The Cannibal Hymn forms a self-standing episode in the ritual anthology that makes up the Pyramid Texts, first appearing in the tomb of Unas at the end of the Fifth Dynasty. Its style and format are characteristic of the oral-recitational poetry of pharaonic Egypt, marked by allusive metaphor and the exploitation of wordplay and homophony in its verbal recreation of a butchery ritual. Christopher Eyre examines the text of the Cannibal Hymn in its performative and cultural context: the detailed mythologization of the sacrificial process in this hymn poses key questions about the nature of rites of passage and rituals of sacrifice in Egypt, and in particular about the mobilization of oral accompaniment to ritual actions.

The Pyramid Texts were funerary inscriptions that were written on the walls of the early Ancient Egyptian pyramids at Sakkara. These date back to the fifth and sixth dynasties, approximately the years 2350-2175 B.C.E. However, because of extensive internal evidence, it is believed that they were composed much earlier, circa 3000 B.C.E. The Pyramid Texts are, therefore, essentially the oldest sacred texts known. Samuel Mercer was the first to produce a complete English translation. This is Volume 1 of a 4 Volume set. This particular volume, apart from the Preface and Introduction, contains the actual verses of the Pyramid texts. Volumes 2-4 contained all the commentary by Mercer and others, and are very hard to come by, so I don't think they will be going up on the site anytime soon.

The Pyramid Texts are the oldest body of extant literature from ancient Egypt. First carved on the walls of the burial chambers in the pyramids of kings and queens of the Old Kingdom, they provide the earliest comprehensive view of the way in which the ancient Egyptians understood the structure of the universe, the role of the gods, and the fate of human beings after death. Their importance lies in their antiquity and in their endurance throughout the entire intellectual history of ancient Egypt. This volume contains the complete translation of the Pyramid Texts, including new texts recently discovered and published. It incorporates full restorations and readings indicated by post-Old Kingdom copies of the texts and is the first translation that presents the texts in the order in which they were meant to be read in each of the original sources.

'Man perishes; his corpse turns to dust; all his relatives pass away. But writings make him remembered' In ancient Egypt, words had magical power. Inscribed on tombs and temple walls, coffins and statues, or inked onto papyri, hieroglyphs give us a unique insight into the life of the Egyptian mind. Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson has freshly translated a rich and diverse range of ancient Egyptian writings into modern English, including tales of shipwreck and wonder, obelisk inscriptions, mortuary spells, funeral hymns, songs, satires and advice on life from a pharaoh to his son. Spanning over two millennia, this is the essential guide to a complex, sophisticated culture. Translated with an Introduction by Toby Wilkinson

Middle Egyptian introduces the reader to the writing system of ancient Egypt and the language of hieroglyphic texts. It contains twenty-six lessons, exercises (with answers), a list of hieroglyphic signs, and a dictionary. It also includes a series of twenty-six essays on the most important aspects of ancient Egyptian history, society, religion, literature, and language. Grammar lessons and cultural essays allows users not only to read hieroglyphic texts but also to understand them, providing the foundation for understanding texts on monuments and reading great works of ancient Egyptian literature. This third edition is revised and reorganized, particularly in its approach to the verbal system, based on recent advances in understanding the language. Illustrations enhance the discussions, and an index of references has been added. These changes and additions provide a complete and up-to-date grammatical description of the classical language of ancient Egypt for specialists in linguistics and other fields.

This book is the first complete edition of a hieratic-demotic papyrus preserved to this day in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The papyrus dates back to the middle of the second century B.C. and contains a minute discription of a considerable part of the embalming and burial rites of the Apis, the sacred bull of the Egyptians. The Vienna papyrus is the only authentic document to give a coherent picture of the course of events during the embalming of the holy animal, adding substantially to what we know already from the Serapeum stelae and the classical writers. The book comprises a general introduction, a translation with commentary, an annotated transcription, a glossary, several indexes and photos of the text.

Colliding with and confronting The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair's Cannibal explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile. She evokes a home no longer accessible and a body at times uninhabitable, often mirrored by a hybrid Eve/Caliban figure. Blooming with intense lyricism and fertile imagery, these full-blooded poems are elegant, mythic, and intricately woven. Here the female body is a dark landscape; the female body is cannibal. Sinclair shocks and delights her readers with her willingness to disorient and provoke, creating a multitextured collage of beautiful and explosive poems.

The ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts form a corpus of ritual spells written on the inside of coffins from the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000-1650 BCE). Thus accompanying the deceased in a very concrete sense, the spells are part of a long Egyptian tradition of equipping the dead with ritual texts ensuring the transition from the state of a living human being to that of a deceased ancestor. The texts present a view of death as entailing threats to the function of the body, often conceptualised as bodily fragmentation or dysfunction. In the transformation of the deceased, the restoration of these bodily dysfunctions is of paramount importance, and the texts provide detailed accounts of the ritual empowerment of the body to achieve this goal. Seen from this perspective, the Coffin Texts provide a rich material for studying ancient Egyptian conceptions of the body by providing insights into the underlying structure of the body as a whole and the proper function of individual part of the body as seen by the ancient Egyptians. Drawing on a theoretical framework from cognitive linguistics and phenomenological anthropology, Breathing Flesh presents an analysis of the conceptualisation of the human body and its individual parts in the ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts. From this starting point, more overarching concepts and cultural models are discussed, including the ritual conceptualisation of the acquisition and use of powerful substances such as "magic", and the role of fertility and procreation in ancient Egyptian mortuary conceptions.

A radical reinterpretation of the Pyramid Texts as shamanic mystical wisdom rather than funerary rituals • Reveals the mystical nature of Egyptian civilization denied by orthodox Egyptologists • Examines the similarity between the pharaoh’s afterlife voyage and shamanic journeying • Shows shamanism to be the foundation of the Egyptian mystical tradition To the Greek philosophers and other peoples of the ancient world, Egypt was regarded as the home of a profound mystical wisdom. While there are many today who still share that view, the consensus of most Egyptologists is that no evidence exists that Egypt possessed any mystical tradition whatsoever. Jeremy Naydler’s radical reinterpretation of the Pyramid Texts--the earliest body of religious literature to have survived from ancient Egypt--places these documents into the ritual context in which they belong. Until now, the Pyramid Texts have been viewed primarily as royal funerary texts that were used in the liturgy of the dead pharaoh or to aid him in his afterlife journey. This emphasis on funerary interpretation has served only to externalize what were actually experiences of the living, not the dead, king. In order to understand the character and significance of the extreme psychological states the pharaoh experienced--states often involving perilous encounters with alternate realities--we need to approach them as spiritual and religious phenomena that reveal the extraordinary possibilities of human consciousness. It is the shamanic spiritual tradition, argues Naydler, that is the undercurrent of the Pyramid Texts and that holds the key to understanding both the true nature of these experiences and the basis of ancient Egyptian mysticism.

This study examines aspects of Seth which suggest that throughout Egyptian history he was continually worshipped and indeed, at times, enjoyed some prominence, notably in the Pre- and early-Dynastic periods, during the Hyksos interlude of the Second Intermediate Period and during the Ramesside era of the 19th and 20th Dynasties. Whilst previous authors have devoted some scholarship to these various aspects of Seth there have been very few attempts to bring all these together and to demonstrate that rather than being something of an 'outsider' to the Egyptian pantheon, he actually had an important role within it, and as such was continually worshipped throughout ancient Egyptian history. In sum, the author examines the role of Seth as he was perceived by the Ancient Egyptians at specific times throughout their history. To achieve this aim a chronological approach is taken beginning with Seth's role in Predynastic Egyptian religion and then progressing through the early Dynastic and Old Kingdom, the FirstIntermediate period and the Middle Kingdom, the Second Intermediate Period, the New Kingdom, the Third Intermediate Period, the Late Period, and culminating with the Graeco-Roman Period up to the death of Cleopatra.