Le Livre des Morts dans les tombes

Le chapitre dédié aux versions pariétales du Livre des Morts par S. Einaudi vient de paraître :

S. Einaudi, “The Book of the Dead in Tombs”, in Rita Lucarelli (ed.), Martin Andreas Stadler (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Oxford, 2023, p. 231 sqq.

Abstract : The Book of the Dead spells began to be written on tomb walls in the Eighteenth Dynasty, in accordance with the contemporary increasing diffusion of this corpus of funerary texts. The great majority of tombs (private and royal) decorated with BD spells and/or vignettes are in the Theban necropolis and they date mainly to the Ramesside period (Nineteenth Dynasty in particular). At this time, some spells appear to be especially preferred, such as BD 1, 17, 59, 74, 110, 125, and 146. The presence of BD spells on tomb walls decreased first slowly, toward the end of the Twentieth Dynasty and then, drastically, in the Third Intermediate Period, for which only a few cases are known in the necropolises of Tanis and Saqqara. A sort of “revival” in the use of the Book of the Dead for tomb decoration is attested at Thebes in the Late Period, as an aspect of the tendency to display the archaism typical of the Twenty-fifth to Twenty-sixth Dynasties. In fact, the monumental tombs of the high officials in the Assasif necropolis show numerous BD spells on their walls, often arranged in long sequences that reflect, to a great extent, the canonical Saite recension of the Book of the Dead. The use of BD spells in tombs continued sporadically throughout the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, for which some examples in Atfih, Tuna el-Gebel, Qaw el-Kebir, Akhmim, Hu, and the oases of Siwa and Dakhleh are attested.

Keywords: Theban necropolis, Assasif, Karakhamun, Ramesside Period, Late Period, Nefertari, Padiamenope, Saite recension, Senenmut, Useramun