Egyptian Books of the Netherworld

The project aims at a detailed investigation of the 'Book of Caverns', the youngest and longest of three so called Netherworld Books from the period of the Ancient Egyptian New Kingdom (1550-1070 BCE). These books are designed as a combination of pictures and accompanying texts, not unlike modern comics, and describe in them one of the most influencing ontological elements of pharaonic Egypt: the nocturnal journey of the Sun God through the Netherworld. Topics of the investigation are: the text-critical reconstruction of the transmission of the book, the reconstruction of an urtext, the corpus-specific language form and the cryptographic system underlying some specific text parts, the description of the principles used to visualize the concept of the Netherworld's sphere, as well as the theological concepts described in the book. In some of these topics the Book of Caverns (13th century BCE)will be compared to the two older Netherworld Books, the Amduat (beginning of 15th century BCE) and the Book of Gates (middle of 14th century BCE). The compilation of a text-critical edition of the Book of Caverns is nearly finished.