Religious texts as a source of a contemporary study of Antiquity – linguistic interpretations of the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts

Abstract

Religious writings are usually treated in the same way as mythological narratives. It is consistently forgotten that they express faith. They were testimonies of people’s beliefs. They were designed to verbalise transcendental reality – to express the Inexpressible. When one comprehends and digests these facts, a scholar is far better able to perceive the predicament, the arduousness of the scrutiny of this genre of written sources.
While studying the written sources the image we would like to recapture is an image scattered in words and phrases, in language. It is embodied in language itself. Thus, the author of the paper scrutinised the world’s oldest religious texts – the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts, against a backdrop of general remarks, to show the uniqueness and specificity of analysis and interpretation of this type of sources.