--------------------- _a._ Berlin Museum. No. 1470. _b._ British Museum. No. 9901. --------------------- _See_ NAVILLE, “Book of the Dead,” I, Plate. [Illustration] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ NOTES. The seventeenth chapter is one of the most remarkable in the whole collection, and it has been preserved from times previous to the XIIth dynasty. The very earliest monuments which have preserved it have handed it down accompanied with scholia and other commentaries interpolated into the text. Some of the monuments enable us to some extent to divide the original text from the additions, in consequence of the latter being written in red. But there is really only one text where the additions are suppressed, and which therefore offers the most ancient form, as far as we know it, of the chapter. This is the copy on the wall of the tomb of Horhotep. The sarcophagus itself of Horhotep contains a copy of the text along with the additions. The chapter must already at the time have been of the most venerable antiquity. Besides these two copies of the chapter we have those from the sarcophagi of Hora and Sit-Bastit (published, like those of Horhotep, by M. Maspero[24]), two from the sarcophagi of Mentuhotep, and one from that of Sebek-āa (the three latter published by Lepsius in his _Aelteste Texte_). The British Museum has Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s copy of the texts inscribed on the coffin of Queen Mentuhotep of the XIth dynasty, and also a fragment (6636 a) of the coffin of a prince named Hornefru. Here then we have an abundance of witnesses of the best period. They unfortunately do not agree. The progress of corruption had no doubt begun long before, and the variants are not simply differences of orthography but positively different readings. The differences however are chiefly in the scholia. Even when the explanations of the text are identical, the form differs. The latest recensions have retained the form ⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂; the ancient added the feminine ⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂. _What is that?_ But some of the ancient texts give the equivalent words ⁂⁂⁂⁂, and Horhotep does without them altogether. These words were evidently additions not merely to the text but to the scholia.