Decoding the Pyramids

THE PYRAMID TEXTS

The king offers an offering! Anubis gives the offering! From the highlands come to thee your thousand young antelope with bowed heads. What a gift!

Anubis gives this offering! Thank you for your thousand loaves! Thank you for your thousand beers! From the palace hall, you sent forth a thousand incenses! Everything pleasant in thy thousand! There are a thousand cattle in your herd! Everything thou eatest you eat in a thousand, on which thy desire is set!

In addition to his work on the Berlin dictionary, Sethe's most significant contribution to Egyptology was an edition of hand-copied hieroglyphs, translations, and commentaries of all texts engraved in pyramids at the time. Sethe's edition has been the foundation of virtually every discussion of the readers of the pyramids: he is, in fact, the one who first named those texts, collectively, 'Pyramidentexten' - Pyramid Texts.

For each verse of the pyramids' texts in Maspero's Les inscriptions des pyramides de Saqqarah, he provided a translation of its meaning based on his understanding of the funerary texts of later ages since there was nothing else with which to compare them. Due to their mysterious nature, Maspero's work was quite subtle, but one which he readily acknowledged was primarily based on intuition derived from extensive studies of ancient Egypt and its religion.