The Hidden Name Rite

Behind the catalogue of the special exhibition that sarcophagus belongs to lies an argument the field has never really finished: that passage of liturgical text on the coffin, how is it supposed to be read?

There are at least three readings. The museum uses the most conservative one, and the reason is set down in the catalogue's editorial note: interpretation should not be pressed too far. The second is handled as a remark in a few textbooks, and what it reads out leans toward "the priest who guards the gate"—safe, harmless, calling for no further explanation.

The gallery has room for one. The wall label carries the museum's version, Chinese and English, 24-point type, with a line of small print beneath it giving the basis for the translation; the catalogue text gives it 3 pages, and the second reading is squeezed into a footnote at the foot of a page, 4 lines of it.

There is a third. It reads one set of glyph-roots as the Hidden Name:

The one hidden behind the gate, not to be named, not to be called.

The mainstream dismisses this reading as forced, because one of its glyph-roots does not match. At the same position, the Third Dynasty version of the liturgical texts has "gate"; the Hellenistic recension has "box." The two signs have no developmental relation in form, the two copies stand more than 2,000 years apart, and no transitional form has been found in between.

The standard way of handling a conflict like this is to put it down to the copyist. Copies get recopied down the line; glyph-roots drift, similar-looking signs get mixed in, a copyist who does not understand the original traces it out anyway. All of this is common. Most scholars write "probably scribal corruption" in a footnote and move on, and nobody rearranges the reading of a whole passage over it.

A very few do not accept that handling. Their reason is short: corruption is random, and this conflict falls at precisely the same position in two copies that stand two thousand years apart and have no connection between their sources.

They have started to suspect that the place where the roots do not match is where somebody deliberately hid a name out of history.

And that night, on the bottom of the coffin, this sarcophagus had a passage of inscription on it that is not in the catalogue.