Studies in Ancient Egyptian Funerary Literature, (Hardcover)

Ancient Egyptian funerary literature encompasses a complex, dynamic, and open group of texts and images selected to be deposited in mortuary settings. Despite this shared final purpose, they derive from a variety of spheres of origin (ritual, apotropaic, medical, legal) and can be concurrently used in different contexts. They further exhibit a semantic density and were transmitted across the centuries, and subjected to modifications as they were incorporated into new social, religious, or functional environments. The twenty contributions assembled in this volume have the three-fold objective of: offering new theoretical and methodological perspectives to evaluate the structure, content, and history of these compositions; opening challenging avenues for new interpretations; or presenting novel textual and iconographic sources. With a wide chronological spectrum of topics addressed, the manifold approaches collected here aim to challenge traditional conceptions and procedures of analysis and to introduce new sets of ideas.