Textualization as Cultural Heritage: The Case of the Pyramid Texts

In linguistic anthropology the notion of ‘text’ has been widely discussed during the last century, and particular attention has been given to the locally defined social context and the historical dimension in which a text can be produced and received (Hanks 1989). A distinctive case study in the topic of ‘textualization’ is offered by ancient Egyptian funerary corpora, written in hieroglyphic script, that represented a fundamental instrument for the preservation of cultural memory. We here focus on a specific corpus, the Pyramid Texts, dated to the end of the Third Millennium BC that, after its original use in the royal pyramids, starts spreading in private contexts at the beginning of the Second Millennium BC. Thinking of ‘textualization’ as the circumstance when a text comes into existence, or “how a work of verbal art may become a literary text” (Engler 1991), the advent of the Pyramid Texts during the Old Kingdom represents a crucial moment for the writing-history of Egypt, monumentalizing a ritual script and transforming it into a “permanent, ideational representation” (Hays 2012). Such an interpretation of the corpus depends on its own nature consisting of graphic signs (markers) used as performative icons. This feature of the inscriptions is not a bare formal aspect, but rather the materialization of the creative word; we are dealing with a preliminary step in the growth of the concept of “text” (according to its nature connected with the librarian culture: Assmann 1997), because the result of the process is not a textual tradition, but an “effective” writing. At the end of the Old Kingdom several sequences of Pyramid formulas appear on Middle Kingdom coffins and the high degree of adaptation of this corpus produces a variegation of textual patterns, generating innovative graphic and semantic forms, fitting into new contexts. This presentation intends to introduce the Ca’ Foscari Venezia - Istituto per l’Oriente C.A. Nallino joined project for an Ancient Egyptian / Italian Dictionary, especially based on Pyramid and Coffin Texts, i.e., the funerary corpus that emerged in the elite burials of the Middle Kingdom (first half of the Second Millennium BC); the two corpora show their potentiality both in conveying a millennial textual tradition and modifying their own shape and structure when a re-(con)textualization is required: medium of this process is the graphic system, which allows us to recognize the use of the writing as meta-language in the construction of the message, as confirmed by the use of some specific categories of signs (above all, the taxograms /determinatives).