Studies in Ancient Egyptian Funerary Literature

Ancient Egyptian funerary literature encompasses a complex, dynamic, and

open group of texts and images selected to be deposited in mortuary

settings. Despite this shared final purpose, they derive from a variety

of spheres of origin (ritual, apotropaic, medical, legal) and can be

concurrently used in different contexts. They further exhibit a semantic

density and were transmitted across the centuries, and subjected to

modifications as they were incorporated into new social, religious, or

functional environments.
The twenty contributions assembled

in this volume have the three-fold objective of: offering new

theoretical and methodological perspectives to evaluate the structure,

content, and history of these compositions; opening challenging avenues

for new interpretations; or presenting novel textual and iconographic

sources. With a wide chronological spectrum of topics addressed, the

manifold approaches collected here aim to challenge traditional

conceptions and procedures of analysis and to introduce new sets of

ideas.