Vol. I - The Coptic Orthodox Church

Introduction. xlvii
of Hieroglyphics," which he fully believed he would one day
publish (see p. xlii).
When I had been engaged on this work, officially
and un-
officially, for nearly two years, Birch died, but I continued to write
slips for the concordance to the Theban Recension, and began
to collect words from the Brernner (Rhind) Papyrus (Brit. Mus.
No. 10,188), and other funerary works. It was now quite certain
that the new edition of Birch's "
Dictionary of Hieroglyphics "
could never appear, and my friends advised me to go on collecting
Egyptian words with the view of "
publishing a Vocabulary "
on much the same lines as Pierret's " Vocabulaire." By that time
the slips which I had written amounted to many thousands, and I abandon
the 1
I soon found that the work of arranging them and of
dea 01
, .
incorporating
the new ones consumed a vast amount of time. It was impossible concordance
to continue the work on the scale on which I had begun, and I
* tlle
funerary
foresaw that the task of making a concordance to Egyptian papyri,
literature could not be carried out by any man who could not
devote his whole time to the work.
Between 1888 and 1892 the British Museum acquired
the Papyrus of Ani, the Papyrus of Nu, the Papyrus of Nekht
and other remarkable Codices of the Theban Recension of the
Book of the Dead. The first edition (500 copies) of the Facsimile
of the Papyrus of Ani was sold in less than two years, and
a second and
it became a part of my official work to prepare
more correct edition of the Facsimile and to write the volume Vocabulary to
of English text which was published with it in 1894. I made a JJePapyrosof
Vocabulary to the Egyptian text, but want of space prevented
its inclusion in the volume of English translations. I then began
to make a Vocabulary to the Papyrus of Nu, and in working
through it I was so much impressed with the importance of this
Codex that I decided to publish an edition of the Theban The Papyrus
Recension, and to make it and the Papyrus of Nebseni the principal of Nu -
authorities for the Egyptian text. I have described the Papyrus
of Nu at length elsewhere, 1 and it is only necessary to say here
that it contains 131 Chapters, i.e., more than any other copy 2
of the Book of the Dead now known. The whole papyrus is
carefully written, Nu himself probably having been the scribe.
The father of Nu was called Amen-hetep and his mother Sen-
seneb, and it is probable that she was no other than the lady
Senseneb, the wife of Nebseni the scribe, whose copy of the Book
1
See my Tlw Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, Vol. 1, p. xii. London, 1898.
a The Papyrus of Nebseni contains 77 Chapters.