Studies on the Vignettes from Chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead

Among the numerous deities in the ancient Egyptian mythology, whose nature and function are still vague and obscure, are mś.w Bdšt – ‘Children of Weakness’. These beings are twice mentioned in the Book of the Dead chapter 17. The text fragments contain two local versions of the myth with mś.w Bdšt – Hermopolitan (Urk. V: Abs. 1), and Heliopolitan (Urk. V: Abs. 22). Since the last text describes the combat between Re and the ‘Children of Weakness’, the same is likely to be reflected on the vignette, which depicts the battle of Re against mś.w Bdšt, metaphorically shown in the form of a serpent. This book is a comprehensive study of the ‘Children of Weakness’ myth and the scene depicting the cat, cutting off the head of the serpent under the branches of the išd-tree found on the number of Book of the Dead chapter 17 vignettes.

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: The scene with the cat, serpent and sacred tree, 19th–21st Dynasties

Chapter 2: Correlation between text and visual image

Chapter 3: Mś.w Bdšt – the sources and the plot

Chapter 4: Mś.w Bdšt in the context of BD 175A, BD 123, CT Sp. 409, pBrooklyn 47.218.84 and the Book of Heavenly Cow – the Cosmogonic myth dénouement

Chapter 5: Mś.w Bdšt in the Book of Gates

Chapter 6: Mś.w Bdšt – the name and the image

Chapter 7: Essence of mś.w Bdšt in the Egyptian world view

Conclusion

Appendix 1: Catalogue of sources

Appendix 2: Selected texts

Abbreviations

Bibliography

Dr Mykola Tarasenko is a Senior Fellow at the A. Yu. Krymskyi Institute of Oriental Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyev. His research area is focused on the studies of illustrative tradition of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, and specifically the vignettes of spell 17. In 2007 he was awarded the fellowship grant of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for the study course at the 'Bonn Book of the Dead Project' (Bonn Totenbuchprojekt). In 2014 he won the fellowship grant of the Stiftungsfonds fur Postgraduates der Agyptologie (Vienna, Austria). The current book is the result of his work within these Fellowships Projects.