Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 99. (Budapest, 2003)

LIPTAY, ÉVA: Between Heaven and Earth. The Motif of the Cow Coming out of the Mountain

Transition from the evening bark to the morning bark at dawn and vice versa at sunset is a critical moment for the soul.

64 It happens on the western and eastern horizons, respectively, which are of intermediate character between the spheres of day and night, this world and the other.

65 These are the localities where the sun god transforms himself into a new manifestation (hpr.w). From this perspective, ih.t ('horizon') is actually the place of the cosmic renewal, where heaven meets the earth.

66 Sunset means 'Entering the West'; whereas dawn is the time of'Arising in the East'. As soon as the sun god or deceased left one of the barks, an ordinary papyrus boat carries him to the other (shn.wj).

67 The sun god (and likewise the deceased) gets sorely tried in this no man's land-like territory, and has to defeat their dangerous enemies.

68 Beyond the scope of royal funerary inscriptions, private tombs of the Old Kingdom contain further allusions to how the deceased gets on the solar bark. A constant scene on the walls of the tomb chapels, the so-called zSS-wíd with a strong reference to Hathor, has been explained by Altenmüller

69 in light of the tomb owner's desire to ascend to the sky. Since present study concentrates mainly on the motives Arriving at the West' and 'Meeting the Hathor-cow', the Old Kingdom z£f wid -scene needs special attention.

70 In utterance 271 of the Pyramid Texts the deceased king unites with her mother, the Wild Cow, after he performed the ritual of zSS wid (splitting the papyrus').

71 According to the text, the goddess resides upon two mountains. One of them is called 'Mountain of the shsh-bird', and it is the place where the king climbs up to the sky on a ladder. We come across with the same mountain again, which has already been touched upon in the cycle of 'Hathorsprüche' (CT Spell 484). That particular passage in the Coffin Texts was also concerned with meeting Hathor, and getting on the solar bark. Sethe claimed that the two mountains cited in the Pyramid Texts supported the sky on the eastern and western horizons, thus we should take them as forerunners of the later B3hw and Minw.

72 64 Bickel, S., Die Jenseitsfahrt des Re nach Zeugen der Sargtexte, in Ein ägyptisches Glasperlenspiel (n. 1)41. 65 Schäfer, loc.cit. (n. 51) 16; Rambova, loc.cit. (n. 51) 29; Bickel, loc.cit. (n. 64) 46-48; Hermsen, E., Die zwei Wege des Jenseits (OBO 112), Freiburg - Göttingen 1991, 116-117. 66 Allen, loc.cit. (n. 57) 12-14. 67 Altenmüller, H., Aspekte des Sonnenlaufes in den Pyramidentexten, in Hommages à Fr. Daumas, Montpellier 1986, 1-11. 68 Willems, op.cit. (n. 16) 154-156. 69 Altenmüller, H., Die Himmelsaufstieg des Grabherrn. Zu den Szenen des zSSwid in den Gräbern des AR, SAK 30 (2002) 1-42 (henceforth abbreviated Himmelsaufstieg). 70 Likewise, it has been proposed that meeting the Hathor-cow of the marshland could be the central theme of the „Hirtengeschichte" (P. Berlin 3024): Moftah, loc.cit. (n. 48) 43-44. 71 Altenmüller, Himmelsaufstieg (n. 69) 33-34; Barta, op.cit. (n. 61) 139. 72 Sethe, K., Übersetzung und Kommentar zu den Altägyptischen Pyramidentexten II, Hamburg 1962, 125-127. See also n. 49.