Enigmatic Texts from Deir el-Medina. On the Transmission and Decipherment of ‘Cryptographic’ Compositions in the Community of Workmen

This paper aims to shed new light on the transmission and interpretation of enigmatic texts during the New Kingdom. It offers a fresh analysis of two previously-published ostraca, O. Cairo CG 25359 and O. Turin CGT 57440, which have so far been neglected by the Egyptological community. We show that O. Cairo CG 25359 contains a copy of captions from an Enigmatic Netherworld Book of the Solar-Osirian Unity (the only other attestation of which is found on the second shrine of Tutankhamun), and we demonstrate that the hieratic funerary composition on the verso of the Turin ostracon is in fact a ‘clear-text’ version of the enigmatic text written in cursive hieroglyphs on the recto. Based on material and philological clues, we argue that the hieratic text is a ‘decipherment’ of the enigmatic text. Finally, we suggest that this composition may have been a harper’s song originally inscribed in the tomb-chapel of the scribe Amennakhte (v), son of Ipuy.