Various elements, such as the wish of the deceased, in the Coffin Texts, to acquire documents and books and to become a scribe to various deities, suggest that in the afterlife, the upside-down world and domain of the gods, another language is used. Thoth or Ra are occasionally referred to as interpreters, respectively, in chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead, the papyrus of Nu, and in the third hour of the Amduat. Perhaps the imaginary words occasionally found in funerary or magical collections, or the cryptographic writing evolving in the royal tombs of the New Kingdom, sometimes with an astonishing juxtaposition of the normal text and the cryptographic text, can be linked to this dossier. The article will provide an update on this topic by analyzing these different sources, which are few in number and not always explicit, but without claiming to be exhaustive.
cryptographic writing; interpreter; language of the gods; translation
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