The Book of Gates enters the record in the late Eighteenth Dynasty, its earliest known appearance in the burial chamber of Horemheb, the general who closed the Amarna interlude as king, where it displaced the Amduat's customary position; the choice of the newer composition by a restoration-minded court suggests the book carried the prestige of a fresh synthesis.
Ramesside kings used it lavishly: Ramesses I's small chamber holds its scenes, Merenptah and the later Ramessides spread it through corridors and halls, and Ramesses VI's tomb pairs it wall for wall with the Book of Caverns. Its most complete single monument is not a wall but a coffin, the translucent alabaster sarcophagus of Seti I, engraved inside and out with the entire composition and filled once with the king; hauled to London by Giovanni Belzoni's expedition and refused by the British Museum over price, it stands today in Sir John Soane's Museum, the finest Egyptian object in Britain by many judgments. The final scene it carries is the book's theological summation, unique in Egyptian art: Nun, the primeval ocean, lifts the solar barque bodily out of the depths while Nut receives the sun above, the cosmos itself handing the reborn god from night to day. After the New Kingdom the book's use thinned faster than the Amduat's, though excerpts recur into the Late Period; modern study, from Champollion's first descriptions to Hornung's editions, secured its place beside the Amduat as the second pillar of the genre.