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.