Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists Abstracts of Papers

XICE – Abstract of Papers
no distinction has to be made between the document and the physical museum object
(e.g. a papyrus) or the text written on it (e.g. a hieratic Book of the Dead). Frequently,
however, several texts are found together on a single writing surface and then it must
be decided whether these all should become individual records or not.
In defining what constitutes a document or book (and thus should become a
separate record), our approach has been to put material aspects central: in principle all
texts written on what was in antiquity a physically separate writing surface belong
together and form one document, unless there are good reasons to believe that the
only (and unintended) relation between the texts is the writing surface itself. In other
words, only in the case of “unrelated” reuse of the writing surface will texts written on
the same material object be split up over various records. While this admittedly leaves
some room for interpretation, the definition to a large extent aligns with current
papyrological and epigraphic usage, and only poses problems for temple texts.
An entirely different but perhaps even more important problem is that of our
dependence upon what has been called “the vicissitudes of discovery and
preservation”. To quantify chronological fluctuations in language use in the Graeco-
Roman period, we would prefer to use the actual number of documents written. That
number is unknown to us, however, and was certainly higher than the number of
documents preserved, which in turn will be higher than the number of documents
published, which in turn will be higher than the number of documents which are
exactly dated. Since we have to work with figures for this last category, these various
interferences need to be examined in detail.
The role of Osiris in the mythological cycle devised around Heracleopolis Magna
Lucía Elena Díaz-Iglesias Llanos
In the sources of ancient Egypt, a constant process of actualization of mythological
contents can be established by means of the introduction, change or preferential use of
some themes over others. It is inside this ongoing process that we frame the
development of the mythological cycle of Heracleopolis Magna starting from the
Heracleopolitan Period. It results in the creation of a new image of the city in the
mythical sphere, possibly promoted from the circles of royal and religious power. The
new imagery can be traced in the written documents of this period and those which
follow. They contrast sharply with those stemming from the Old Kingdom, above all
the Pyramid Texts, where it is remarkable the absence of mythemes that use any of
the elements in the Heracleopolitan territory as a frame of reference for the
mythological arguments that are introduced in the utterances. However, they are
integrated from the Heracleopolitan Period onwards, especially in compositions of
funerary and religious nature (Coffin Texts and Book for Going Forth by Day;
hymns) on which our discussion is based.
Three factors give us the clue for the interpretation of the mythemes: the main
characters at stake, the spatial contexts and the actions or situations envisaged.
� As regards the first factor, the sources highlight the role played by the local god
Heryshef and three of the most prestigious figures of the pantheon: Re, Osiris and
Horus.
� Concerning the second point, these characters are related with the following local
landmarks: the capital itself, the lake/s of Heryshef’s temple, a place of cult of a
local form of Osiris called Naref, connected with a necropolis in the nome;
67