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

死亡是对人类状况的一个根本挑战，分析对死亡的反应是理解人类文化的基础。反映古埃及人对死亡的反应的最著名的文本来源是《死者之书》：人类最早、最大、最重要的现存宗教经文传统之一，其传播的连续性超过了15个世纪。然而，虽然它的重要性是公认的，但圣经学目前还没有一个全面的模型来理解死亡之书传统是如何在新王国创造或传播的。圣经学者，古典主义者，中世纪学者长期以来一直使用文本批评-其中一个作品的幸存证人之间的共同错误使其传统的重建-分析古代的抄写实践和文本语料在各自领域内的传播。然而，在我的硕士论文之前，对《死亡之书》中的9个咒语进行了文本批评，虽然有几位考古学家从材料语言学的角度考虑了《死亡之书》的手稿制作，但只有一本《新王国死亡之书》的咒语接受了文本批评分析。因此，考古学目前对《新王国亡灵书》的整体文本传统了解甚少，也没有任何经验性的方法来评估个别手稿的文本权威性、代表性或传统背景。这严重削弱了我们解释一个主要的前西方宗教语料库的能力，这是极端的全球遗产的重要性，因为它可以揭示人类宗教的发展，更广泛地说，人类thought.I设计了一个创新的方法，定量和实证分析跨证人语料库的微小文本变化集群的传输。它恢复了可靠的家谱信息，从更短的文本比以前被认为是可能的候选人象形文字考据，允许快速，广泛的采样新王国死亡之书语料库。这打开了一扇大门，为新王国时期的《死亡之书》法术传播快速建立一个基础模型，最终将使《死亡之书》的各个手稿被安全地置于他们的传统中，并将使人们能够对产生和维持这一传统的抄写员实践进行深入细致的欣赏。使用这种新颖的方法，这本身是适合未来使用的领域超越生物学，我的博士研究将提供一个定量的，经验的，迫切需要的基础模型的早期文本传输的古埃及死亡之书。

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.