Carsten Niebuhr Institute Publications – serie

The term canonicity implies the recognition that the domain of literature and of the library is also a cultural and political one, related to various forms of identity formation, maintenance, and change. Scribes and benefactors create canon in as much as they teach, analyse, preserve, promulgate and change canonical texts according to prevailing norms. From early on, texts from the written traditions of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt were accumulated, codified, and to some extent canonised, as various collections developed mainly in the environment of the temple and the palace. These written traditions represent sets of formal and informal cultures that all speak in their own ways of canonicity, normativity, and other forms of cultural expertise. Some forms of literature were used not only in scholarly contexts, but also in political ones, and they served purposes of identity formation. This volume addresses the interrelations between various forms of canon and identity formation in different time periods, genres, regions, and contexts, as well as the application of contemporary conceptions of canon to ancient texts.

This book presents the edition of all known copies of the important Osirian ritual known as The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys, along with an extensive commentary. The main copies are a series of papyri from Tebtunis and Thebes, but excerpts are also preserved on some coffins from Thebes and Akhmim. The papyri from the Tebtunis temple library deposit preserve actual manuals used by the priests for the ritual, whereas the other papyri and the coffins preserve copies of excerpts intended for funerary use by private individuals.

This book presents text editions of three medical texts from ancient and late antique Egypt. Two of the texts, written on the recto and verso of the same papyrus, date to the 14th or 13th century BCE and comprise treatises on ophthalmology and gynecology respectively; the third is a Coptic medical treatise from the 5th or 6th century CE that outlines treatments against a wide variety of ailments.The texts are published in full for the first time, which substantially increases the limited corpus of ancient and late antique medical texts from Egypt. They significantly aid our understanding of the practice of medicine and the conceptualization of disease and treatment in the pre-modern world. The specialized terminology of the treatises also makes them lexicographically valuable, as they present a number of otherwise unattested words.

This second volume of the Fragmentary Osirian Papyri comprises copies of several rituals which were performed in the cult of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. With one exception, the material originated in the Roman Period Temple of Tebtunis in the Fayum.Some of the rituals, like the Great Decree or the Great Ceremonies of Geb, are known from earlier copies, while others, like the Procession Text or the Osiris Figurine Ritual, were only discovered in the course of research for the Fragmentary Osirian Papyri series.The volume concludes with the Mysteries Texts, a group of papyri detailing the rites and recitations assigned to specific dates in the Osirian festival calendar.

The Tebtunis temple library is the only ancient Egyptian temple library of which substantial remains are still preserved. It is by far the richest single source of Egyptian literary texts. This book contains a wide selection of demotic texts from its stores that have never previously been brought together in an edited volume, including a theological treatise; manuals on dream interpretation and one on birth prognosis; several lists of professions, plant life, and titles of cultic treatises; newly discovered fragments of the Great Demotic Book of Wisdom; and an astronomical text.