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

死亡是对人类生存状态的根本挑战，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亡之书：人类最早、最大和最重要的现存宗教圣经传统之一，其传播的连续性超过了15个世纪。然而，尽管它的重要性得到了很好的认识，但埃及学目前还没有全面的模型来理解死亡之书是如何在新王国被创造或传播的。圣经学者、古典学家和中世纪文学家长期以来一直使用考据批评--在这种情况下，一部作品的幸存证人之间的共性错误使其能够重建其传统--来分析他们领域内的古代圣经实践和文本语料库的传播。然而，在我的硕士论文将考证应用于9本死亡咒语之前，尽管几位埃及学家从材料-语言学的角度考虑了《死亡之书》的手稿制作，但只有一本新王国的死亡咒语得到了文本批评分析。因此，埃及学目前对新王国死亡之书的整体文本传统了解很少，也没有任何经验性的方法来评估单个手稿的文本权威性、代表性或传统背景。这严重削弱了我们解释一个重要的前西方宗教语料库的能力，这个语料库具有极端的全球遗产重要性，因为它可以揭示人类宗教的发展，更广泛地说，它可以揭示人类思想的发展。我设计了一种创新的方法，对证人语料库中一连串微小的文字变化的传播进行定量和实证分析。它从比以前被认为可能的象形文字考据候选文本短得多的文本中恢复可靠的谱系信息，从而允许对新王国死亡之书语料库进行快速、广泛的抽样。这为迅速产生新王国死亡之书咒语传播的基本模式打开了大门，最终将使个人死亡之书手稿被安全地放置在他们的传统中，并将使人们能够深入细致地欣赏产生和维持这一传统的抄写实践。使用这种新的方法论，它本身适合未来在埃及学以外的领域使用，我的博士研究将为古埃及死亡之书的早期文本传播提供一个量化的、实证的和迫切需要的基础模型。

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.