right wall of the
appeared to be part

'

A. Roccati, in'. Dal Museo al Museo. Passato e futuro del museo egizio di Toino, ed. A.M. Donadoni Roveri (Turin,

H. Steckeweh, Die Filrstengrdber von Qaw (teipzig, 1936), 48, n. 8.

A. Roccati, Oriens Antiquus 13 (1974), 16l-197 and G. Lapp,

ologenkongresses Miinchen IlI, ed. S. Schoske (Hamburg, 1989),269'2'19.

o
E. Doret, BSEG 13 (1989), 50.

in: Akten des v.ierten Internationalen Agyp'

il0

THE WORLD OF THE COFRN TEXTS

chamber was unfinished. On palaeographical grounds there is scarcely a doubt that the plaster fragments also belong to these walls, and that they were picked up from the floor. Finally, some bumt

timber pieces inscribed with a version of spell 335, but without any excavator's indications, are
likely to be all that survives of the lid of the inner coffin. The witness of spell 335 gives again
some indication of a provenance from eaw.s
Due to the lack of externl evidence, all elements, e.g. relating to dating, must be drawn
from internal criteria, such as orrhographic devices: notice rhe writing
-FlN+, w;.r,
a

"f
with the stroke, #. Hr "Horus," the frequency of * wn,6 and the writing
;|N, of wnmi following rather a strange spelling found only in T3Be,8 datable likewise to'itout-ttre middle of
Dynasty XII.
The use of orthography as a dating method reminds me of another Turin coffin which was
excavated at Gebelein and has been extensively published in de Buck's Egyptian Cffin Texts.
From this edition there appear to be many similarities with T3C, princess Aashayt's coffin from
Deir el-Bahari. The archaic shape of G1T has, in general, suggested an early date, and its appearance is indeed rather different from the Qaw Coffin Texts. But, in the light of internal evidence,
we are obliged to admit their contemporaneity. Some thirty years ago I had the opportunity to
study the behaviour of the spellings of the fw-passive conjugation in the literary manuscripts of the
XIIth Dynasty and in the Coffin Texts.e On account of CT II, 394c 116l (not dealt within Jtirgens' recent treatment of spell 162'0), the copy of GIT could not be placed earlier than the
middle of the XIIth Dynasty. Supplementary evidence is given by the spelling w for prothetic l.rl
These observations are confirmed by a further study of the orthographs of the word
!wt,altar,,
namely in CT III, 322h [239].t2
Thus we must admit a discrepancy not in the dating of the actual coffins, but in the age of
their archetypes (or Vorlagen). The basic prototype of GlT might well be ancient,r3 but the actual
copy of GIT cannot be so ancient. Even Jrgens' "stemmakonstruktionen" seem to me without
much weight for a precise dating of the sources, for individual manuscripts might have been in use
throughout different periods. While the Turin cofhn from Gebelein appears to draw on an ancient
tradition - as its similarity with T3C bears out - the Qaw material seems, in general, to belong to a
more recent, probably XIIth Dynasty tradition similar to that of some Bersheh coffins. This does
not mean that the textual corpus available in Middle Egypt was newly created: against this view it
would be enough to recall spells found by a Spanish mission.ra But the material from Middle
Egypt seems more susceptible to change. It frequently includes spells which were later favoured,
e.g. spells 335 or 75, both found at Qaw but unequally attestsd in several places and periods.

***

A. Roccati, BiOr 34 (1977), l'14-175.

See H. Kees, in: Gi)ttinger Totenbuchstudien

'gr
'gr
e

v, 3rb
III,

(Berlin, 1954),4.

t3691.

129h; l36d

12031.

A. Roccati, RSO 39 (1964), 173-179 idem, Oriens Antiquus 6 (1967), 169-180.

'o P. Jrgens, GM 132 (1993), 49-65.
rr A. Roccati, Oriens Aniquus 6 (1967),172; to the instances quoted
there, add CT II, 30f t80yB2L (w|!w) and CT V,

338a

[464]/8lL (lwgrw), two more coffns of the late range.

A. Roccati, in: Drinking in Ancient Societies. History and Culture of Drnl<s in the Ancient Near

12

East, Papers

Symposium Held in Rome, May 17-19, 1990, ed. L. Milano (Padova, 1994), 441-469 (see particularly p. 456).
13
According to H.O. Willems, GM 67 (1983),8l-90.
'a A. Roccati, Oriens Antiquus 13 (1974), 16l-197.

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During my last stay in Qurna I had the opportunity to enter T 240, high on the cliffs around Deir
el-Bahari. The beautiful Turin stela which its owner Meru probably erected at Abydos gives a
precise dating (year 46 of Mentuhotep II) also to the burial. There are again Coffin Texts in its
burial chamber with a rock-hewn sarcophagus which was excavated by the Metropolitan Museum
of Art. The Coffin Texts found here cover a very limited surface (CT VII, 639-r [861] and 59g-i
t8571). This shows again how sparing the early use of such materials was, ancient though they may
be. But they were already available in the new capital of Thebes soon after Egypt's unification.
They look more like a novelty brought by the new court than as a production of the First
Intermediate Period.

Moreover we must surmise that earlier manuscripts should not be considered as standard
copies

of a book text. Each text should work as a discrete entity, as are the texts inside

each

pyramid, and even some Coffin Texts manuscripts such as BlBo.r5 Book making and the multiplication of copies must be envisaged as not antedating the XIIth Dynasty. Therefore careful
parallels to a basic text are suspected to be later products. This is one reason why I cannot believe
that the Kom el-Hisn Coffin Texts brilliantly treated by Silverman belong to a different tradition.r6 In my opinion, their differences result instead from a quite early date, when a written
tradition had not yet been established.
On the contrary, the bulk of XIIth Dynasty Coffin Texts represents a normal medium of
transmission of texts. They mirror a literary background, which followed other common channels,
A good example is the passage drawn from the tale of the shepherd who saw a goddess, which is
found in one Theban coffin.r7 It cannot be excluded that the flourishing of the Coffin Texts
parallels the 'Bltezeit' of the well-known court literature. In spite of their religious meaning, they
may not be the outcome only of temple libraries.
This opinion is again supported by some Turin material which does not go back to the
Middle Kingdom but must be dated to the Ramesside Period. Although the literary climate at the
end of the second millennium was innovative, we know for certain that many New Kingdom texts
go back to Middle Kingdom originals. This remark holds good also of the Coffin Text material, as
we find literal quotations from a Coffin Texts spell in a so-called magical papyrus.
'Magical' papyri, as they are often labelled, are a typical feature of Ramesside material.
What is no longer used for mortuary purposes, comes to light here thanks to practices of which
many of these books, kept in some Ramesside libraries, bear testimony. 'We cannot state that the
texts were used for the same purpose in earlier periods, or that magical practice gave birth to many
Coffin Texts (another known source for Coffin Texts is, of course, the Pyramid Texts). At any
rate, (some) Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts and (some) New Kingdom magical texts may, from
different angles, reflect the evolution of this topic, no less than the Books of the Dead, which are
the natural development of the core of the Coffin Texts and of the Pyramid Texts.
On the other hand, Ramesside magical papyri show extensive book handling, and they are
characterized by the generalization of a proper book script, as hieratic then certainly was. This
difference in layout should not obscure the connection with some Coffin Texts material.
Coffin Texts Spell 249 (CT III, 343a-344) is preserved in a pair of Asyut manuscripts
from one tomb, but its wording becomes clearer through comparison with a passage in Turin papyBrovarski correctly dates to the XIth Dynasty (in Studies in Ancient Egypt, the Aegean and the Sudan,
in Honor of Dows Dunham, ed. W.K. Simpson and W.M. Davis [Boston, 19811,23-25).
D.P. Silverman, in Studies in Egyptology Presented to Miriam Lichtheim II, ed. S.l. Groll (Jerusalem, 1990), 853-

't Which E.
Essays
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876.

't M. citula, GM

29 (1978),21.

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113

numerous fragments by its recto

rus 54065 verso. This papyrus could be easily reconstructed from
handbook for foretelling the
new
which contains the Apops Book,tt and I take its verso to be a
certainly parallels to spell 249 of the
future. on its present page II, lines 2 to 4, some sentences are
changes in some words are due to
Coffin Texts (see fig. l), and it is not evident to me whether the
are discussed by me in an
a renovation of the text by way of a translation. The relevant terms
is the word :Nbd
them
of
article contributed to the studies in honour of J. Leclant. One
read as ' 'document" a term
lmw in the meaning of 'omen,' a substitute of what the CT parallels
Kingdoms'
which had a wide range of meaning during the Old and Middle
text in the light of its Ramesside
Kingdom
I shall now attempt a rendering of this Middle
edition, and it is interestiig to compare it with Barguet's treatment:re

jl
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harm (concerning
I am Thoth who completes (?) your [great ones]. I have brought you without any
and you are right; your Horus "'
you?). I have counteJ you, completed you so that you are healed
that you are complete' Behold Horus'
all those who rejoiced about what I have done ... about it, so
day, of this good and right moment' which'
behold I see thi; good omen of this good hour, of this

will

not lie ...'

Kingdom magic.2. what I did

Some elements of the wording arise once more in Middle
by G. Posener, Provides a
(4),
published
not expect is that that the text of T. Carnarvon II, recto 7
witness to some relationship of this latter'
continuation to the quoted passage.'l It therefore bears
papyrus, and to divinatory practices'
unidentified text to the coffin Texts, to our Ramesside
practice conjecture' This
At the end we have indeed moved from a source discussion to a
a point where I must
research:
of
kind
may hint at the magnitude of the problems involved in this
stop.

,, A. Roccati,
rr

;. ;;r'g"";

20

A. Roccati,

"

493-497 '
See now also Hommages lean Leclant I tgdl:: 1994)'
501:
(Paris,1986)'
Empire
du
Moyen
gyptiens
sarcophages
Les textes des
(turin. 1970)' 28'
papiro
54003. Estaui magici e rituali del pimo Medio Regno
BSEG

7 (1982),91-94.
ieratico

(Geneva' 19'16)' 143 and

G. Posener, L'enseignement loyaliste

pl II'

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