The Dawning Moon of the Mind: Unlocking the Pyramid Texts

"This is probably my favourite book of the bunch. It may also be the most controversial. The Pyramid Texts are hieroglyphic inscriptions that appear on the walls of a small, Old Kingdom tomb erected around 2000 BCE in Saqqara. The script is Middle Egyptian, but the story that it tells may actually be much older. According to Brind Morrow, the Pyramid Texts are altogether the oldest surviving body of writing on religious philosophy in the world. The tomb itself was opened in 1880. The text was ignored for quite a while, and then people started to translate it. The results were not great. Through the 20th century, Egyptologists have attempted to translate the Pyramid Texts and Brind Morrow found all of these efforts unsatisfying, some markedly so. She also identified a bias in existing translations where translators presuppose that the writers of the Pyramid Texts were not very sophisticated, and conclude that this was a primitive document. That bias gave them a lot of room to set the bar very low for the author of the Pyramid Texts. It gave them a lot of room to leave a lot of gibberish in their translation. Another way to put it might be that they didn’t ask very much of themselves as translators. Having found a number of absurdities in the various translations, she decided to take it on herself. She’s trained as a classicist, but she lived in Egypt for quite a while and she has expertise in Egyptology. She’s also a poet, so she’s got a sense of how poetic verses work. One of the first things she noticed in looking at the Pyramid Texts is that there are a series of separations that appear, so that the hieroglyphs seem to be grouped. She sees this as evidence of versification, that each group represents one verse in a long poem. The whole assemblage seems to be a sequence of prayers. What’s happening is that Unis, the dead person whose tomb this is, needs to leave his body. To do so, he needs to utter a set of prayers, and these are on the walls of the tomb. The idea is to move his spirit out of its bodily encasing and elevate it into the sky where it will live on as a star. So there’s this stepwise progression of his spirit that he’s supposed to go through and the text narrates that process in highly symbolic form. I looked into the Pyramid Texts after I read The Dawning Moon of the Mind . And I found myself agreeing with her about the state of the Pyramid Texts before she took them on. The older translations also struck me as absurd. I was surprised by the gibberish, too. It’s important to bear in mind, though, that because this is a very old text, it’s going to be very, very hard to capture just what it says. It starts so absurdly in the traditional version, where there’s the suggestion that a baboon is using its penis to open either the roof of the temple or the vault of the heavens or both at once. It’s unclear what’s going on. Brind Morrow reinterprets this wild scene by making it sensible. As she explores the signs, she finds a story of what’s going on in the sky, what constellations might be visible. She links this to what we know about the progress of the spirit in the afterlife in ancient Egyptian religion. Unfortunately this is where her own translation gets controversial. Not everybody agrees about how ancient Egyptians looked at the sky and what they might or might not have seen in it. What looks like Orion to me might be part of another constellation entirely to an ancient observer of the skies, even one standing, by some time-travel mechanism, right beside me tonight in my backyard, never mind thousands of miles away, thousands of years ago. So, her translation has a little bit of ambiguity, because we ourselves are not too clear about what was in that particular sky at that precise moment and what would have been noticeable, or salient, to the people producing this body of texts. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . That said, her debridement of the traditional version of the Pyramid Texts has resulted in something quite beautiful and powerful. The translation has an authority that certainly speaks to me. And the text itself is so important that it should be translated as clearly as possible. I see it as being in the same class as other traditional religious texts. The Tibetan Book of the Dead comes to mind, but also, actually, Kübler-Ross on the stages of grief . In both of those texts, a death produces a moment where it’s necessary to exist in a state of heightened alertness, when one must behave in a ritual fashion and treat the dead person in a ritual fashion as well, taking care to observe all the elements of the ritual in the right order and so on. That’s certainly the case in the Pyramid Texts. There’s something very comforting about that, I think, it’s one of the things that I find so helpful about Susan’s book. I don’t read it as a set of instructions for a dead person so much as a set of meditations for someone who is bereaved . From that point of view, it becomes a wonderful poem of solace, because the stepwise movement from grief and loss to transcendence is so carefully laid out. Certainly it’s being filtered through ancient Egyptian beliefs about life and death, and this alone may make it kind of foreign, but for a grieving person who is willing to read the text a little slant, as Emily Dickinson suggested, it may be a source of comfort. There are other Old Kingdom texts—hymns and songs. Volumes of ancient Egyptian myths and legends are available in translation as well. It’s not all government decrees, like the text on the Rosetta Stone. There really is a lot of more culturally relevant material. But, certainly, the Pyramid Texts are very, very special. In your question I think is a suggestion, which I appreciate, that we are in great need of solace ourselves, living through a global pandemic and with authoritarianism on the march again in so many places. Champollion also lived through some tumultuous times, politically and culturally. But it’s important to point out that his tongue was firmly in his cheek every single moment. Certainly, he found solace in this ancient grammar, but I think also in that statement, he is recognizing how distant from present concerns this study of ancient Egyptian really was. It was something that was absolutely central to his life, but whole governments were being overthrown around him, and he played a role in those revolts, nearly losing his life on at least one occasion. He is a man of the world as well as a scholar. So when he says that, I think he’s speaking to both sides of himself."