The transmission of the pyramid texts into the Middle Kingdom: Philological aspects of a continuous tradition in Egyptian mortuary literature

This dissertation focuses on the dissemination and use of texts originally used in royal pyramids during the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom. As late as the reign of Unas (ca. 2375-2345 BCE), the prominent priesthood at Memphis undertook the task of fixing these recitations into writing so that they could be transferred onto the walls of the pyramids and thus benefit the deceased king. At the end of the Old Kingdom, however, these texts began appearing in the tombs and coffins of high-status officials and priests of the provinces, who soon integrated these time-honored texts into their ritual practices and mortuary monuments. This dissertation addresses the literary and textual aspects of this process of transmission, focusing on the scribal mechanisms for adapting the royal texts of Memphis to the smaller venues of non-royal tombs and coffins, and the theological speculative movements that transformed the compositions in accordance with local beliefs and ritual practices. It also deals with the transmission of the series of Pyramid Texts of Nut by examining its textual variations (errors and differences) and genealogical relationships. In addition, it focuses on questions of social inequality, access to royal privileges and the transformation of Egyptian society in the third and second millennia BCE. The conclusions of my research demonstrate that the transmission of mortuary literature in the Old and Middle Kingdom operated as an uninterrupted cultural phenomenon that encompassed coexisting streams of transmission and two major bodies of compositions, Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts. In addition, the study validates the degree of adaptability of the Pyramid Texts, a corpus whose heterogeneous characteristics allowed priests and scribes to adapt tradition to new settings by re-arranging texts, preparing new versions, and combining them with novel compositions. This dissertation challenges Egyptology\u27s monolithic understanding of the mortuary texts as a novel invention created in the interest of the crown, and instead pinpoints the origin of these collections in the private oral domain, identifies a wider range of uses for these texts in both royal and private contexts, and emphasizes the relationship of the multiplicity of textual programs with local ritual traditions