The "Cannibal Text" (Frankfort) or "Cannibal Hymn" (Mercer, Faulkner) is an extraordinary literary document. It consists of two spells (Pyramid Texts 273 & 274) inscribed on the East gable of the antechamber of the tomb of Pharaoh Unis (Unas or Wenis, ca. 2378 - 2348 BCE, the last king of the Vth Dynasty (ca. 2487 - 2348 BCE) and his successor Pharaoh Teti (ca. 2348 - 2198 BCE), who initiated the VIth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom (ca. 2670 - 2205 BCE)."The spells then drop out of the regular corpus, to reappear in the Middle Kingdom, when the Cannibal Hymn is included among the Pyramid Texts of the Middle Kingdom tombs of Senwosretankh at Lisht and of Siese at Dahshur. A reworked version appears as Coffin Text Spell 573, while a variety of phrases and themes from the hymn also recur in other Coffin Texts." - Eyre, 2002, p.11. The major theme of this text, the praise of Pharaoh, allows us to classify it as a hymn. Its main metaphorical and dramatical mechanism, namely Pharoah eating the deities, puts its acute poetical power into evidence. Degustation (like the spitting and masturbating Atum) is used as a material metaphor of transcendence. Pharaoh's consumption of the gods makes him akin to the precreational order of Atum (manifesting as Re, the father of the king). Some deities and the natural order of creation are left behind.
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