Sit on Osiris’ Chair: Uses, Meanings, and Graphic Forms of ḥmsi҆ in the Pyramid Texts

ḥmsỉ (“to sit”) is a root that occurs frequently in the Pyramid Texts, allowing a quite reliable analysis of both its semantic and graphic value. It is attested almost 200 times in the corpus, and in more than half of the cases the spelling includes an anthropomorphic determinative, although never in its complete form. This aspect appears particularly interesting, considering that in the Pyramid Texts many lexemes are lacking determinatives/taxograms at all, and that especially anthropomorphic ones are totally avoided or barley partially represented. The choice of analysing this lexeme is precisely explained by its relative abundance in the corpus and by the interest it can assume in a lexicographic perspective. Basing on these benchmarks, the paper intends to gather the instances of ḥmsỉ in the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts, in order to: -Examine the meaning and semantic value of the lexeme in different spells. -Analyse all its different graphic forms, trying to suggest possible explanations for the “mutilated” or, better, partially represented glyphs phenomena. -Investigate the lexeme in a diachronic perspective through the comparison with the Middle Kingdom copies of Pyramid Texts spells.