Buch vom Tage

The ancient Egyptians imagined the circulation of the sun as a journey of the sun god crossing the heavens and the netherworld in his barque, accompanied by a crew of gods. The Books of the Afterlife describe the events of this journey and the creatures encountered by the travellers, as well as various mythological or scientific ideas associated by the Egyptians with these travels. While several compositions describe the nocturnal journey, only one single source reports on the daytime journey: the Book of the Day (Livre du Jour). In the 1940s Alexandre Piankoff presented the first and so far standard edition of the Book of the Day, for which the two versions in the tomb of Ramesses VI provided the textual basis. Further sources were either published incompletely or remained unrecognized, for instance several sarcophagi. Still other sources have been considered to represent the Book of the Day, but their classification remains an issue. This study critically assesses all known sources and presents a new edition based on a revised compilation of texts. On the grounds of his synoptic text edition, the author provides the first German translation of the Book and a philological comment. He re-evaluates cryptographically encoded texts, describes the cosmography and hidden mytho-geography of the Book, and discusses its astronomical conceptions.