Overview

In ancient Egyptian thought, the funerary procedure played a key role in the transition to the afterlife. As early as the Old Kingdom (c. 2700-2200 BCE), the Pyramid Texts and representations and inscriptions in private tombs show a highly developed funerary ritual with a large number of individual rites intended to ensure a safe transition to the realm of the dead and a pleasant afterlife for the deceased. One of these is the so-called 'breaking the dsr.t-vessels' (Egyptian sd dsr.wt), a rite that involved the intentional damaging of a certain type of ceramic vessel. The aim of this study is to gain a better understanding of the rite through a re-evaluation of the primary sources and previous research and to provide the first study devoted entirely to the rite. While the rite of 'breaking the dsr.t-vessels' has been associated with several different archaeological contexts and primary sources, this monograph argues that a careful distinction needs to be made between the evidence identified as such. This study aims to demonstrate that there is a significant discrepancy between textual, iconographic, and archaeological sources which calls into question the identification of a large number of sources as sd dsr.wt contexts. A number of different ritual and non-ritual practices in ancient Egypt involve the deliberate fragmentation of pottery, each of which should be addressed in context.

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9781803275871

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Elena Hertel holds a BA Classical Archaeology and Egyptology from Heidelberg University and an MA by research in Egyptology from Leiden University. Currently she is a PhD candidate at Basel University in the Swiss National Science Foundation project 'Crossing Boundaries'. Her research specialty in Egyptology is the combination of philological and object studies. She is also involved in several publication projects of demotic and abnormal hieratic papyri.

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