"It is filled with an assortment": The Transmission of the Instruction of Ani and the Instruction of Amenemope

Twiston-Davies, H (2018) "It is filled with an assortment": The Transmission of the Instruction of Ani and the Instruction of Amenemope. PhD thesis, University of Liverpool.

Text 200515010_Sep2017.pdf - Unspecified Download (9MB)

Abstract

This thesis examines the textual traditions of two Late Egyptian wisdom texts: the Instruction of Amenemope and the Instruction of Ani. It hypothesises the scribal process of copying through text-critical techniques, and from the perspective of ‘Material Philology’. It does not attempt to create a stemma codicum or to reconstruct an Urtext, but considers the possible role of dictation and visual copying, in transmission, and how significant variations between manuscripts arose. The incidence of obvious textual corruption is not high, ‘aural’ error is not significantly more frequent than visual error. Since aural errors can occur even in copying visually, visual copying is determined to be the more likely method of transmission. Copying errors are found to occur slightly more frequently toward the bottom of each page in p. Boulaq IV, suggesting that this manuscript was copied a page at a time. Several manuscripts have been corrected by their copyists, demonstrating attempts to produce a comprehensible text. Textual variations between manuscripts are not to be explained simply as the results of corruption, and do not provide a more ‘original’ text. Some variations are attempts to ‘update’ grammar and vocabulary to a more contemporary idiom, but this was not systematic in any of the manuscripts. The most systematic example of this is the consistent replacement of Hr with r in p. Boulaq IV, where Hr has been used in an abstract, non-locational sense. This is part of a broader trend in Egyptian from the end of the New Kingdom onward. Textual variation between the manuscripts is seen as part of a copying culture in which the copyist plays an active role in redacting the text in their manuscript, where literary texts are personal rather than published copies. The rubrication of the Instruction of Amenemope appears to be connected closely to the text’s division into chapters. The structure of the Instruction of Ani is less strictly represented by its format, and the rubrication of its manuscripts appears to follow their contemporary practice. P. Deir el-Medina 1 appears to be rubricated at regular intervals, when the text shifts topic. The post-Ramesside copies are rubricated less regularly, and not always according to clear principles, but this is related to the decline in rubrication at this period. The orthography of p. Boulaq IV has been much discussed in the past. Many of the peculiarities of this are the result of the use of late Ramesside group-writings, and of plural strokes and fixed determinatives as ‘word-ending groups’ updating orthography, and not corruption. The thesis concludes that the process of transmission seen in these texts demonstrate the personal and individual nature of copying in Egypt.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	16 Aug 2018 08:19
Last Modified:	16 Jan 2024 17:21
DOI:	10.17638/03017112
Supervisors:	Eyre, Christopher Enmarch, Roland
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3017112