Walls, Wrappings and Papyrus

Egyptian religious texts survive through an unusually favorable combination of dry climate and durable materials, including hymns carved into temple and tomb walls intended to last indefinitely, and papyri, some of extraordinary length such as funerary texts placed with the dead, preserved by Egypt's arid conditions far better than comparable organic materials generally survive elsewhere in the ancient world, a preservation advantage that gives Egyptian religion an unusually rich textual record compared to some other ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern traditions covered elsewhere in this atlas. This material advantage does not eliminate real interpretive difficulty, however, since much surviving Egyptian religious text was composed for a funerary or temple context assuming considerable prior religious knowledge on the reader's part, meaning modern scholars must reconstruct assumed background context that an ancient Egyptian audience would have taken for granted, a challenge different in kind from, though comparable in difficulty to, the incomplete decipherment problems affecting corpora such as Etruscan religion elsewhere in this atlas. This entry records the corpus as a whole, while individually dated and sourced hymns are catalogued separately where their specific period and context can be established with reasonable confidence.