Maspero, Sethe, and the Long Descent to Everyone Else

The texts were unknown until 1880, when workmen under Gaston Maspero, then head of the Egyptian antiquities service, opened the pyramids of Pepi I and Merenre at Saqqara and found the chambers covered in inscription. Unas followed in 1881. Until that moment the interiors of Old Kingdom pyramids had been assumed to be plain, and the discovery pushed the documented history of Egyptian religious writing back by close to a thousand years. Maspero published progressively from 1882 and issued a collected edition in 1894; Sethe's critical edition of the Old Kingdom material two decades later established the text and the numbering that scholarship still uses.

The utterances themselves are certainly older than the walls they are cut into. The language is archaic even by Old Kingdom standards, several passages appear garbled by copyists who no longer fully understood them, and some material presupposes burial customs that had gone out of use. How much older is unknown and probably unknowable, since nothing survives from the period in which they would have been transmitted orally or on perishable material.

What happened afterwards matters as much as the origin. In the Old Kingdom this was royal property. By the Middle Kingdom much of the same stock, reworked and expanded, is painted inside the coffins of officials as the Coffin Texts, and from those descends the Book of the Dead, available to any Egyptian who could pay for a papyrus. The corpus that began as the exclusive equipment of a dead king ended as a purchasable commodity, and its individual utterances were still being copied into private tombs and temple walls two thousand years later.