Die Stundenwachen im Osiriskult

the long version

Andreas H. Pries' study on the hour guards in the cult of Osiris serves as a primarily philological and historical ascertainment of a central ritual in the Ptolemaic temple in Egypt. Volume I of the work offers a critical presentation of the comprehensive and often difficult to understand ritual texts, and includes their translation, religious-historical classification and text-critical analysis. Volume II presents a complete edition of the available documentation of the ritual in words and pictures. The performance of hourly rites at an Osiris figurine, performed annually in the month of Choiak, is modeled on the framework of comprehensive funeral ceremonies and on the vigil reception of death cults, and incorporates ideas and motifs from funerary contexts in the form of recitations of sayings that can be traced back to the Old Kingdom, the period around 2300 BC. Against this background the handbook-like main body of the work is a compilation of such sayings, which were compiled in a new arrangement with the addition of further elements. It thereby offers, unlike any other text of ancient Egyptian composition, an ideal basis for a detailed tradition-historical investigation.