Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 104. (Budapest, 2006)

ÉVA LIPTAY: Between Heaven and Earth II: The Iconography of a Funerary Papyrus from the Twenty-First Dynasty (Part I.)

6 FUNERARY PAPYRUS: FIRST SCENE. BUDAPEST. MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS the dawn. In the course of that the sun is still in the underworld, i.e., invisible for the human eye, but its approach to the horizon is accompanied by a reddish luminous phenomenon.'

8 The first motif of the extant piece of the Budapest papyrus recalls a well-known pictoral representation of the defeating of the enemy (fig. 6). The topic occurs several times in the Amduat and the Book of Gates, but is especially emphasised in the critical period just before sunrise. The enemy in our case is a well-known topos: it appears in the form of the huge snake called Apopbis. Its two horns which can be seen here were also mentioned in a much earlier magical text against serpents.'

9 The fight takes place on the eastern part of the sky, on the boundary between day and night. The creator god emerging from the primaeval water has to fight the power of darkness, chaos, the antithesis of the created world, on the water, on board of his sun-barque.

60 The outcome of the fight is not doubtful, moreover is certain in our case: two knives are lodging into the serpent's head,

61 indicating that it was rendered harmless in a physical and magical sense. The victory makes the rest of the journey towards the eastern horizon undisturbed for the sunbarque. I have not found a parallel so far to the motif seen on the Budapest papyrus

—the defeated serpent, with the mummy-shaped netherworld creatures standing in its coils with their backs to the direction of the scenes

—among the papyri of the Twenty-first Dynasty.

62 As to the individual parts of the scene, they are naturally frequently appearing motifs in the examined material; only in this arrangement can the composition be regarded as a rarity. The parts of the scene, which are worth examining" individually, partly independently of one another, are as follows: the momentum of "being in the serpent's coils"; the gesture of "looking backwards" and the sequence of the mummy-shaped gods; and the body of the defeated Apophis as an iconographical element.