With a continuous tradition spanning more than two millennia, funerary texts from ancient Egypt offer an excellent data set for studying how compositions were composed and passed on in the ancient Near East. Clear evidence demonstrates the importance and mechanics of scribal copying in the transmission process. What remain less clear are the methods by which new compositions were created. In some cases, the accretion of scholia, commentary, and exegesis produced new versions of old texts. This is well illustrated by the continuum between Coffin Text (ct) spell 335 and Book of the Dead (bd) spell 17. In other cases, however, large collections appear in writing for the first time showing few hints at the earlier stages of their production. This is true for the Pyramid Texts (pt), whose pre-written forms can only be hypothesized. Fortunately, fragmentary steps from conception to textualization are partially preserved for a relatively little studied corpus from Roman Period Egypt, sometimes known by the title the Demotic Book of Breathing. Despite clearly representing the final stage in the pt-ct-bd tradition, scribes did not create this composition by copying from its predecessors. Instead, a new composition was crafted without direct parallel. In addition, the new text was never fixed, as fifty separate exemplars attest to a core set of formulae that could be added to, subtracted from, or rearranged at will. The variance in this corpus reflects a growing trend toward multiplicity in similar funerary manuscripts from Greco-Roman Egypt. A portion of this variance can be demonstrated to derive from an active oral tradition and it is this oral tradition, I will argue, that provided the raw material for new compositions such as the Demotic Book of Breathing. This paper will therefore address how textual traditions began by looking at the very end of funerary literature in ancient Egypt.

跨越两千多年的连续传统，古埃及的葬礼文本为研究古代近东的构图和传承方式提供了一个极好的数据集。清晰的证据表明抄写抄袭在传播过程中的重要性和机制。尚不清楚的是创建新组合物的方法。在某些情况下，霍乱的增加，评论和释经产生了旧文本的新版本。棺材文本（ct）法术335和死者之书（bd）法术17之间的连续性很好地说明了这一点。然而，在其他情况下，大量藏品首次以书面形式出现，在其早期阶段几乎没有任何暗示。生产。对于金字塔文本，这是正确的（pt），只能假设其预写形式。幸运的是，从概念到文本化的片段化步骤被部分保留下来，供罗马时期埃及研究较少的语料库使用，有时也被称为《呼吸人类书》（Demotic Book of Breathing）。尽管清楚地表示了pt-ct-bd的最后阶段传统上，抄写员不是通过复制其前身来创造这种构图的。取而代之的是，在没有直接并行的情况下设计了新的合成。此外，新文本从未被修复，因为五十个独立的示例证明了一组核心公式，可以随意添加，减去或重新排列。该语料库的差异反映了古罗马罗马时期类似的葬礼手稿向多重性发展的趋势。这种差异的一部分可以证明是源于活跃的口头传统，而我将争辩说，正是这种口头传统为新作品（例如《呼吸呼吸书》）提供了原材料。因此，本文将通过考察古埃及丧葬文学的结尾来论述文本传统的起源。