The kneeling figure on the Berlin papyrus P 3153

| The kneeling figure on the Berlin papyrus P 3153 should not automatically be read as a “prisoner”: the object is a Litany of Ra preserved at the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, now in the Neues Museum on the Museumsinsel, dated to the 1st millennium BC, probably between the 21st and 25th dynasty, circa 1000–700 BC, and attributed to the Theban priest Nes-Amun-nesut-tauj, in a geographical orbit plausibly linked to Thebes, today’s Luxor, even if the place of archaeological discovery is not documented with certainty because many Egyptian papyri entered European collections through the 19th-century antiquities market. The dimensions of the scroll are published in a way that is not always immediately accessible in popular summaries, but it is a horizontal funerary papyrus, about a few dozen centimeters high and spread across multiple panels, not a single "isolated scene": the photographed detail must therefore be read within a broader religious program. Historically, it is attested that the Litany of Ra originated in the New Kingdom, with attestations as early as the 18th Dynasty and great popularity in royal tombs between the 19th and 20th Dynasties, circa 1292–1077 BC; only later did formulas and images born in a royal environment also pass to priestly and private elites. It is also attested that in Egyptian books of the afterlife, such as Amduat, the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, and similar solar cycles, the enemies of the god and the forces of chaos can appear bound, upside down, decapitated, or immobilized: there, violence is not a "chronicle," but a ritual symbol of the victory of Ra and Ma'at over Isfet, cosmic disorder.tshibuashibuashi.