Pyramid Texts

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.

The central concern is the king's survival and his passage upward. The utterances repeatedly deny that he is dead, insist he has gone away living, and describe his ascent by ladder, by ramp, on the smoke of incense, on the wings of a bird, or carried by the sunbeams. He arrives among the imperishable circumpolar stars, joins the sun god in his barque, or takes possession of the Field of Reeds, a cultivated afterlife landscape that later texts develop at length.

Running alongside this solar and stellar material is the identification of the dead king with Osiris and of his successor with Horus, which supplies both a resurrection model and a theory of legitimate succession. The two strands, ascend to the sky, and become Osiris, are not obviously compatible and are not reconciled. Egyptian religious texts habitually hold several accounts of the same thing at once, and the Pyramid Texts are the earliest large demonstration of that habit.

The most notorious passage is the so-called Cannibal Hymn, utterances 273-274, in which the king hunts, cooks and eats the gods in order to absorb their powers and become the greatest of them. It appears in Unas and again in the pyramid of Teti and then disappears from the royal corpus, though versions resurface much later in the Coffin Texts. Whether it preserves a genuinely archaic ritual memory or is a piece of extravagant metaphor about acquiring divine attributes is disputed and cannot be settled from the text alone; what is certain is that it was dropped, which suggests later Egyptians found it as startling as modern readers do.

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.