Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/550

470 The myth which is the subject of this paper occurs twice in it (p. 26, l. 27 a. f., and p. 38, l. 20 a. f.).

A duplicate in such an Egyptian religious papyrus is not a remarkable thing. These texts do not contain continuous works, although it might be sometimes expected from their titles, but compilations of widely different religious writings from which the copyist or his employer selected this or that chapter. It was not a rare thing if the same text occurred twice in the originals, that the copyist thoughtlessly copied it twice regardless of the repetition. He was all the safer in doing so as his work, upon being finished, was at once consigned to the grave with a dead body, and there was little probability of mortal eye ever discovering his carelessness. For the same reason, i. e., the security from control, the copyists were generally careless in their work in all respects. The texts designed for the dead are usually full of gross errors, wrong letters, omissions of letters or whole words or sentences. Thus the Musée Gimnet at Paris has an hieratic papyrus from the Theban time, supposed to be a fragment of a book for a dead person, but which is really no more than a conglomerate of disconnected fragments of sentences with letters. The unreliability even of those texts, which at first glance appear to be written carefully and show artistic vignettes, is so great that it is often impossible to translate them or discover their meaning without comparing several copies.

So, in the case of our creation myth, there is cause for especial congratulation that a fortunate accident caused the writer of the papyrus to be careless enough to copy the report twice, and thus make it possible, or at least easier, to understand the thoughts. The form in which he clothed his report the first time is as follows, the translation being as faithful as possible.

The book of the Knowing the creations of Ra, the overthrow of Apepi.

The word ζεπερ, which has been translated by create, creation, etc., means: to enter into existence, to be, to exist, to call into being, etc. It is, therefore, to be understood both in the transitive and the intransitive sense. Prom it is derived, among others, the name of the god Chepera, strictly the nascent one, afterwards the rising sun.