Back to the Beginnings (5)

The works of Gerald Massey are, of course, in many respects products of their time.  In particular, of the Egyptology of the time; while Massey's conclusions were not those of the mainstream either then or now, he was still relying on the texts, translations & work on the language then available.  In many passages, the argument depends on now-rejected translations and transliterations, or on getting originally distinct glyphs confused, or has been shown to be nonsense by later discoveries.

For example, owing to the demonisation of Set during the Late Period, many of his names and images were systematically effaced, and it took a while for them to be positively identified. This had the effect that when Egyptologists in the mid nineteenth century were trying to identify which Egyptian deity classical Greek writers were talking about when they used the name "Typhon" (who in Greek myth is the son of Tartarus and Gé, and apparently a personification of destructive powers of nature, either volcanic or atmospheric), some ... mistakes ... were made.  Samuel Sharpe, who also managed to mis-identify an inscription showing the eighteenth-dynasty Aten cult as belonging to the period of Persian rule, in his Egyptian Mythology and Egyptian Christianity (1863) and elsewhere, identified an image of a hippopotamus-goddess, possibly Tawaret or Ipet (the hieroglyphic caption does not match either name: it is consistent with her being "Sheput" (Špwt), mentioned in passing in Budge's Gods of the Egyptians), as "Typhon."  This may have had the knock-on effect of spawning an entire school of speculation.

The main hieroglyphic dictionary and translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead (generally cited as simply Ritual) cited in A Book of the Beginnings and The Natural Genesis was that by Samuel Birch, which was originally published in 1867 as an appendix to a monumental work called Egypt's Place in Universal History by C.K.J Bunsen, occupying a substantial part of the page count of the fifth volume.

The Book of the Dead version translated by Birch is late -- it is a Ptolemaic-era copy of the "Saïte Rescension" which had became more or less standardised during the Late Period.  It is from this copy that the numbering of the first 165 "Chapters" or spells in Egyptological literature derives.  New Kingdom papyri do not follow this order (though chapters are not arranged at hap-hazard and there is evidence of both sequence and thematic grouping).

For Ancient Egypt, Massey also made use of a translation by P. le Page Renouf (mainly based on New Kingdom papyri), which had been published by instalments in the Transactions of the Society for Biblical Archaeology from 1892 onwards.  It was unfinished at the time of Renouf's death (1897); the remaining chapters were translated by E. Naville and the whole published in book form in 1904.  Massey also occasionally cites an early edition of E. A. Wallis Budge's translation (first published 1890).  His comments on the Papyrus of Nu seem to miss the point that, while the person for whom the papyrus roll was prepared was quite credibly named for the god of the primæval abyss of water, "the Osiris Nu" referred to that person and not a compound God, and the texts in which that name appeared would be the same if it was the Osiris Nu or the Osiris Ani or the Osirs Bes-n-Mut.

The translation of the Book of Enoch (I Enoch, or Ethiopic Enoch) cited is that by Richard Laurence, first published in 1821 ("revised and enlarged" third edition, 1838).  Chapter numbering in this translation differs slightly from that in the more recently translation by R. H. Charles, a critical text using more manuscript sources than Laurence.

Progress update:

Book of the Beginnings -- proofed / formatted to vol. ii p. 128 (of 684)

Natural Genesis -- current pass at vol. ii. p. 272 (of 535)

Ancient Egypt -- current pass at p. 691 (i.e. a bit over a third of the way through vol. ii).