F. Scalf, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 70, No. 1 (April 2011), pp. 124-126 review...
Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, by David Lorton. Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt by Jan Assmann; David Lorton Review by: Foy Scalf Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 70, No. 1 (April 2011), pp. 124-126 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659041 . Accessed: 16/05/2012 06:27 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
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hundred scribal hands have been identified as respon sible for the more than eight hundred different manu scripts that have been discovered to date;2 hence no explanation is offered for how so many scribes would have made do with so few inkwells. 4. Nor does the author, in adopting the outdated Essene hypothesis, take into account the fact, now widely recognized, that the range of theological per spectives represented in the texts precludes them from having originated with only one of the many groups representing the various strains of Jewish thought in the period represented by the scrolls, which extended from early in the second century b.c. to late in the first century a.d.3
inkwells were found in the scriptorium; and according to M. Broshi (“Inkwells,” in the same publication, p. 375), a grand total of four on the entire site. 2 I purposely use a round number because, owing to the frag mentary nature of many of the texts, estimates of the total number of distinct manuscripts discovered range between eight hundred and nine hundred. The encyclopedia cited in the previous footnote gives the number as “more than eight hundred” (L. H. Schiffman, James C. VanderKam, “Preface,” p. viii). 3 Strangely, the author knows of the existence of the encyclo pedia cited in the two previous notes, but he appears not to have profited from the recognition expressed by some authors of this collective work that the discovered scrolls cannot possibly represent a single theological current and the relatively few scribes who would have set down in writing the documents of such a group. See the discussion in the review cited here above, n. 1, and the quotation there of E. Tov, one of the most important figures in Dead Sea Scrolls research, to the effect that “The scribes who wrote the texts found in the Judean Desert were in a few cases local, but most of them wrote elsewhere in ancient Israel” (p. 830; as becomes clear from perusing the longer discussion on p. 827, “ancient Israel” does not designate the Israelite period but ancient Israel as opposed to modern Israel).
5. I am not an expert myself in this huge field and hence cannot say whether the author’s documentation is adequate or not, but it is perhaps not out of place to cite what appears to be a telltale detail: the author makes reference (p. 24) to an ostracon which is said to prove the existence of a “community” (yaḥad) at Qumran, but he is seemingly unaware of a refutation of the reading proposed in the editio princeps.4 In the very next issue of the journal in which the original claim was made, one of Israel’s leading epigraphers provided a close-up photograph and new hand-copies of the text itself in support of her claim that the word yḥd is not in fact present on the ostracon.5 The original publication is cited as one of five arguments indicating “a strong relationship between the site, the caves, and the Scrolls” (p. 23), but the refutation of the crucial reading goes unmentioned.6 The author has correctly realized that for the scrolls to make sense to a broader audience they must be placed in a plausible historical, cultural, religious, and literary context. He unfortunately has chosen one that is far too narrow to accommodate the multifarious data present in the texts themselves.
4 Frank Moore Cross and Esther Eshel, “Ostraca from Khirbet Qumrân,” Israel Exploration Journal 47 (1997): 17–28 (ostracon no. l). 5 A. Yardeni, “A Draft of a Deed on an Ostracon from Khirbet Qumrân,” Israel Exploration Journal 47 (1997): 233–37. 6 Above, I described the author as “seemingly unaware” of the refutation—the adverb is necessary because, in the presentation of the reading and argument put forward in the editio princeps, one finds the caveat “If their reconstruction is correct . . .” (p. 24). Whatever the basis of this qualification may be, even the readers of a general work deserve to be made more specifically aware of the tenuous nature of a particular argument.
Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt. By Jan Assmann. Translated from the German by David Lorton. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 490 + 7 figs. Reviewed by Foy Scalf, University of Chicago. The work of Jan Assmann, one of the most prolific Egyptologists of our time, has been made increasingly more available to English speakers through the efforts of Cornell University Press (CUP) and their steadfast translator of Egyptology books, David Lorton.1 Death 1 Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (Ithaca, 2001), a translation of Ägypten: Theologie und Frömmigkeit einer frühen Hochkultur (Stuttgart, 1984).
and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, a slightly abridged and updated translation of Tod und Jenseits im alten Ägypten (2001), exhibits the same high standard of quality we have come to expect from past CUP volumes. The present volume straddles the line be tween scholarly tome and advanced student reading. Divided into two parts, “Images of Death” and “Ritu als and Recitations,” the book’s seventeen chapters
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serve as a compendious introduction to how ancient Egyptians approached their mortality as well as their impending immortality. Part one (chaps. 1–9) focuses on the various roles played by death in Egyptian funer ary religion. Part two (chaps. 10–17) addresses the rites, personnel, and literature associated with death. Discussions of the many facets of Egyptian religious mentality will serve well in the classroom for both undergraduates and graduate students, while schol ars and interested readers will find a useful introduc tion along with a plethora of new and noteworthy interpretations. For scholars familiar with Assmann’s previous work, one of the strengths of this book is its attempt to disentangle an issue for which Assmann himself is somewhat responsible. In his 1990 contribution to the Festschrift of Miriam Lichtheim, Assmann pro posed a dichotomy between mortuary texts and fu nerary texts.2 According to his categorization, the former were meant for recitation during rituals as sociated with embalming and burial while the latter were meant to accompany the deceased to the grave and provide him with support in his netherworld journeys. The distinction between mortuary texts and funerary texts, however, cannot be rigorously maintained because texts meant for ritual recitation were often taken to the grave for their religious effec tiveness, while spells originally meant to be employed by the deceased often found their way into the rites accompanying burial. Therefore, English-speaking Egyptologists have used the terms interchangeably. In the present work, Assmann correctly abandons this terminology in favor of “mortuary liturgy” and “mortuary literature,” thereby wisely placing the onus on the noun rather than the descriptor, the function rather than the text (p. 238, original “Totenliturgien” and “Totenliteratur”). In this view, a single papyrus could serve as a mortuary liturgy when recited by a priest, but as mortuary literature when taken to the grave. However, some confusion has resulted from the translation process. To take only two examples, “Totenkult” is translated as “funerary cult” (p. 323), while “Totenspruch” is translated as “mortuary spell” on the same page. Earlier in the text, “Totensprüchen” is translated as “funerary spells” (p. 301). Lorton is not to be forcefully blamed for the lack of consistency, Jan Assmann, “Egyptian Mortuary Liturgies,” in Studies in Egyptology Presented to Miriam Lichtheim, ed. Sarah Israelit-Groll (Jerusalem, 1990), 1:1–3 and n. 2. 2
for it reduces the monotonous repetition of terms in the English translation and only affects those with specialized knowledge in the field. Nevertheless, one must return to the German original when tackling any such terminological issues. Throughout Death and Salvation, Assmann con tinues to build upon his vast store of important publications, yet again bringing to his work a deep background in theoretical literature, especially anthro pology and philosophy. This gives his work a decidedly comparative flair, citing parallels or contrasts with cul tures ancient or modern, Near Eastern or otherwise. He is often bold, proposing ideas that will surely in spire debate among fellow Egyptologists. For exam ple, he claims in the introduction under the section “Death as Culture Generator” that man grapples with the existence of death by creating “an artificial world in which he can live and that is culture” (p. 7). This follows from his thesis that “death is the origin and center of culture,” which the reader meets as the very first sentence of the book (p. 1). Although he is wellversed in cultural theory, it would be no surprise to see Assmann’s supposition garner as much opposition as it does support. Many Egyptologists would likely disagree with Assmann’s statement that “[p]rior to the GraecoRoman Period, there are no traces of shamanism, prophecy, or mysticism in Egypt. All forms of imme diate contact with the divine realm refer to life after death” (p. 78). This old Egyptological opinion had already been contested twenty years ago by Edward Wente and further evidence such as the Letters to the Dead or the ecstatic episode portrayed in the Tale of Wenamun also contradict it.3 Assmann is at his best when explaining the elements of the personality, es pecially the ka as social signifier, being “the vehicle of the vindication that restored the individual’s status as a social person, which had been destroyed by death” (p. 96), an idea that has already found its way into recent scholarly literature.4 As the volume under review is a translation of an earlier work, it is necessary to consider the useful ness of the English edition. Following the layout of the German original, the English edition has its notes placed at the end, which is a tiresome inconvenience Edward Wente, “Mysticism in Pharaonic Egypt?” JNES 41 (July 1982): 161–79. 4 Cf. Mark Smith, Transversing Eternity: Texts for the Afterlife from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt (Oxford, 2009), 6. 3
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for those interested in the sources of Assmann’s di verse insights. While nearly all of the chapters con tain more endnotes in the German version due to abridgement (the exceptions are chapter 5 and the afterword), Lorton has made the information in the English endnotes less cryptic to non-Egyptologists by expanding the abbreviations. The English text has been streamlined by moving translations of several Egyptian passages from the body of the German edi tion to various notes in the English edition. The very useful indexes of sources, divine names, non-Egyptian names, and ancient and modern authors’ names, pres ent in the German volume, have unfortunately been removed from the English edition, being replaced by a simple word index that includes only a random selection of the items found in the more extensive
German indexes. It is surprising to find detailed in dex entries under “mortuary,” but none under “fu nerary” (though “funeral” does occur), despite the latter term’s appearance at least twenty-three times in the text and its critical importance to portions of Assmann’s argumentation.5 It is needless to say that much of Assmann’s Egyp tological work has become required reading, and Death and Salvation will be no exception. Contro versial, insightful, incredibly informed, and in constant contact with the primary textual material, this volume will continue to inspire discussion for years to come.
E.g., as a descriptor for rites/rituals/cults (pp. 38, 90, 229, 323), liturgies (pp. 33, 95), etc. 5
Les cultes d’Amon hors de Thèbes: Recherches de géographie religieuse. By Ivan Guermeur. Bibliothèque de l’École des Hautes Études, Sciences Religieuses 123. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Pp. xi + 634 + 22 pls. Reviewed by Foy Scalf, University of Chicago. Derived from his 2001 doctoral thesis at l’École Pra tique des Hautes Études, Les cultes d’Amon hors de Thèbes by Ivan Guermeur is a substantial book de signed to stand as a reference volume for Egyptolo gists. With a preface by Christiane Zivie-Coche and a postface by Jean Yoyotte, the volume under review has clearly found favor with Guermeur’s advisors and col leagues. The book is fundamentally a catalog divided into nine sections, each devoted to a geographical region presented without particular order: (1) Mem phite region, (2) Western Delta, (3) Central Delta, (4) Eastern Delta, (5) Upper Egypt, (6) Middle Egypt, (7) Deserts, (8) Lower Nubia, and (9) Upper Nubia. Within these nine sections, there are forty-seven chap ters corresponding to attested cults of Amun in each of these broader regions, identified by toponyms or cult designations (e.g., ʾImn ḫnty ḥw.wt nṯr.w, ‘Amun, foremost of the temples’). Each chapter begins with a brief introductory section providing a description of the locality and a statement of the cult’s importance, supplemented with bibliography. Guermeur then presents the documen tation for the cult in question, classified by a simple system of abbreviations: DR for royal documents (“documents royaux”), DP for private documents
(“documents privés”), IT for temple inscriptions (“inscriptions provenant des temples”), and IG for geographical inscriptions (“certaines inscriptions géographiques”). Most chapters include a short con clusion summarizing the cult’s temporal range and significant features. Following this catalog there is an essay focused on Amun’s connection to royal power, the development of that power over time, the clergy, and theology. A helpful set of indexes includes royal names, private names, divine names, place names, titles, and sources. Twenty-two plates complete the volume, illustrating several monuments and figures of reference. In his introduction, Guermeur reviews the principal theories about Amun’s development, beginning with Sethe’s foundational work and the ensuing reactions to it.1 As is often the case in studying the ancient world, students may be surprised at how little we know about such an important figure in the Egyptian pantheon as Amun, especially regarding his origins and eventual eminence as a so-called “imperial divinity.” Guermeur Kurt Sethe, Amun und die acht Urgötter von Hermopolis: Eine Untersuchung über Ursprung und Wesen des ägyptischen Götterkönigs, Abhandlungen der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse Jahrg. 4 (Berlin, 1929). 1
