5-Week SASA Reading Group: The Pyramid Texts: The Earliest Ancient Egyptian Rituals

In this course, we will read selections from the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts — the oldest religious literature in the world and the foundation of the long history of Egyptian mortuary texts. The Pyramid Texts are inscribed on the walls of the tomb chambers in the royal pyramids of the Fifth Dynasty and record the spoken utterances of Old Kingdom rituals. Although the overall corpus of the Pyramid Texts is large, many of the individual texts are quite short, just a few clauses, and so multiple texts could be discussed in one week — this is important, as some texts will express the same ideas in different ways, while others will present wildly different and seemingly incompatible beliefs. We will discuss how to interpret the often enigmatic texts in order to understand not only the beliefs and myths that underlie them, but also how the rituals functioned to ensure the…