The text of the chapter grew more and more obscure to readers, and the explanations hitherto given were so unsatisfactory as to call for others. The texts of the manuscripts of the new empire furnish a good deal of fresh matter, much of which is extremely ancient, though the proof of this is unfortunately lost through the disastrous condition of literature in the period preceding the XVIIIth dynasty. The XVIIIth dynasty and its immediate successors inherited but did not invent the new form of the Book of the Dead, with its succession of vignettes, which however differing in detail bear the stamp of a common traditional teaching. The manuscripts of a later period bear witness, with reference to this as well as to other chapters, to a recension of an authoritative kind. The text becomes more certain though perhaps not either more true or more intelligible, and the notes and explanations have here reached their fullest extent. It would take an entire volume to give the translations of all the forms the chapter has assumed. It must be sufficient here to give the earliest forms known to us of the text and of the first commentaries. These are printed in characters which show the difference between text and later additions; all of which, it must be remembered, are of extreme antiquity—some _two thousand years_ before any probable date of Moses. Explanations or other interesting matter occurring in the manuscripts of the later Empire will be referred to in the notes. The title in the early copies is the simple one here heading the chapter. In those which begin at the XVIIIth dynasty the title is very like that given for the first chapter. The chief additions are that the deceased person “_takes every form that he pleases, plays draughts, and sits in a bower, comes forth as a soul living after death, and that what is done upon earth is glorified_.” 1. It would be difficult for us to imagine that the very remarkable opening of the chapter is an addition. Yet it is unknown to the primitive recension on the walls of Horhotep’s tomb, though found everywhere else. The texts however which contain it do not agree. “I am He who closeth, and He who openeth, and I am but One.” ‘He who closeth’ is ⁂⁂ _Tmu_, ‘He who openeth’ ⁂ _Unen_. As the god who closes and who opens is one and the same, ‘I am but One,’ is a very natural ending of the sentence, and for its sense the whole may appeal to classical, and higher than classical, authority. “Modo namque Patulcius idem Et modo sacrifico Clusius ore vocor.”[25] “I am Alpha and O, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord.”[26]