Coffin Texts

Coffin Texts — Breasted 1912 selected English quotations and context — sourcepage 295

TRIUMPH OF OSIRIS 273 are found. The number of such mortuary texts is still constantly increasing as additional coffins from this age are found. Every local coffin-maker was furnished by the priests of his town with copies of these utterances. Before the coffins were put together, the scribes in the maker's employ filled the inner surfaces with pen-and-ink copies of such texts as he had available. It was all done with great carelessness and inaccuracy, the effort being to fill up the planks as fast as possible. They often wrote the same chapter over twice or three times in the same coffin, and in one instance a chapter is found no less than five times in the same coffin.1 1 LACAU, XXII, Rec. 29, 143 ff. These texts as a class are some times designated as the Book of the Dead. As about half of them are taken from the Pyramid Texts, and the Pyramid Texts are sharply distinguished from the Book of the Dead (the former for the use of the king originally, the latter for universal use), it would seem not only incorrect, but also the obliteration of a useful distinc tion to term these Middle Kingdom texts the Book of the Dead. Hence I have for convenience termed them Coffin Texts, a designa tion drawn from the place in which they are found, and thus parallel with the Pyramid Texts. These Coffin Texts have never been col lected and published as a whole. A very valuable collection taken from the coffins in the Cairo Museum has been made and published by LACAU, Textes religieux, Recueil de travaux, vols. 26-27, 28-33. LACAU'S collection is not yet all in print, but it includes eight-six chapters. The character of the Coffin Texts as containing the earliest surviving fragments of the Book of the Dead was first recognized by LEPSIUS, who published the material in the Berlin collection (LEPSIUS, Aelteste Texte des Todtenbuchs, Berlin, 1867), and other texts were later published by BIRCH (Egyptian Texts . . . from the Coffin of Amamu, London, 1886). WILKINSON'S tracing of an Eleventh Dynasty Coffin Text, now lost, was published by BUDGE, Fac similes of Egyptian Hieratic Papyri in the British Museum, London, 1910, pi. xxxix-xlviii, pp. xxi-xxii. A similar body of texts from the sepulchre of the Middle Kingdom tomb of Harhotep was published by MASPERO, Memoires de la Mission arch, au Caire, vol. I, 136-184. A useful statement of the availrble materials will be found by LACAU in his Sarcophages anterieures au Nouvel Empire, I (Catalogue