Rick Baudé Wrote:
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> If they were written over a period of "centuries"
> wouldn't we have at least fragments of various
> prayers from here and there from the previous
> centuries?


Not if they were only on papyrus in heavily secured places within the temples. They probably would have been the first things looted... and later destroyed.



AFAIK we don't have a thing. The PT's
> show up "All-at-once" in Una's tomb. I know about
> changes in grammar and the texts themselves are
> subtly transformed from one tomb to the next which
> would be normal considering the fact that they
> were probably working in the dark and didn't have
> any word processors to copy texts with. So IMO it
> doesn't flatly rule out the single author
> conjecture. Consider the Book of Mormon, the
> Koran, the Five Books of Moses, etc. all
> supposedly the work of a single person.


No, it's not that the grammar changes from tomb to tomb, but some of the grammar is very old by the time it first appears, matching grammar used in other contexts that is much older. Some of the texts, however, us grammar that is relatively new.

The problem lies in deciding how they might have altered older documents to serve newer purposes. The inclusion of sAH, for example, in the Cannibal Hymn, may not be an original element. That's the tough part.





Anthony

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think.