Book of the Dead spell transmission in the 18th and 19th Dynasties: an innovative text-critical approach

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Death being a fundamental challenge to the human condition, analysing responses to it is fundamental to understanding human cultures. The most renowned textual source that reflects ancient Egyptian responses to death is the Book of the Dead: one of humanity's earliest, largest, and most important extant religious scriptural traditions, whose continuity of transmission exceeded fifteen centuries. However, while its importance is well recognized, Egyptology currently has no comprehensive model for understanding how the Book of the Dead tradition was created in the New Kingdom or transmitted.Bible scholars, Classicists, and Medievalists have long used textual criticism-where commonality of error between a work's surviving witnesses enables the reconstruction of its tradition-to analyse ancient scribal practice and textual corpus transmission within their fields. However, prior to my Masters dissertation, which applied textual criticism to 9 Book of the Dead spells, while several Egyptologists had considered Book of the Dead manuscript production from a material-philological perspective, only one New Kingdom Book of the Dead spell had received text-critical analysis. Accordingly, Egyptology currently has very little understanding of the New Kingdom Book of the Dead's overall textual tradition, nor any empirical way to assess an individual such manuscript's textual authoritativeness, representativeness, or traditive context. This seriously undermines our ability to interpret a major pre-western religious corpus that is of extreme global heritage importance for the light it can shed on the development of human religion, and, more broadly, human thought.I have devised an innovative methodology that quantitatively and empirically analyses the transmission of clusters of minor textual changes across a witness corpus. It recovers reliable genealogical information from much shorter texts than had previously been considered possible candidates for hieroglyphic textual criticism, allowing a swift, broad sampling of the New Kingdom Book of the Dead corpus. This has opened the door to rapidly producing a foundational model for New Kingdom Book of the Dead spell transmission that will finally let individual Book of the Dead manuscripts be securely placed within their tradition, and will enable a deeply granular appreciation of the scribal practices that produced and maintained that tradition. Using this novel methodology, which itself is suitable for future use in fields beyond Egyptology, my PhD research shall provide a quantitative, empirical, and urgently-needed foundational model of the early textual transmission of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead.