Book of Gates

The book's architecture is announced in its modern name: between each hour of the night and the next stands a gate, drawn as a fortified portal with a coiled serpent upright on its door, attended by uraei and divine gatekeepers, and the solar barque may pass only when the serpent's name has been spoken. The night begins at the western mountain, where the ram-headed god enters the world between the horns of the horizon, and proceeds hour by hour through territories whose population is organised with an administrator's clarity: the blessed dead in their fields, provisioned and vindicated, the hostile bound and consigned to destruction.

Recurring actors give the book its texture. Atum walks ahead of the barque dealing with the enemies of his father; the crew tow the vessel through each region; and Apophis, the great serpent of dissolution, is met and mastered not once but repeatedly, chained by his captors so the voyage can continue. In the fifth hour stands the composition's celebrated ethnography, four groups of four men, the peoples of Egypt, the Levant, Nubia and Libya, each drawn with distinct dress and skin, all alike under the shepherding of Horus and Sekhmet, the netherworld receiving the whole of humanity. The judgment hall of Osiris interrupts the sequence near its middle, enthroned god, scales and condemned enemies, the only such tribunal scene in the royal netherworld books, written partly in cryptographic script.

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.