Coffin Texts

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A carpenter planed the inner boards of a rectangular wooden coffin; a scribe then covered them, surface by surface, in columns of cursive hieroglyphs. The writing faced inward — toward the body that would lie there, not toward any living reader. This is where the Coffin Texts are found: on the interior walls of Middle Kingdom coffins, painted or incised where the dead alone could meet them, roughly the twenty-first to seventeenth centuries BCE. They survive on many hundreds of coffins, and beyond them on tomb walls, on masks, on canopic chests, and on a handful of early papyri. The standard modern edition gathers more than a thousand distinct spells, though no single burial ever carried anything close to the whole; a coffin held the selection its owner, or his priests, judged he would need.

The corpus did not begin from nothing. Behind it stood the Pyramid Texts, the oldest body of religious writing to survive from Egypt, cut into the burial chambers of Old Kingdom kings to carry a dead pharaoh up among the gods. Many of those royal spells reappear, reworked, among the Coffin Texts — adapted for a coffin rather than a stone chamber, for an official rather than a king — and around them gathers a great mass of new material with no Old Kingdom precedent: the long transformation spells, the addresses to ferrymen and gatekeepers, the cosmographies. The Oriental Institute’s own description of the corpus calls the Coffin Texts the missing link between the Pyramid Texts and the Book of the Dead; the phrase understates the case. The Coffin Texts are not a stage passed through on the way to something else but a body of mortuary thought larger and stranger than either the corpus before them or the one that followed.

The democratization question

The conventional name for what happened between the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts is the democratization of the afterlife: a literature once reserved for the king, descending to provincial governors, treasurers, stewards, and their households. The phrase is old. James Henry Breasted gave it its first developed form in Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt in 1912, reading the spread of Osirian funerary spells from the royal tomb to the private coffin as the moral widening of a hope — the offer of the next world extended, at last, beyond the throne.

Recent scholarship has pressed hard on that account, and in places dismantled it. The people whose coffins carry these spells were not a populace; they were a narrow elite of nomarchs and high officials, the same stratum that had always commanded the resources of an expensive burial. Mark Smith, surveying the evidence in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, argues that the supposed democratization rests largely on negative evidence — on what does not happen to survive from the Old Kingdom — and that no such single transfer of privilege can be shown to have occurred at all. Harold Hays, in a study pointedly titled the death of the democratization of the afterlife, makes a related case: non-royal Egyptians had mortuary equipment of their own well before the First Intermediate Period, and the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts form a continuum rather than a fence between king and commoner. What the spread of the spells more plainly registers is political: the collapse of central authority after the Old Kingdom, and the rise of provincial dynasts powerful enough — at Deir el-Bersha, at Asyut, at Meir — to be buried with the language of a king. The older formula survives as a serviceable shorthand, provided its limits are held in view: fewer souls were saved than the word suggests, and the saving was a function of rank and wealth, not of any leveling of the dead.

Equipment for the journey

What the spells furnish is not consolation but equipment — words that do work in a specific and dangerous place. The dead person is addressed throughout as identified with Osiris, the god murdered and dismembered by his brother and reassembled into the first of the resurrected; in the recurring formula of the texts the deceased becomes the Osiris so-and-so, taking the dead god’s name before his own, and what was done for the god is to be done for him. So provided, he must cross a netherworld full of hazard. He passes hostile gatekeepers, each of whom must be answered with the right name. He takes other forms at need — a falcon, a heron, a flame, the god of the air, a living soul that goes out by day and returns. He is fed, and given water, and made to breathe. He is taught how to avoid the two indignities the texts most fear for him: walking upside down, and eating filth or excrement in place of bread. These are not metaphors loosely held. The netherworld of the Coffin Texts is a literal topography with literal perils, and the spell is the means of survival within it.

The forms the dead may take are cataloged with particular care, in a long series of transformation spells that let him become the falcon of gold, the lily, the ram, the bull of offerings, the divine flame, or the air the gods breathe — each form a capacity he gains, a way of moving or hiding or being fed that the deceased in his own body could not. Other spells secure the lesser but indispensable goods of an Egyptian afterlife: the reuniting of the dead man with his family in the beyond, the keeping of his head upon his shoulders, the command of the cool north wind, the right to a plot in the Field of Offerings and the strength to plow and reap it. The same anxieties recur across the corpus — hunger, thirst, suffocation, disorientation, the loss of the parts of the self — and against each the texts set a word.

Threaded through these protections is a theology of the saving word. To know a name was to have power over its bearer; to pronounce a formula correctly was to compel the world it described; to depict a thing — a falcon’s body, a route, a table of offerings — was to make it real and available to the dead. This is the domain Egyptian thought called heka, the efficacious creative force that the written sign, the spoken name, and the painted image all carried. The Coffin Texts are not literature in the modern sense, composed to be read and admired; they are ritual instruments, placed where the dead could reach them, working by their mere correct presence whether or not any living eye ever fell on them again.

The Book of Two Ways

Among the new compositions the Coffin Texts brought into being, the most extraordinary is the sequence Egyptologists call the Book of Two Ways. It comes above all from the coffins of Deir el-Bersha, the cemetery of the governors whose nome had its capital at Hermopolis, the city of the god Thoth, master of writing and of the divine word. Drawn most often across the floor of the coffin — under the body, the ground the dead would walk — it is not a list of spells but a picture: an actual map of the beyond. Two routes run through it, one of land and one of water, drawn as parallel tracks and divided along their length by a lake of fire. Both lead, by their different dangers, toward Rostau and the Field of Offerings, the domain of Osiris where the blessed dead are fed forever. Way-stations, guardian demons, walls of flame, and the gates between regions are marked along the routes, with the words required to pass each. It is among the earliest cosmographic guides to the world after death that any culture has left — and, in its union of picture and caption into a single navigable whole, a claimant to the title of the oldest illustrated book.

That claim grew sharper in recent years. Excavating at Dayr al-Barsha in 2012, a team from KU Leuven recovered, in a much-disturbed shaft, the coffin of a woman named Ankh, of the family of the governor Ahanakht, carrying fragments of the Book of Two Ways — among them parts of the spells de Buck numbered 1128 and 1130. Other objects in the grave date it to the reign of Mentuhotep II, who reunified Egypt and died around 2010 BCE, making this the earliest known copy of the composition, older than any previously recorded by roughly a generation. Harco Willems published the fragment in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology in 2018, and the find drew wide notice as a candidate for the oldest illustrated book yet known. What it changed was not the character of the Book of Two Ways but its depth in time: it pushed back, by a single governor’s lifetime, the point at which Egypt had already drawn the road through the dark and written down the way to walk it. The map answers a practical anxiety the spells make plain. The dead do not arrive in the next world oriented; they arrive lost, among gates that will not open to a stranger and fires that consume the unprepared, and the Book of Two Ways is the diagram that tells them which way to turn.

The line of descent

The Coffin Texts stand in the middle of a sequence that runs for the better part of two thousand years, and they are best understood neither alone nor as a mere bridge. Before them, the Pyramid Texts: royal, carved in stone, reserved for the pharaoh and the precincts of his pyramid at Saqqara and elsewhere. After them, in the New Kingdom, much of the coffin material — selected, re-edited, freshly illustrated, and recopied — was set down on papyrus rolls and laid beside the dead in the tomb, the collection the Egyptians called the Book of Coming Forth by Day and that later scholars named the Book of the Dead. Its famous scene of the heart weighed against the feather of truth is the lineal descendant of this older equipment. A separate New Kingdom genre, the Underworld Books of the royal tomb — the Amduat, the Book of Gates — should not be confused with this private mortuary line: those chart the sun god’s nightly passage and belonged to the king’s tomb, not the individual’s coffin. The Coffin Texts are the central member of the civilian sequence: stone gives way to wood, the king’s monopoly to the provincial elite’s coffin, and the coffin in turn to the portable papyrus that any sufficiently prosperous Egyptian could buy.

The afterworld these texts map is also the matrix from which later Egyptian sacred geography drew — the same Osirian theology that the great temples would elaborate for millennia, the cult of Isis and Osiris that endured at Dendera and Philae into the Roman age, and the reputation of Egypt as the land where writing, names, and images held real power that Greek and Roman readers later fixed onto the figure of Hermes Trismegistus. The conviction at the heart of the Coffin Texts — that the right word, exactly known, carries the dead safely through — was already ancient when those later traditions formed, and it is a conviction the corpus shares with the broader Egyptian practice of efficacious ritual speech and image.

Edition and study

The decipherment of hieroglyphs by Jean-François Champollion, announced to the Académie des Inscriptions in 1822, made the funerary literature legible for the first time, and the great museum projects of the late nineteenth century began to publish it. Samuel Birch issued an early coffin in Egyptian Texts of the Earliest Period from the Coffin of Amamu (British Museum, 1886), and Pierre Lacau gathered further religious texts in his Textes religieux égyptiens (1910). But the corpus acquired its modern shape through a single sustained undertaking. The Egyptian Coffin Texts Project, begun by James Henry Breasted and Alan Gardiner in 1922, was carried to completion by the Dutch Egyptologist Adriaan de Buck, whose The Egyptian Coffin Texts appeared from the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute in seven volumes between 1935 and 1961. It was de Buck who collated the witnesses, assembled the variants spell by spell, and fixed the numbering — Spells 1 through 1185 — by which the corpus is cited; that numbering is itself a piece of twentieth-century scholarship, and the concordances built on it remain in copyright. A later eighth volume, James P. Allen’s edition of the Middle Kingdom copies of Pyramid Texts (Oriental Institute, 2006), extended the series to gather the older royal spells as they recur on coffins.

The standard English translation is Raymond Faulkner’s The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, published by Aris & Phillips in three volumes between 1973 and 1978 and later reprinted in one — the version through which most readers without hieroglyphic Egyptian meet the corpus. The Book of Two Ways has its own monographic treatment in Leonard Lesko’s The Ancient Egyptian Book of Two Ways (University of California Press, 1972). The democratization debate that frames the whole corpus is set out in Breasted’s Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912) at its origin and in Mark Smith’s Encyclopedia of Egyptology survey at its present, critical state. The principal pre-1929 English gateway to Egyptian funerary religion remains the work of E. A. Wallis Budge — superseded in its philology by Faulkner, Allen, and Erik Hornung, but the path by which the English-speaking world first met the dead of Egypt; the Library holds his Book of the Dead and his Egyptian Magic.

What the Coffin Texts preserve, finally, is a moment in Egyptian thought about death caught between two more famous books and unlike either: more various than the royal spells in stone, less standardized than the papyrus rolls that came after, willing to imagine the netherworld in detail and then to draw it. A man of the Middle Kingdom went into the ground with the map under his body and the names of the gatekeepers along his coffin’s walls — fed, breathing, free to take the shape of a falcon and rise, and provisioned for the long walk to the field where Osiris keeps the bread that does not run out.

→ In the library: The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani) — Budge (1913) · Budge — Egyptian Magic (1899)

→ Related: Pyramid Texts · Book Of The Dead · New Kingdom Underworld Books Amduat Book Of Gates · Ancient Egypt · Dendera · Heliopolis · Hermopolis Magna · Isis · Thoth · Hermes Trismegistus · Magic