The Pyramid Texts

Graduate / Professional

This course consists of fourteen weeks devoted to reading the Old Kingdom corpus of Pyramid Texts written in hieroglyphs. The Pyramid Texts are the oldest religious texts in the world and were inscribed in the internal walls of the pyramids of several pharaohs built in Saqqara. These texts are direct precursors to later mortuary liturgies like the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead. They represent our most important source for the study of religion in the third millennium BCE. This course also functions as an introduction to Old Egyptian, the oldest stage of the ancient Egyptian language. Prior knowledge of Old Egyptian, is therefore, not required. The schedule and list of utterances that we read are tentative and adapt to the pace of the reading sessions and the students’ own interests. Students are encouraged to think critically and propose new interpretations and translations of the texts that we read every day in class. HTBA