The Twenty-second Ceremony
THE TWENTY-SECOND CEREMONY.
The next offering was the ah which according to Dümichen was not a bread-cake, but a lump of cooked meal, like the Puls of the Romans and the Polenta of the modern Italians. According to Maspero, it was a flat cake mixed with fat, and perhaps sweetened, and folded like a pancake. Whilst the SEM
priest presents this the Kher heb pronounces a formula, which in the Unas text seems to mean,
"The darkness (or, the night) becometh denser and denser," and in the text of Peta-Amen-apt,
"The ah food is spread out before thee like a field."
It is clear that in the one text there is a play of words in ahah and akka, and in the other in ahah and ah, but the exact meanings of the sentences are unknown because we do not understand the allusions.
The Sem priest presenting the Ah meal.
[paragraph continues] Dümichen thought that the word akka, i.e., "darkness or night," referred to the colour of the ah-cake, and that it might have been baked to a brown colour which was so dark in comparison with the tept cake that it appeared to be black.