by   JUAN JOSÉ CASTILLOS

On the 2 and 4 November 2007 more than one hundred people, scholars from several countries, students and lay people with an interest in the civilization of ancient Egypt got together to attend a series of presentations by professional egyptologists who made known their latest original research on a number of very interesting topics. The event took place in the Museum´s large and very comfortable auditorium which has a huge movie theatre kind of screen and the latest technology to make any kind of projection equipment available to the speakers.

This Colloquium did not involve any charges to the speakers or the public and all expenses were covered by the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities (SSEA), of which I am a life member, all this being the result of the efforts over the years of a number of academics at the University of Toronto and now of other Canadian universities, who strive to make sure that this kind of scientific events, as well as lectures, movie nights and other activities, keep alive in the Canadian public a thirst for more information on ancient Egypt.

This was proved by the many questions and comments after almost every paper which led to lively exchanges, although the event was so well organized that the original schedule could be implemented without need for reminders to the speakers, as is usually the case in these meetings.

I was entrusted with making the opening presentation in this Colloquium and I hoped that the organizers´ confidence would not be disappointed, something in what I was finally reassured by the feedback I got later on from attending colleagues.

What follows is my usual report on the major points and comments made by the speakers so that as many people as possible benefit from these brief summaries, which can be amplified or clarified by direct contact with the scholars involved by means of email or regular letters addressed to the institutions where they teach or do research.

J. J. Castillos - Further research on the origin of inequality in early Egypt - So far most of the evidence for the birth and development of inequality in predynastic Egypt has involved studies of the many cemeteries of that age that provide abundant data on the subject and even allow us to determine approximately when these changes in those early communities started to happen on the way to greater social complexity. But it is not wise to dwell on funerary data alone in order to draw conclusions because although in the case of ancient Egypt there is a long history of correlation between the worlds of the living and of the dead, it is desirable to confirm our interpretations with other complementary evidence from the contemporary settlements. Here is where the picture is unfortunately very incomplete since we know very little of predynastic villages and cities, however the little we know compared with evidence from other people at a similar stage of social development in other parts of the world can considerably improve our understanding of the situation in Egypt at the time. The reasons for the changes in social, economic and political organization in early Egypt that brought about the significant step of the appearance of powerful hereditary chiefs have been assigned by scholars in the past to foreign invasion, to something described as oriental despotism, to spontaneous developments due to the need for a centralized government in order to control, rationalize and expand the irrigation, thus assuring the country' s prosperity, to demographic pressure, to growing circumscription and warfare, to other sources and constraints of an ideological nature, none of which appear to be satisfactory to account for the significant changes observed in the archaeological record. The speaker then described his own interpretation that assigns to the activity of ambitious, power hungry and resourceful individuals, called aggrandizers in the modern anthropological literature, the role of social transformers, giving examples of work recently carried out outside Egypt but that could offer useful research guidelines for scholars working in Egyptian predynastic settlement archaeology in order to try to identify such trends and determine how they compare with similar results from elsewhere within the same basic process of change towards greater social complexity. The speaker declared that in his opinion this approach is original and new applied to predynastic Egypt, since he has been unable to find it in papers or books written by his colleagues which he is acquainted with, and it would perhaps be profitable for scholars working in this field to determine how well it accounts for and explains contemporary developments during the Badarian - Naqada transition in Upper Egypt.

T. Schneider, The Herdsman's Dangerous Encounter: a new attempt - In this text a herdsman is very frightened by the appearance of a lady, possibly a goddess, but most other aspects of this story are widely disputed. It is doubtful who speaks and who acts, the herdsman, his pals or the bulls. The herdsman appears to be mainly concerned with taking the herd to a safe place for the night. The ritualists among the herdsmen recite a water spell against the threat of crocodiles. In the morning the goddess, naked and with her hair in disorder, approaches the herdsman and there the story ends. It probably means that the goddess was one of terrible appearance like Sekhmet, who had to be appeased before safety could be achieved. The speaker linked this story with other mythical ones involving such terrifying goddesses and the propitiatory dances and rites that had to be performed to render them harmless. In these other stories with an ending, after those ceremonies the goddess granted her protection to the people before whom she so suddenly appeared. She seems to be a sort of ogress, with long teeth, a mane, in all a frightening appearance that if she was not propitiated devoured human flesh but if the person she encountered succeeded in suckling from one of her breasts, she became his or her protector. This story would reflect the dangers to be encountered in the borders of Egypt, at the edge of the valley or in the desert.

B. Ouellet, In search of methodology: Eliade's hermeneutical approach in the study of ancient Egyptian texts - Eliade wrote at the beginning of The Quest: "It is solely insofar as it will perform this task particularly by making the meanings of religious documents intelligible to the mind of modern man that the science of religions will perform its true cultural function". This presentation had much to do with a paper, The International Eliade by Bryan Rennie. Eliade has been deemed outdated, uninteresting, but a critical study of his work may provide useful leads and an improved Eliadean hermeneutic applied to ancient Egyptian texts. In religious studies the analysis and interpretation of the phenomenon of speech is thoroughly dealt with but in egyptology a similar depth is not usually achieved. According to Eliade the history of religions involves religious manifestations, a fantastic literature and the relationship between writing and religion. Eliade has been criticized for his inadequate references to primary sources and a lack of systematic methodology which led to achieving results that today are deemed to be obsolete. The speaker tried to adapt Eliade's categories applied to ancient Egyptian religion, such as vital power (ankh), the one and the many aspects of the sacred-real, the dialectics between the equilibrium (maat) and perturbation (isfet), the king as an exemplary model of homo religiosus, among others. There is a full circle from maat, neter, isfet which could be defined rather as a spiral involving the different categories. Eliade proposed to introduce into the horizontal historical aspect a vertical element, phenomenology, and the hierophantic aspect of the discourse, avoiding the pitfalls of reductionism and historicism. For instance, the following interpretative outline was suggested: Atum, creative principle, cosmic life force; Maat, cosmic order; Geb, ordered the created world, structured universe; Osiris, political order, inherent life force, this latter manifest in all levels of experience: cosmos, nature, state, human life, immortality.

V. Angenot, Egyptian Semiotics: A deictic indicator in Theban tomb iconography - Her research has to do with how to read an Egyptian sequence of images. The vectoriality, that is, the movement of the eye by the reader when seeing the images in western modern examples goes from left to right and down, back to the left, etc., in ancient Egypt a spiral would best describe the eye movement but also more complex patterns could be identified by the speaker. In order to detect these ancient vectorialities she had to start by studying examples in which the order and sequence of pictures was clear and evident. In one tomb painting, for instance, the reading of the scenes should start at the bottom left, then move left and up and down to reach the opposite bottom right, then back to the bottom left following the lowest register, according to the sequence of the seasons and their activities, then the reading should move up to the top right register and then left, in all, a double spiral. Then the speaker discussed ancient Egyptian semiotics and how certain gestures could mean different things in different contexts. Not feeling inclined to put arrows like in modern signs or comics to show the sequence of pictures, the ancient Egyptians showed this using gestures with different meanings to indicate what actions were to be seen next, her study was mainly concerned with the gesture of the scribe counting with his fingers and the changes and remotivations this image had in the course of the Eighteenth Dynasty with a deictic indication besides its literal meaning. An example from the tomb of Sennefer (TT96A) allowed her to elaborate on the use of this gesture and its implications.

S. Stannish, Akhenaten and monotheism: Differences between the Egyptian Heresy and the Desert Faiths - The images many have of the period of Akhenaten are of fanaticism, disease and imposture. Many modern authors have described his doctrine as unabashedly monotheistic, even Redford who dislikes Akhenaten still described him as a kind of Martin Luther. The ontological separation between the god and his creation, divine agency and the unity of the divine governing the universe are some of the marks of monotheism, while discord and disunity are common in polytheistic doctrines. It does not appear to be wise to describe ancient Egyptian religion as polytheistic or monotheistic since their concepts do not quite fit the notions implied by those modern words, but if we define the traditional religion as polytheistic, Akhenaten's fulfils in some aspects our requirements for monotheism but in others the picture is more muddled since in the persecution of other gods and their presence in temple walls, several gods were spared. But one of the clearest differences between Akhenaten's religion and monotheism is the relationship between the god Aten and his creation, much closer and more in agreement with that which existed between the traditional gods and the world. Akhenaten's religion or heresy did not imply the introduction of a new kind of deity but rather a rejection of some of the earlier rites and beliefs. His doctrine resembles more a kind of pantheism than a monotheism but it would perhaps be wiser to stop using modern categories to describe Akhenaten's religion. A more realistic approach would be to see this heresy as not the product of an isolated and pathological enthusiasm but as part of a trajectory through Egyptian religion.

J. Revez, From Ra to Amen-Ra of Napata: Paradigm shift in solar mythology during the reign of king Aspalta - Rivalry among brothers to access kingship in Napata was not a parallel of the ancient Egyptian practice of making it appear to be a re-enactment of the Horus and Set rivalry to succeed Osiris. In Napata although Osiris and Horus were present, Set was remarkably absent. The Enthronement Stela of king Aspalta discussed in this paper provides much useful information on kingship in Nubian society at the time. This stela depicts the silence of the god Ra on this matter, his role being replaced by the god Amen-Ra. The stela begins with a question of who should be king and the answer is that Ra himself decides who will be enthroned ("He has given it to his son whom he loves because Ra knows that he will make good laws on his throne"). However, Ra remains silent. Then a decision is made to turn to the dynastic god of Kush, Amen-Ra, "he is the one who guides us, ...... let us give praise to him". This is most probably a paradigm shift which implies an ethnic change in which the Nubian version of Ra is the god who decides the issue, that is, the struggles for power among the candidates to the Nubian throne. The option towards Amen-Ra of Napata shows a political and religious change in favour of a local great god instead of Ra, an Egyptian one. In a first attempt the names of the royal brothers were inscribed on ostraca but no decision was made by Amen-Ra, only in a second attempt the name of Aspalta was chosen by the god to be king.

P. Brand, The wars of Seti I in Western Asia: A reassessment of the scale of New Kingdom imperialism - Traditionally Seti I is represented as a great conqueror but this view has been reassessed and this king is now seen as at the most responsible for revitalizing Egyptian rule in Western Asia. The speaker tried to establish what was the scope of Seti I's campaign in Asia represented in temple walls and it becomes clear that rather than a victorious incursion implying even the defeat of the contemporary Hittite army, it was more likely a tour of inspection of the Egyptian possessions at the time. The battle scenes are not all representations of actual battles, only three of them can be considered as such but not including prisoners and spoils taken by his army, they show the king in the attitude of fighting but they are rather scenes of submission by the local kings. At one time Seti I sends the three divisions of his army to take three towns in one day, since the king could not be in three places at the same time, the opposition the Egyptian army faced could not have been very great. The conditions in Western Asia reported by New Kingdom texts as of chaos and unrest may imply that the Egyptian pharaohs did not mind the squabbles and wars among the local kings, as long as the victorious one paid allegiance and tribute to the Egyptian ruler. However, when one of these kings was foolish enough to fight his neighbours when Pharaoh's army was nearby, it gave the Egyptian king a pretext to obtain an easy victory at his expense, of which he could brag later on in his monumental inscriptions. The great kings in the Near East preferred to engage in these petty fights rather than fighting one another, so as to be able to claim a number of easy victories that emphasized the domination of the major power within their hegemonic areas.

S. Katary, Distinguishing sub-classes in New Kingdom society on evidence of the Wilbour Papyrus - Usually government officials, the military, high priests are considered to have been the members of the ancient Egyptian elite. But groups of minor officials, other priests, craftsmen, merchants seem to have been members of a strong middle class at the time.The trend to greater social mobility increased in the New Kingdom and a sort of middle class became more numerous. Where did the middle upper class end and the elite begin? Questions such as this are pertinent but difficult to answer due to the paucity of relevant evidence. However, some texts throw light on these issues, for instance, providing for a number of individual smallholders the size of the plots of land they occupied and their percentage of assessment for taxation purposes. A kind of administrators linked to assessment and taxation and the Deir el Medina workmen qualify for inclusion into this growing middle class, people who could afford a rather comfortable standard of living as well as being able to provide for their afterlife with a tomb and other proper funerary arrangements. The numerous occurrences of a 25% rate of assessment indicate that this was probably a fixed category of people who enjoyed a status that placed them well within such a middle class, among which others such as wab, rwdw, sS, waw deserve more detailed consideration because these words refer to people who occupied a variety of socio-economic niches and which were inter-related accross occupational boundaries. Some of the people who had a higher rate of assessment may have been officials who enjoyed several offices simultaneously. The evidence supports a far greater complexity in ancient Egyptian society than previously assumed and there was a continuity for a long time in the patterns of land tenure.

K. Diamond, dmDyt: The Bone Collector - The feminine term dmDyt apparently refers to a mourning woman. Gardiner thought that it was the feminine of the word dmDw, that is, a crowd, an interpretation that has been accepted by many over the years, but this definition has been shown to be incorrect. It can also be translated as a bone collector, somebody responsible for collecting the bones of the dead (the limbs of Osiris) for the rejuvenation and rebirth of the deceased in the other world. The earliest mention to the best of the speaker's knowledge dates back to the 13th Dynasty and has funerary connotations, although the root dmD can already be found in the Pyramid Texts referring to the collection and assemblage of the limbs of Osiris. It includes a ritual action, an address to the deceased, a procession and food and drink offerings. The singular and plural versions of this word represent two very different things. The former has to do with a woman who performed important funerary actions, the latter is a group of women who participate in other ways in the funerary rites, such as performing ritual dances. Therefore, the dmDyt is not simply a mourner but women who carry out actions which are important for the rebirth of the deceased. In some cases goddesses such as Isis and Nephtys and other deities can be seen performing these functions on behalf of Osiris. In the New Kingdom these women seem to be a survival of earlier Old Kingdom practices of a symbolic nature.

J. Boehmer, Dramatic rituals of transformation in Old Kingdom funerals - Creation itself was a sort of transformation of a primeval unity into a diversified world. Other kinds of transformation were achieved by heka (magic or cosmic energy), enabling the animation of images. It is not surprising then that the transformations that enabled the deceased to be reassembled and reanimated for its rebirth was part of the solar cycle of daily transformations. Although no Old Kingdom source presents the whole funerary process of transformation, attempts have been made to reconstruct it from the partial renderings in contemporary scenes with processions such as "Going from the house of the estate to the beautiful west", these scenes also show the requirements of the craft of the lector priest in the journey from the river to the tomb. The sources also include the Pyramid Texts and the funeral liturgy in Papyrus E of the Ramesseum cache. Then other stages like the journey to Sais, crossing in the Weret boat, conducting the ritual by the lector priest, the sledge journey, the "his flesh is complete", wailings, offerings (feeding the akh and making sakhw by the embalmer), cutting up cattle for the great burial, circulating around the mastaba four times, various recitations and the rituals by the bone collectors. The circling of the tomb may be a ritual of purification or of establishing boundaries in the demarcation of a sacred area, according to inferences made from different sources. The funeral procession was a physical and metaphysical journey during which the body was transformed into an effective akh as it moved from the home of the deceased to his house of eternity.

V. Tobin, Ritual myth in the Pyramid Texts - Ritual myth basically involves two aspects: the actual spoken mythos and the actions that go with it. From the diverse collections of Pyramid Texts a whole body of philosophical statements, religious thought and myth can be inferred, although this was not their main purpose. Their contents are not so much concerned with the process by which the king is reborn for the afterlife but rather with the nature of the monarch and of kingship itself. The king is shown as the one with the legal right to inherit kingship from the gods, thus justifying his exalted status. The goddess Nut in other texts says that the king is her beloved son, that she gives him the two horizons, thus legitimizing his position and establishing that the royal parentage was really divine. In some aspects these myths involve political statements side by side with the religious ones. The dead king is prominent as a great god not as a person or an individual but as an embodiment of kingship. The Pyramid Texts should not be considered as a body of religious thought because they will provide a contradictory and obscure source, but rather as statements of political thought that justified and validated the political system that was created as a result of the unification ofr Upper and Lower Egypt. The Pyramid Texts articulated the distinction between the secular and the sacred, at the same time showing their interdependence, in them creation myth and political myth are so tightly linked that one was not possible without the other.

J. Gee, Fronted adverbials - The speaker remembered an undergraduate paper from his student times bearing the title "The Inca ruins in Yucatan", which said that they did not exist but had a two page footnote showing why. Originally his position was that, as others have said before, fronted adverbials did not exist, but at this time he wanted to elaborate on such a situation, determine if that was really the case and why. The speaker referred to papers published by Polotsky in the second half of the last century as part of his 'standard theory' (replaced nowadays by a body of philological thought that could be called the 'not so standard teory', as Allen so aptly put it) and provided examples from texts such as P. Onch. 3/20-22, P. Setne I 4/1-3, Urk. VI, 63, Chicago Hawara Papyrus I, etc. which seem to show that fronted adverbials not only exist but are in fact quite common, especially in contracts. The speaker could not quite explain this situation and wondered what to do with second tenses if fronted adverbials do exist. He would not go as far as denying that second tenses exist, they do, but still the problem persists. Then the speaker asked the audience for input on this and several exchanges took place but the problem could not be solved.

G. Cruz-Uribe, In search of the elusive demotic graffito: How Christians and Arabs came between me and my mummy - Between January and June of 2007 the speaker carried out a search for demotic graffiti in several regions of Egypt. In the small temple of Isis at Aswan town demotic graffiti were found by the speaker, they were inside the temple, that part was not being used anymore at the time they were written, otherwise it would have implied a blasphemy and a desecration. Graffiti are usually found outside the temples, so to speak, in the public access areas, where pious people left their writings. He could find many more graffiti than had been identified so far (as many as 110) because they are barely noticeable nowadays and many are in areas of the walls which are very hard to reach. Some of these inscriptions refer to the periodic trips that the goddess Isis made to Nubia. Others are a sort of historical documents referring to a conquest of Aswan by the Nubians at the time of the Ptolemies. He also studied at the temple of Isis at Philae graffiti located in the so-called 'Meroitic Chamber' depicting big men with lengthy inscriptions in front of them and also some that were on the roof of this temple. Another found near the floor at the main entrance to the temple tells us that a group of workers from the Edfu temple were ordered to stop work there and come to Aswan to help finish the temple of Isis at Philae. Surprisingly, Griffith left unpublished many who are long and very visible, which can be explained because of his work being based on squeezes rather than on actual personal inspection like the speaker is currently doing. He also found graffiti at the quay where Isis was embarked when making her periodic trips, one is right below the last known hieroglyphic inscription of 394 AD. The speaker also found graffiti in Valley of the Kings tombs, some mentioning the god Set. A real tragedy is that modern restoration work (plastering) has obliterated thousands of graffiti in the Valley of the Kings. He also went to the oases, mainly at Kharga where he found graffiti at Bagawat, with the tantalizing possibility that these were above the current ground level so there could be many more underneath, in areas covered by the sand. Some of these graffiti are difficult to read and seem to have been very roughly scratched on the walls, this could be due to the person standing on a pile of sand at the time which yielded under his weight and made him sink as he wrote. The last known demotic graffito of 452 AD has been recently covered (and thus destroyed !!) by an item of sound and light paraphernalia, the speaker suggested a replacement as the last known demotic graffito but that was no consolation to many of those who learnt the above bad news. In a few words, tourism and pragmatic, careless, exploitation of the ancient past leading to the loss of part of that same past they seek to popularize.

L. Swart, Observations on the status of Theban women in the 21st and 22nd Dynasty - In this period there were significant changes involving an increase in the position and power of women. The highest of these positions were those of profetesses of several gods in Upper Egypt but others such as 'First Great Chief of the Musical Troupe of Amun' are also known, the wives and daughters of the High Priests of Thebes being those who performed such functions, thus strengthening and maintaining the power structure of the Theban bureaucracy and its ruling families. In the early 21st Dynasty we see in contemporary papyri women in a subordinate position, placed behind the male figures, typical of New Kingdom iconography. Later on, family members disappear from these papyri and gender differentiation seems to vanish as well, being both male and female papyri basically the same, implying a more equal treatment for both, the differences being due to affordability rather than to gender. The Theban economy was thriving at the time, probably to a certain extent due to the recycling of the gold stolen from older royal tombs, and therefore this situation can explain the possibility of men and women being able to afford separate funerary papyri. In this period it appears that men and women were each on their own for funerary purposes. In the P. Virginia Museum 54-10 a woman is represented in front of the god Osiris and was depicted twice the size of the god. The king's daughter became the "God's Wife of Amun' in the 22nd Dynasty, showing a peak in this process. But from the 22nd Dynasty onwards we can detect a regression going back to the traditional subordinate position for women, with couples being represented together and the women placed behind the male figure as before. There are, however, some exceptions to this rule and the speaker showed some in which women still appear alone and prominent worshiping gods. The high status of some women was restricted to members of prominent families and was not so widely spread as during the 21st Dynasty.

G. Mumford, Egypt and the incense trade - Frankincense, myrrh, cinnamon, aloe, black pepper, coming from East Africa and South Arabia are some of the valuable commodities that were the object of intense trade all through the pharaonic period in Egypt. Much information on this trade is unfortunately missing, but this paper dealt with that still available. These aromatic products were used for funerary and other religious purposes as well as for medical and other more mundane ones. The speaker made an evaluation of New Kingdom consumption which came to about 6,547 litres per year, or approximately a boatload of such products. Despite the gaps in our knowledge, there is enough evidence since the reign of king Sahure in the Old Kingdom to attest the existence of periodic and regular expeditions to procure these products. Besides the well known sea route to Punt from Red Sea ports, there was another land route from South Arabia along the Red Sea coast towards the Egyptian Delta. Another route through the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia to Asia Minor bypassed the Egyptians as intermediaries for these products. From Late Bronze IIB (19th Egyptian Dynasty) there is an increase in wealth in Canaan and also objects that imply the use of such goods, probably coming from the longer trade route. There is another gap in our knowledge about this trade from the end of the New Kingdom but the continued depiction in iconography of the dedication to gods and the use of these products, it is reasonable to assume that this trade went on although we do not have the evidence for it. Post New Kingdom struggles to control the flow of these goods show the strategic nature and importance of the Jordanian region which was situated at the end of the second route along the Red Sea coast and the wealth of the Nabataean kingdom at Petra underlines the role it played in this trade.

R. Gillam, Egypt, the Bible and some insects - The speaker quoted from the biblical book of Exodus to refer to ancient Egyptian insects mentioned therein. We cannot find many references to insects in ancient Egyptian literature but the Taharqa Stela (Year 6) mentions the favour Amun-Ra showed the king during a great flood in Egypt in which he prevented insects and other vermin such as rats and snakes from causing great destruction. The satire of the trades also refers to some harmful insects and their pernicious actions against humans. Herodotus mentioned the steps the ancient Egyptians had to take to protect themselves from them, although we can notice that they usually affected the lower orders of Egyptian society who were more exposed to them. The references in biblical literature similar to ancient Egyptian sources may be due to oral transmissions or to the fact that texts like the Taharqa Stela may have been read (and translated) to foreign visiting dignitaries as well as to the presence of ancient Egyptian scribes in Western Asiatic locations. If the scribes in Judah were familiar with hieratic, they could have also read references to these insects and their effect on human life in Egypt.

L. Green, Evidence for 'ecstatic' dance in ancient Egypt - Dancing as well as consuming alcoholic beverages and other psychoactive drugs can lead to altered states of consciousness. Dancing was among the earliest forms of communal activity in early civilizations. Sacred dance expresses or enhances spiritual experiences, the speaker tried to identify the movements each one of these dances imply, the contexts in which they appear as well as the continuity or not of such practices through time in ancient Egypt, all which goes beyond the limited time of the presentation and will be the object of future research. In modern Arab dancing of this sort (sufi and dervish) movements of the head and neck cause alterations in the consciousness of those who practice it. These dances can be identified in ancient Egypt as early as tomb 100 at Hierakonpolis (although the author of this report pointed out an earlier example dating back to Naqada I) where figures with extended arms seem to be engaging in dances similar in body attitude to those of the ecstatic Arab dancers of today. A similar situation can be traced back to images of dancers on Naqada II pots. Then the speaker showed images of dancers from the tombs of Baki and Khety at Beni Hassan which seem to be also gyrating and performing dances of the nature we are discussing now. She also mentioned the mww dancers who also seem engaged in a dance designed to induce trance. The depiction of dance in funerary contexts which could be seen by many as disrespectful today, in other contexts can be linked to notions of reconnecting with the forces of birth, or in ancient Egyptian funerary terms, rebirth. The speaker showed as well other ancient Egyptian examples implying different body positions and movements, which she presented as a long list of instances and variations and their presence or absence through time in ancient Egypt, some of these dancers used percussion instruments, which could mean a shared activity in which those who participated in the dance had a similar ecstatic experience.

P. Robinson, Book of the Dead chapters 149 and 150 and their Coffin Text origins - In the past, it has been the practice amongst scholars to concentrate upon single textual elements of this funerary literature, whether they be individual chapters from the Book of the Dead, spells from the Coffin Texts or even utterances from the Old Kingdom royal afterlife texts found in the Pyramid Texts. Now, however, there is a growing realisation that not only the individual elements of these textual passages but also their contexts are important to understand the role and significance of sections of funerary texts, and that these sequences and their contexts are important indicators to help our modern interpretation and understanding of these afterlife texts.These Book of the Dead spells refer to a variety of mounds or cities of demonic forces, gods or divine inhabitants, depicted in vignettes indicating locations perhaps at Thebes and Abydos. For instance, in Coffin Texts 159 and 161 each mound is found in individual spells. This was followed by an attempt by the speaker to try to find instances in the Coffin Texts for each one of these mounds, the results being CT 84, 85, 86, 87, 273, 277, 278, 383, 387, 690, 697, etc., as well as their geographic associations in ancient Egypt. Then he plotted the occurrences of these Coffin Text spells relating them to the position in the coffins (head, front, back, foot, bottom or top) and discussed at length the nature of such spells in each one of these coffins, the part in which they were written and their geographic location. Although we can see, in some cases, cultic or ritual reasons for locating individual mound spells on specific surfaces of particular coffins, for example with CT 383, in many cases however, where we can find a number of examples of individual spells, it is apparent that the actual coffin surface upon which the text is depicted is probably not as important as the locations of other texts may be. Finally, he traced the evolution of these two Book of the Dead spells starting from the Pyramid Texts through the Coffin Texts to the 18th and 19th Dynasty. There seems not to be a specific geographic origin for the text of the mounds spells, they are mostly transformation, knowledge and provisioning spells, and Lisht seems to be the place of origin of the most 'unpleasant' and darker New Kingdom themes and mound descriptions.

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