Towards Sunrise: Innovations in the Representations of the Swallow in the Funerary Papyri of the Twenty-First Dynasty

Abstract

The funerary papyri belonging to the priesthood of Amun-Re of the Twenty-First Dynasty offer a rich field for exploration. The socio-religious circumstances of the period influenced the representations within the papyri leading to a variety of innovative illustrations. Of these are the depictions of the barn swallow, which is the topic of the current study. The present work focuses on 24 representations of the swallow in a corpus of 22 papyri that are currently in various museums around the world. The study classifies those representations into two main divisions, namely those of Chapter 86 of the Book of the Dead and those depicting the bird on the prow of the morning solar boat.