Book of Caverns

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Book of Caverns is an Ancient Egyptian underworld book from the New Kingdom, and in the tomb of Ramesses VI its passages cover the walls completely. Texts of this kind turn up in tombs and temples, written for the dead. This one tells a story set in the world beneath the earth. Who is its traveler, and what does he do to the beings he meets there? How is a book without pages organized? Why did the first scholars to see it mistake it for part of something else? And why was it carved in the deepest rooms of royal tombs? The answers begin with a journey through the night.

  111216

• 2. Ra in the Duat

  ›

  Twelve caverns make up the Duat, the Egyptian underworld, and the sun god Ra must pass through all of them during the twelve hours of the night. The book follows his progress and, above all, his dealings with the residents of each cavern. Some of them he punishes, and others he rewards, depending on how they behaved. The caverns therefore serve two purposes. They are a place of punishment for souls who displeased Ra in life, and a sanctuary for the righteous. Artists marked the guilty clearly. Ra's enemies appear either decapitated or with their hands bound behind their backs. The night ends with a change of state. Ra is reborn in the morning by merging with Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. The book also offers a few hints about how the underworld was imagined to be laid out, though the specifics are still unknown. Strangely, the walls that carry this story are not divided into twelve parts at all.

  1112131416

• 3. Six Divisions

  ›

  Seventeen sections make up the book as it appears on tomb walls. Six are main divisions, and the rest are several litanies plus a final scene showing Ra's rebirth. The material mixes text and image in different ways. Some sections hold only writing, some pair writing with pictures, and a few are pictures alone. Where there is text, it records the conversations Ra has with the deities of the underworld. The six main divisions form two parts of three tableaux each, followed by one closing tableau for the rebirth. Here the book differs from other underworld books. Its six divisions match neither the hours of the night nor the twelve caverns. Because of this, readers have often wrongly concluded that the book describes an underworld of only six caverns. The first division opens at a set of doors guarded by serpents.

  1112141613

• 4. Ra Meets Osiris

  ›

  Serpentine doorkeepers bar the way in the first division, and the upper register shows Ra persuading them to let him through. In the same register, the corpse of Osiris lies in several pieces, which stresses that the two gods are still separate. The Ennead, a group of guardian deities, escorts Ra to the Western Necropolis.

  Ten scenes fill the second division, which continues the bargaining with the doorkeepers. It also shows the death of Osiris.

  Thirteen scenes make up the third division, where Ra finally passes through the doors. Here the first sign of union appears. Ra's sun disk is drawn resting on top of an image of Osiris. This pairing begins around the third hour of the night and recurs until the moment of rebirth.

  Nine scenes in the fourth division bring Ra together with Isis, Nephtys, Anubis and Horus. The third and fourth divisions pay special attention to the damned, the dead who displeased the gods.

  Nut, the mother of Ra, enters in the fifth division, and her presence signals that his rebirth has begun. Several deities stand around the reassembled body of Osiris.

  Scarab beetles and a sun disk rise from mounds of earth in the sixth division, standing for Ra and Osiris. Another scene shows a mummified figure, the usual form of Osiris, wearing the ram's head that normally marks Ra. This image fuses the two gods just before the dawn.

  In the final tableau, Ra emerges in the morning in several forms: a child, a scarab beetle and a ram-headed deity. Which of the book's two great themes, punishment or union, mattered more to the Egyptians remains an open argument.

  111121416

• 5. Carved in Stone

  ›

  On the left hand wall of the Osireion, a mortuary temple to Seti I at Abydos, stands the earliest known version of the book. That inscription is almost complete, and only its upper register is damaged. The book itself dates to the Ramesside Period in the 13th century BC. Copies then appear in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings during the 19th and 20th dynasties. In the tomb of Ramesses VI, the book sits opposite the Book of Gates at the front of the tomb, echoing the arrangement in the Osireion.

  Eight sites in all preserve the book, but only the Osireion and the tombs of Ramesses VI and Ramesses IX hold versions described as complete. In royal tombs, the Book of Caverns often decorates the burial chamber, alongside the Book of Gates and the Book of Earth. New Kingdom tombs often echoed the route of Ra's journey through the twelve caverns in their very architecture. So the burial chamber, the deepest room, is thought to stand for the end of that journey. There Ra unites with Osiris in the form of the buried king's mummy.

  Thirteen text witnesses are known today. A funerary papyrus of queen Nodjmet and a papyrus amulet of Butehamun both date to the mid-11th century BCE. In the second half of the 7th century BCE, the book was carved in the tomb of the official Montuemhat and in that of the lector priest Pediamenopet. It also reached the sarcophagi of the general Petiese and of Tjihorpto, the latter dated to the 4th century BCE. The first modern writer to describe the walls of Ramesses VI did so in a letter from Thebes.

  568916

• 6. A Book Without a Name

  ›

  Jean François Champollion wrote about these walls in his 13th letter from Thebes. He described the inscriptions and images in the tomb of Ramesses VI, but he had no name for the work. His findings appeared in the 1844 edition of Notice Descriptions. In the same year, he also published a manuscript detailing the inscriptions he had found in other tombs across the Valley of the Kings.

  The title came decades later. Eugène Jean Baptiste Lefebvre first called it "The Book of Caverns" in volume 3 of Les Hypogées Royaux de Thèbes, published in 1889.

  Another copy was brought to light by the archaeologists Margaret Murray and Flinders Petrie, who excavated the Osireion in 1902 and 1903. They found it on the left wall of the entrance passage, directly across from the Book of Gates. Murray then published her results. A modern-language translation had, in fact, appeared even before Champollion's publication.

  2131416

• 7. Translators and Editions

  ›

  Ippolito Rosellini gave the first translation of a few sentences from the tomb of Ramesses VI in 1836. Champollion followed with some translations in his 1844 manuscript. After that, scholars showed little interest for about a century, until a second complete version turned up in the Osireion.

  Between 1942 and 1945, Alexandre Piankoff published a French translation. In 1954 he issued an English translation containing both text and images from the reliefs. Together with several articles he wrote between 1942 and 1958, it forms the basis of current English scholarship on the book.

  Erik Hornung produced a German translation in 1972. A second English version is a rendering of Hornung's German book. The latest translation comes from the German scholar Daniel Werning and rests on a new text critical edition. Even with these editions, historians disagree about what the book was for.

  13121611

• 8. Misreadings and Debates

  ›

  Margaret Murray first took the book to be a section of the Book of Gates, since she found it facing that text in the Osireion. It has also sometimes been theorized to belong to chapter 168 of the Book of the Dead. Closer study has disproved these early readings.

  Purpose is the larger question. Some historians argue that the book chiefly shows the unity of Ra and Osiris during the journey through the caverns. Others see its focus as the punishment of the enemies of these gods. Both aspects are prominent in the text and images, and scholars still debate which one drove the Egyptians who created it. Each copy, from the Osireion to the sarcophagus of Tjihorpto, offers another chance to test those readings.

  1112131614