Coffin Texts

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The Coffin Texts are a corpus of ancient Egyptian funerary spells, inscribed for the most part on the interior surfaces of wooden coffins during the Middle Kingdom, roughly the twenty-first to seventeenth centuries BCE. They survive on hundreds of coffins, and also on tomb walls, masks, and papyri; the standard modern edition gathers more than a thousand distinct spells, though no single burial used anything close to the whole.

The texts grew out of an older tradition. The Pyramid Texts, carved in the burial chambers of Old Kingdom pharaohs, were composed to carry a dead king to the company of the gods; many of those spells reappear, reworked, among the Coffin Texts, alongside a great body of new material. The conventional account calls the change a democratization of the afterlife — the move from a literature reserved for the king to one written for provincial governors, officials, and their households. Recent scholarship has pressed on that phrase: the people whose coffins carry these spells were still a narrow elite, and the shift may register the decentralization of power after the Old Kingdom as much as any widening of hope. The older formula remains a useful shorthand, provided its limits are kept in view.

What the spells offer is equipment for the journey after death. They give the deceased — addressed throughout as identified with Osiris, the god who died and rose — words to pass hostile gatekeepers, to take the form of a falcon or a flame, to be fed and to breathe, to avoid walking upside down or eating filth in the realms below. One long sequence, the Book of Two Ways, drawn on coffin floors from the region of Hermopolis, sets out an actual map of the netherworld, its two routes divided by a lake of fire: among the earliest cosmographic guides to the beyond that any culture has left.

These spells were not literature in the modern sense but ritual instruments, placed where the dead could use them. Their efficacy was a matter of belief: the written word was held to act, the name pronounced to compel, the image to become real. In the New Kingdom much of this material was selected, edited, and copied onto papyrus rolls laid in the tomb — the collection later Egyptologists named the Book of the Dead. The Coffin Texts are the bridge between the royal spells cut in stone and that final, portable book of the afterlife, and they preserve a stage of Egyptian thought about death more various, and stranger, than either the corpus before them or the one that followed.

→ Related: Pyramid Texts · Dendera