Litany of Re (Litany of the Sun)

Definition

The Litany of Re, also called the Litany of the Sun, is a New Kingdom royal-tomb composition that praises the sun god as he sinks into the netherworld (the underworld of the dead) at night, where he wakes the dead to new life, cares for the blessed, and punishes the damned. Its heart is the Great Litany, a long invocation that calls on the sun god seventy-five times under different names and illustrated forms. Its first verse reads, "Praise to you, oh Re, great of power."

In Tradition

Egyptologists read the Litany less as a journey-narrative than as a praise-list: a roll-call of the sun god's many shapes. Each of the seventy-five invocations is paired with a divine figure picturing one of his forms and functions in the netherworld. Where the Amduat or Book of Gates walk the sun hour by hour, the Litany holds him still and names him over and over, gathering all his aspects into one act of praise as he enters the dark.

In Practice

The thing to picture is the seventy-five forms themselves. Many are animal-headed or fully animal-shaped — the cat, the mouse-like ichneumon, the crocodile, jackal, baboon, and hawk among them — each a different mask of the one sun god. The full set decorated the first and second corridors of royal tombs from the reign of Sethos I onward, and later Twenty-first-Dynasty funerary papyri copied out roughly twenty to twenty-four of the forms for private use. This catalogue of solar shapes has drawn attention beyond Egyptology: the scholar Alexandra von Lieven reads the Litany as an early Egyptian forerunner of the dodekaoros, a later Greco-Egyptian scheme in which the sun changes animal shape hour by hour, since the Litany already shows shifting animal forms (it even supplies a mouse-like creature and a hare). That is a modern reading of how the idea may have travelled, not a claim the Egyptians built an hourly zodiac.

Historical Origin

The Litany of Re is a New Kingdom composition, attested from the reign of Tuthmosis III and standard in the first two corridors of royal tombs from Sethos I onward; its ancient title was the "Book of Praying to Re in the West." The modern study followed here is Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (1999). The seventy-five-shape reading and the proposed link to the dodekaoros are set out by Alexandra von Lieven, "From Crocodile to Dragon," in David Brown (ed.), The Interactions of Ancient Astral Science (2018).

Further Reading

• Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife
• Alexandra von Lieven, From Crocodile to Dragon (in The Interactions of Ancient Astral Science)