The Unas inscriptions are the earliest known and the model for what follows: 228 utterances, cut in fine relief hieroglyphs in vertical columns and filled with blue-green pigment, a colour associated with regeneration. They cover the burial chamber and antechamber and run along the corridor between them. The arrangement is not decorative. The sequences appear to be organised around the body and its movement, offering and resurrection texts nearest the sarcophagus, ascension material further out, so that the walls function as a ritual apparatus rather than a library.
The divisions are called utterances rather than chapters or spells, and their numbering comes from Kurt Sethe, whose edition of 1908-10 remains the reference system. Sethe printed 714; subsequent discoveries in later pyramids, including those of queens, have raised the known total to around 759. No pyramid carries the whole corpus, and the selections differ, which means the corpus as modern readers have it is a composite that never existed in one place.
One detail on the walls is worth stopping at. Many hieroglyphs depicting dangerous creatures, snakes, scorpions, lions, and human figures, are deliberately mutilated: cut in half, shown without legs, or pierced with knives. The reasoning is apotropaic and follows directly from Egyptian assumptions about writing. A written sign was not a neutral record of a thing but a version of it, capable of acting, and a viper carved intact in a sealed chamber with the king's body was a viper in the chamber. The practice is concentrated in the subterranean rooms of Old Kingdom pyramids and varies from pyramid to pyramid, which suggests decisions taken on site rather than copied from a master text.