alEph and BORGES

as is known, Aleph began life in this world very long before we did, about five millennia ago, in the most privileged and closely guarded precincts of the Egyptian pyramids.1 The hieroglyph profile of its bull head can be seen quite clearly in the spells recorded in the Book of the Dead over the many centuries and dynasties that comprise the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms. Surviving shifts in fashion and finance in the function of the papyrus and other texts in this mortuary tradition, the bull’s head beneath its horns achieved polychromatic emphasis in depictions of the bull of heaven, sire of the seven sacred cows, pastoral beasts who between their horns each carry ra the sun from the eastern dawn to the western dusk (Taylor). More intimately, the bull or ox figures in the second of three pairs of items listed as indispensable for the traveller through the afterlife: bread and beer, meat and fowl, emolument in alabaster jars (whose number corresponds the seven orifices of the mummified head) and clothing. Over time, the paired items written and incised innumerable times in hieroglyphic and then hieratic script on a variety of surfaces became formulaic and involved abbreviated spellings and paraphrases, as Gardiner shows in the Excursus of his Egyptian Grammar devoted to the funerary cult (17073). There, in a 12th-dynasty example of the the hotp-di-nesu formula (“a