Synopsis
Among the many scenes and texts that occur for the first time in the Nineteenth Dynasty cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos is a representation of the awakening of Osiris by Horus, which appears directly beneath a vignette depicting the transit of the solar barques. The annotations to this bi-partite tableau appear in a mixture of standard, hieroglyphic Egyptian and cryptographic scripts. Similar groups of scenes and texts occur in the Twentieth Dynasty royal tombs of Ramesses VI (KV9) and Ramesses IX (KV6), the Twenty-Second Dynasty tomb of Sheshonq III at Tanis (NRT5), and the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty private tomb of Mutirdis at Thebes (TT410). In addition, significant, albeit partial parallels occur on the re-carved, Twenty-Second Dynasty sarcophagus of Psusennes and a Ptolemaic sarcophagus inscribed for a certain Khaf. This study offers a summary of the scenes iconography together with the first synoptic edition of the relevant annotations, taking into account all currently published exemplars. Many of the cryptographic texts are translated here for the first time, while others receive updated translations and expanded analyses. The author also considers the meaning and context of the paired scenes in royal and private monuments, in order to demonstrate the status of the bi-partite tableau as a unified composition. This composition is identified as a concise representative of the cosmological genre referred to usually as the Books of the Underworld and Sky.
About the Author
Joshua Aaron Roberson received his Ph.D. in Egyptology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. He has served as a consulting scholar for the Egyptian section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology since 2011 and is employed also as Assistant Professor of History at Camden County College in Blackwood, New Jersey. He has conducted field surveys of royal and private tombs in the Valley of the Kings and el-Asasif necropolis, as well as research on private sarcophagi in the Cairo Museum. In addition, he has worked as a sigillographer for the French-Egyptian expedition to the Opet precinct of Karnak temple, and as a sigillographer and epigrapher for the University of Pennsylvania expeditions to Saqqara and Abydos. His previous monographs include The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth (Wilbour Studies in Egypt and Ancient Western Asia vol. 1, Lockwood Press, Atlanta, 2012); and Le parvis du temple d'Opet a Karnak. Exploration archeologique (2006-2007) (Cairo, 2012), co-authored with Guillaume Charloux, et al.
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