Completely revised and updated

James P. Allen provides a translation of the oldest corpus of ancient Egyptian religious texts from the six royal pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (ca. 2350–2150 BCE). Allen’s revisions take into account recent advances in the understanding of Egyptian grammar.

Features:

• Sequential translations based on all available sources, including texts newly discovered in the last decade


• Texts numbered according to the most widely used numbering system with new numbers from the latest 2013 concordance


• Translations reflect the primarily atemporal verbal system of Old Egyptian, which conveys the timeless quality that the text’s authors understood the texts to have

James P. Allen is Charles Edwin Wilbour Professor of Egyptology at Brown University and the President of the International Association of Egyptologists.

PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION

“In this book A. offers not only an excellent new translation of the Pyramid Texts, but a wholly fresh presentation of this third millennium corpus of funerary rituals and ‘spells’. … Much in these texts is very archaic, redolent of recondite mythologies; but they are a formidable mental product in both extent and complexity, given their early date. The extensive and complex offering-ritual elements in particular stand in dramatic contrast with the tiny, brief, primitive rites (of Leviticus, for example) in the biblical corpus of over a millennium later. A.’s work will be an invaluable reference-resource for its subject.”
— Kenneth A. Kitchen, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament