Pyramid Texts

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The Pyramid Texts are the oldest substantial body of religious writing to survive from Egypt — a collection of spells, or “utterances,” cut into the inner walls of royal pyramids during the closing centuries of the Old Kingdom. They first appear in the pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, late in the Fifth Dynasty, around the twenty-fourth century BCE, and recur in the pyramids of his Sixth Dynasty successors and of several queens. Carved into the burial chamber, the antechamber, and the passages between, they were never meant to be read by the living; they were written for the dead, and for the one occupant each pyramid was built to hold.

Their purpose was to secure the king’s passage into the next life and his place among the gods. The utterances do not tell a single story. They gather rites of offering and protection, formulae against snakes and hunger, and above all the language of ascent — the dead king rising to the sky, joining the circumpolar stars that never set, taking his seat in the boat of the sun, in places even overpowering the gods to claim their power for himself. Some of the material is plainly older than the pyramids that preserve it, drawn from priestly ritual and oral formula that the carving merely fixed in stone; how much older, and from how many separate strands, scholarship cannot fully recover.

The corpus is the first member of a sequence. In the Middle Kingdom many of the same spells, adapted and expanded for officials and not only kings, were painted on the wooden coffins of the non-royal dead — the Coffin Texts. From those in turn descended the New Kingdom compilation that Egyptians called the Book of Coming Forth by Day, known since the nineteenth century as the Book of the Dead, the papyrus version the library holds in Budge’s edition. Across that long line the afterlife is steadily democratized: what once belonged to the king alone became, over a thousand years, available to anyone who could pay for the text.

The texts speak in the voice of a religion centered on the king’s fate, in which death is a transition to be managed by ritual knowledge rather than an ending. They are a primary source for the names and relations of the early Egyptian gods, and for ideas — the imperishable stars, the solar voyage, the weighing of the dead — that would echo through Egyptian thought for two millennia and, much later and at several removes, feed the Greek and Roman image of Egypt as a land of hidden wisdom. Their immediate concern, though, is narrower and more concrete: to get one man safely through the wall of death and out the other side.

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

→ Related: Coffin Texts · Dendera · Hermes Trismegistus