Dream books, ancient Egypt LUIGI PRADA University of Oxford, UK In ancient Egypt, as in many other ancient civi- lizations, a dream book – also known as an oneirocriticon – was a handbook containing lists of possible dream topics (from inanimate objects to living creatures, from trivial daily-life happenings to divine visions), each of which was followed by its mantic interpretation. In contrast with modern dream interpretation (see DREAM INTERPRETATION) as originally popu- larized by Sigmund Freud’s work, ancient dream interpretation (also known as oneiro- mancy) interpreted dreams (see DREAMS, PHARA- ONIC EGYPT AND ANCIENT NEAR EAST) not in order to unveil facts and events about the dreamers’ past, but about their future, treating dreams as omens. Dreams were believed to contain mes- sages to be deciphered, messages that con- cerned the future of the dreamer or even of a third party, and thus their interpretation per- tained to the field of divination (see DIVINATION, ANCIENT NEAR EAST), alongside other divinatory sciences such as astrology (see ASTROLOGY, ANCIENT NEAR EAST). It is important to realize that ancient Egyptian oneiromancy (and, more generally, divination as a whole) was seen by its practitioners as a proper science. Thus, dream books constituted actual scientific texts, in which dreams and predictions based on their interpretation were causally connected, and the very language and style in which dream books were written closely resembled the style of other scientific texts, such as medical or even legal manuals. Our knowledge of ancient Egyptian dream books has hugely advanced in recent years. Until the early 2000s, only one manuscript of Pharaonic date – from the reign of RAMESES II, hence dubbed the “Ramesside dream book” (thirteenth century BCE) – was known, Papyrus Chester Beatty 3 (Gardiner 1935; Szpakowska 2011), written in hieratic. Substantial fragments from two dream books in DEMOTIC dating to Roman times (second century CE), Papyri Carlsberg 13 and 14 verso, had also been pub- lished (Volten 1942). Besides this material, some additional small fragments from other papyrus manuscripts in Demotic of Ptolemaic and Roman dates were also known (e.g., Zauzich 1980), but the corpus at the disposal of scholars was, overall, relatively limited. Moreover, the chronological gap of over a millennium separat- ing the Ramesside dream book from its Demotic counterparts often led scholars to wonder whether there was any continuity between the two traditions, or if the Demotic dream books were to be considered as something separate from their Pharaonic ancestor, and their revival as a peculiarity of the Graeco-Roman Period. In the last fifteen years, however, the situa- tion has radically changed, mainly thanks to an increased interest in the study of papyrolog- ical material from the later phases of Egypt’s history. We now have papyrus fragments of two more hieratic dream books from Pharaonic times, namely, from the Late Period (Quack 2010). They represent a precious link between the Ramesside dream book and the Graeco- Roman material in Demotic, and unambigu- ously testify to the continuity of oneiromancy from Pharaonic to Ptolemaic and Roman times. As for the Demotic dream books, plenty of additional papyrus fragments from multiple oneirocritica have now been identified and edi- ted, or are currently being prepared for publi- cation (Prada 2015; Quack and Ryholt 2019). We thus now have a remarkably large corpus adding to our knowledge, with, in total, remains of three hieratic and more than ten Demotic manuscripts on papyrus (no single dream book survives intact). The Ramesside dream book is not only the earliest known Egyptian dream book; it also shows the most peculiar internal organization of them all. The beginning and the end of the papyrus scroll are lost, but from the surviving columns of text we see that the dreams were not ordered by subject matter, as one would perhaps expect to be the most practical and reader-friendly taxonomy for a work of this 1 The Encyclopedia of Ancient History. Edited by Andrew Erskine, David B. Hollander, and Arietta Papaconstantinou. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah15116.pub2