Min chambers

The House of Min in the Temple of Horus at Edfu (Room O): A Dia- and Synchronic Study of the Meaning, Cultic Function, and Textual History of the Chapel.

With the project Teotino pursues two content-related goals: First, an initial treatment of the texts with a transliteration and a translation will be presented, as well as a content indexing of the inscriptions and a decoration analysis. The aim is to publish the results in a monograph with an improved new edition of the texts and the scenes. A full documentation of the reliefs in drawing and photography will complete it. The decoration's structure dictates the study's structure: The arrangement in which the various decorative elements will be treated in the work will be determined by the relationship of the scenes on the walls to each other.

The second project focus is on the recontextualization of the textual material as a consequence of intracultural knowledge transfer. The ancient Egyptian text material is titled and categorized according to its context of use. Thus, a distinction was made for a long time between funerary and temple texts. The content, however, is less significant than the context in which the texts were found, a fact to which attention has increasingly been drawn in recent years. Thus, several studies investigated the question of the original context and the emic meaning of different texts. Consequently, the validity of the traditional boundaries of usage must be examined from a new perspective.

One has to imagine an extensive text pool, which is fed by cult and ritual texts, which are to be located in the funerary, temple or royal context. The fact that in the inscriptions of the temples of the Greco-Roman period partly contents from text material of older corpora or from another context can be found, aroused interest again and again. Known, for example, are excerpts of the Pyramid Texts, spells from the Book of the Dead and from the liturgies for the dead, hymns, or various rituals. In this editorial process of graphic processing of the texts as a monumental version, linguistic changes can be recognized and explained.

The focus on the textual tradition of the present architectural unit will allow the recognition of earlier, contemporary as well as later parallels and will lead to the identification of macrotexts. A macrotext can be understood as an entire composition consisting of various microtexts distributed in space, which have been divided among different architectural elements and which are to be associated thematically. Unlike the microtexts, the macrotexts may have been expanded by different authors for diverse purposes.

Microtexts can be discerned within the various scenes of the Min Chapel, which have been recontextualized and divided over them, and whose reconstruction will be a central focus of the project. By means of a systematic study of the decorative principles of the House of Min at Edfu, it will thus be demonstrated how text and knowledge, which the priests took up for the design of the inscriptions, were handed down.

Dr. Teotino-Tattko started this sub-project as part of her Walter Benjamin position in Würzburg and is continuing it from Tübingen as an associate member of the Horus Behedety project.