The Pyramid Texts: Egypt's oldest religious inscriptions

In the inner chambers of the pyramid of Unas, last ruler of the Fifth Dynasty, the walls are covered with columns of hieroglyphs carved and painted blue. They are the oldest Egyptian religious texts of any length to have reached us, datable to around the twenty-fourth century BC. Egyptologists call them the Pyramid Texts: a collection of spells meant to accompany the dead king on his journey to the sky.

The inscribed pyramids of Saqqara

After Unas, the practice of inscribing the burial chambers continued with the kings of the Sixth Dynasty, Teti, Pepi I, Merenre and Pepi II, and with some queens, such as Neith, Iput and Wedjebetni. One of the last inscribed pyramids is that of King Ibi, of the Eighth Dynasty. All lie in the necropolis of Saqqara, near the ancient capital Memphis.

The texts were not visible to the living. They were carved in closed, sealed rooms intended solely for the dead king. Their purpose was to ensure that the sovereign could rise again, overcome the obstacles of the afterlife and join the gods. Each spell, called by scholars an «utterance» or «spell», could be recited or simply be present on the wall, effective by the very fact of being written.

The discovery of 1880-1881

Until the nineteenth century it was believed that the pyramids contained no inscriptions. Auguste Mariette, founder of the Egyptian antiquities service, was convinced of it. Between 1880 and 1881, however, the first inscribed chambers were discovered, and Gaston Maspero, who succeeded Mariette as head of the service, explored several of them at Saqqara, including that of Unas. Mariette died early in 1881, just as the discovery was being confirmed.

Maspero published the texts over the following decade. The standard edition was then that of the German Egyptologist Kurt Sethe, published between 1908 and 1922 under the title Die altägyptischen Pyramidentexte, which organised and numbered the spells. In 1969 Raymond Faulkner published a complete English translation, widely used by scholars.

The king's destiny in the sky

The Pyramid Texts describe the king's ascent to the sky in many ways: as a ladder, as the flight of a bird, as a boat crossing the celestial waters. The sovereign joins the circumpolar stars, which never set, and the sun god Ra, but he is also identified with Osiris, the god who dies and is reborn. The two perspectives, solar and Osirian, coexist without apparent contradiction.

Among the most discussed spells is the so-called Cannibal Hymn, found in the pyramid of Unas, in which the king appears as a power that absorbs the strength of the gods. Other texts are prayers, offerings of food and spells of protection against snakes and dangerous creatures. Many spells contain mythological references unknown from other sources, which remain hard to interpret.

The Pyramid Texts are the foundation from which much of Egyptian funerary literature would derive. In the Middle Kingdom many spells were taken up in the Coffin Texts, and later some passed into the Book of the Dead. To read them is to return to the origins of Egyptian religious thought on death, in the oldest form that writing has preserved for us.