Osiris and the Democratization of the Afterlife

The defining religious development of the Middle Kingdom was the wider availability of funerary texts that the Old Kingdom had reserved for the king alone. Officials and their families now had the Pyramid Texts' spells rewritten, expanded and painted onto the interior of their wooden coffins as the Coffin Texts, a change modern Egyptologists have called the democratization of the afterlife, since it extended the promise of a blessed existence after death well beyond the royal house that alone could claim it under the Old Kingdom.

Alongside this textual shift, the cult of Osiris, god of the dead and of resurrection, rose to national prominence, centered on his cult site at Abydos, where private individuals across the social scale erected memorial stelae and cenotaphs to associate themselves with the god's annual mystery festival and his promise of rebirth, even when they were buried elsewhere. Osiris increasingly absorbed the funerary role that royal solar theology had dominated in the Old Kingdom, so that a Middle Kingdom burial identifies the deceased with Osiris rather than exclusively with Ra, a shift that would deepen further in the New Kingdom's Book of the Dead. The Twelfth Dynasty also formalized the Sed festival and royal jubilee rites and continued temple building for Amun at Thebes, a comparatively minor cult in the Old Kingdom that the Middle Kingdom's Theban rulers began to elevate toward the position it would hold as state god of the New Kingdom empire.