The Coffin Texts and the Democratization of Egyptian Afterlife

The Coffin Texts, composed in Middle Egyptian and inscribed on the interior surfaces of non-royal wooden coffins from the Middle Kingdom onward, expanded considerably on the earlier royal Pyramid Texts, incorporating new spells addressing the deceased's transformation into various divine and animal forms, protection from dangers in the underworld, and inclusion of an early version of the Book of Two Ways, a kind of illustrated guide to underworld topography that anticipated the later, more elaborate New Kingdom Book of the Dead.

Middle Egyptian religious and wisdom literature also produced significant non-funerary texts, including instructional wisdom literature offering ethical and practical guidance framed as advice from a father or sage figure, genres that carried implicit theological assumptions about maat, the Egyptian concept of cosmic and social order, truth and justice that pharaohs and ordinary Egyptians alike were understood to be responsible for upholding. Middle Egyptian's grammar and vocabulary, having been fixed as a classical literary standard, continued to be taught and used by Egyptian priests and scribes for monumental temple inscriptions throughout the later Ptolemaic and Roman periods of Egyptian history.