Recontextualize – the Pyramid Texts ‘Serpent Spells’ in the Saite Contexts

Author: Ramadan B. Hussein | Pages: 273–290

Abstract

The genre of ‘apotropaic’ texts against snakes and inimical beings is first attested in King Unas’s corpus of Pyramid Texts. In his classification of the Pyramid Texts genres, J. Osing distinguished two different groups of ‘Serpent Spells’: Group A1 (PT 226–243), which appears on the west wall of Unas’s burial chamber, and Group A2 (PT 276–299) on the east wall of the antechamber. It is noteworthy that these ‘Serpent Spells’ are generative in character, for new spells were added to the corpus ever since. The foregoing study traces the main traits of Group A1 as a building block as well as its role in the production of the overall meaning of the compositions of funerary texts in the Saite shaft-tombs. This building block was subject to major editorial activities by textuists in the Middle Kingdom and the Saite Period. When integrated in the corpus of the Coffin Texts, Group A1 underwent an interpretive including a fluid process of re-ordering of its spells (producing a substantial number of sequences that bear no affinities to earlier ones) and addition of the title rȝ n ḫsf rrk m ẖrt-nṯr (revealing a layer of the Group’s true meaning). In particular, the Saite texuists relied on the watery landscape metaphors and references to Ra in the language of Group A1 spells in order to signify the mythological struggle between Ra and app, of a cosmogonic meaning. It is clear that this Group was elevated from an ‘ancillary’, ‘independent’ genre in the Old Kingdom pyramids to a principal building block in the Saite compositions. However, further research on these mechanisms is still needed.

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