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Book of the Dead [39]: From Shouting to Structure. By Joris F. Borghouts. Stuthen zum Altägyptischen Totenbuch, vol. 10. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2007. Pp. 110. euro40 (paper).
This monograph is devoted to a detailed study of Spell 39 of the Book of the Dead and includes a translation of the spell with copious notes to justify the author's readings, a lengthy commentary on the text of the spell and its meaning, a short discussion on the vignettes of the spell, a discussion on serpents as adversaries of the sun god Re in the great cosmic struggle of order over chaos, and a synoptic transcription of the texts for this spell from six different documents.
The author has observed that the large resurgence of interest in the Book of the Dead has generally focused on broader issues pertaining to the topic rather than on in-depth studies of individual spells, and his contribution to the study of Spell 39 is welcome because it contains a wealth of information. Since Spell 39 is focused on the struggle between Apophis and Re, and since the author states that the current study is a precursor to a larger monograph on Apophis, his expertise on the large topic of serpents as adversaries of Re is readily apparent. Unfortunately, his study is also plagued with many problems, not the least of which is a fundamental lack of coherent organization.
With regard to the text of the spell, the monograph contains no photographic facsimiles but rather relies entirely on transcriptions for six documents: two from Dynasty 18, one from the Ramesside era, one from Dynasty 21, and two from the Late Period (one Saite and the other Ptolemaic). With my own interests focused on Books of the Dead produced during the Late Period (LP), I closely examined the transcriptions of only the two LP documents; I found numerous errors. Many of these are minor in nature, but others are more serious. To list each individual error is beyond the scope of this review, and since both LP documents have been published elsewhere, there is no need to cite every mistake. Examples of minor mistakes are as follows: signs rendered in the wrong order (e.g., location of the book-roll for the last word in...