The Coffin Texts and the Book of Two Ways

Between the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom and the Book of the Dead of the New Kingdom lies a third great corpus of Egyptian funerary literature: the Coffin Texts. These are spells written in ink, mostly in cursive hieroglyphs, on the inner walls of wooden coffins, from the First Intermediate Period and above all during the Middle Kingdom, roughly between the twenty-first and eighteenth centuries BC.

From pyramids to the coffins of notables

The most obvious change from the Pyramid Texts concerns the recipients. The spells were no longer reserved for kings and queens but appeared on the coffins of provincial governors, officials and members of local elites. Many coffins come from cemeteries in Middle Egypt, such as Deir el-Bersha, Beni Hasan and Asyut, as well as from Saqqara and other sites.

To describe this shift Egyptologists long spoke of the «democratisation of the afterlife», meaning the extension to private individuals of a destiny once reserved for the sovereign. The expression is now debated: some scholars point out that private people already had expectations of the hereafter and that inscribed coffins remained a privilege of the few. The phenomenon nonetheless remains a significant stage in Egyptian religious history.

Adriaan de Buck's edition

The systematic study of the Coffin Texts is owed to the Dutch Egyptologist Adriaan de Buck, who published in seven volumes, between 1935 and 1961, the text of more than a thousand spells copied from hundreds of coffins. His work, carried out in collaboration with the Oriental Institute of Chicago, established the numbering in use today, which counts some 1,185 spells.

Many spells take up the Pyramid Texts, adapting them to the private deceased, but many others are new. They include themes such as the transformation of the dead into birds, deities or flowers, protection from the dangers of the afterlife, reunion with the family and nourishment in the beyond. Several spells would later pass into the Book of the Dead.

The Book of Two Ways

A particular section, found above all on the floors of coffins from Deir el-Bersha, is known as the Book of Two Ways. It is regarded as the oldest illustrated guide to the afterlife. A painted map shows two routes, one by water and one by land, separated by a lake of fire and watched over by gates and guardians.

The deceased had to know the names of the guardians and the gates in order to proceed towards the realm of Osiris or the boat of the sun. The combination of text and image anticipates the great underworld books of the New Kingdom, such as the Amduat, painted in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. The Book of Two Ways shows how elaborate the geography of the afterlife already was in the Middle Kingdom.

The Coffin Texts are thus an essential link in the chain of Egyptian funerary literature. They gather the legacy of the pyramids, spread it among provincial elites and prepare the spells that would be copied onto papyri for more than a thousand years. For the historian they are also a precious witness to religious life in the provinces, far from the court.