Abstract
The Saite-Persian shaft tomb of Iufaa contains a large variety of texts of both funerary and nonfunerary character. The handbook of sacred snakes of the priest-magician of Selkis in the arch of the western wall of the burial chamber can be mentioned as a particularly unusual example.
The northern wall of the burial chamber contains another interesting combination of text and image, continuing to the eastern wall. Most of the text consists of a long version of the Royal Purification Ritual (Schott, Die Reinigung Pharaos in einem memphitischen Tempel, NAWG I/3 (1957), 45-92; only about a third of the text recorded in the tomb of Iufaa is preserved in the Berlin papyrus), illustrated and explicated by several mythological texts and images interspersed within the text of the ritual, most prominently the myth of the original purification of the sun god in the lake of cool water (S qbH) at Heliopolis.
The present contribution will, besides presenting the ritual, assess its place in the context of Iufaa's corpus and examine the funerary implications and use of this originally royal ritual composition.