Duat

• 1. The Hidden Place

  ›

  The Duat, also spelled Tuat and written in hieroglyphs as dwꜣt, was the ancient Egyptian realm most often associated with death. As the Egyptian language shifted over the centuries, the same realm came to be called Te and Amenthes. Surviving funerary writings place walls of iron, lakes of fire and trees of turquoise inside it. They also describe it as the setting where the sun god Ra was reborn every night. How could one place hold both the sleeping dead and a rising sun? What waited there for a person who had just died? And why do the surviving texts never agree on what the Duat looked like?

  3589

• 2. A Map of the Beyond

  ›

  The west bank of the Nile was the part of the living landscape most closely tied to the dead. Burial chambers there were treated as touching-points between the everyday world and the Duat. Funeral barges even imitated the sun god Ra as he crossed the sky by day.

  The Duat itself was described with surprisingly ordinary features. Texts speak of rivers, islands, fields, paths and lakes. The whole realm was dark. It was divided by a series of gates, and twelve guarded gates marked the twelve hours of the night. Those gates were closely linked to the journey of Ra.

  Most of the realm went by the name Shetit, a dangerous land whose name is translated as The Beyond. Other titles were just as unsettling. The Hidden Place was said to be a region where neither mortals nor gods were present. The Road of the Secret Things of Re-stau was the road Ra followed on his nightly passage. Somewhere along this route stood the Hall of Truth, which one text places in the sixth hour of Ra's journey.

  34517

• 3. Gods of the Underworld

  ›

  Hundreds of deities were connected to the Duat over the long span of Egyptian history, but a few appear again and again. Osiris was lord of the realm and the personification of rebirth. His own story involves death, since his brother Seth killed him and his wife Isis partly revived him. Artists showed him as a man with green skin, partly wrapped in bandages.

  Anubis was the son of Osiris and Nephthys. His duties covered embalming and mummification, and he guided souls into the Duat after death. He wore the black head of a canine, most often assumed to be a jackal. Horus, son of Osiris and Isis, was the heir to Osiris and the protector of Ra on his journey below.

  Thoth was drawn as an ibis-headed man holding a stylus and a tablet. Ammit, the devourer, was a creature with a crocodile's face, a lion's mane and front half, and a hippopotamus's hindquarters. She is often shown beside the scales in copies of the Book of the Dead. The last great figure was Ma'at, who was both a goddess and the very idea of order, balance and truth.

  895171

• 4. Weighing the Heart

  ›

  Forty-two Assessors of Ma'at awaited the dead in the Hall of Truth. Before reaching them, the deceased had to survive various challenges while moving through the parts of the Duat. The first task at the hall was to address each Assessor correctly by name. At the same time, the dead person recited the sins they had not committed in life.

  Once the Assessors were satisfied, Anubis placed the person's heart on a scale. The counterweight was the feather of Ma'at, which stood for truth and justice. Thoth stood by to record the verdict. A heart heavier than the feather had failed, and Ammit devoured it. A heart lighter than the feather passed what the sources call this most important test, and its owner was allowed to travel on to Aaru.

  11141079

• 5. Paradise and Punishment

  ›

  A'aru, also called the Field of Reeds, was the reward waiting for the virtuous dead. It was imagined as a paradise where people could live their former lives alongside loved ones, free of pain and suffering. Harvests of crops are a common scene in pictures of A'aru. Believers held that the harvests never failed and that the land stayed in eternal spring.

  The Duat should not be confused with Hell as the Abrahamic religions imagine it, where souls suffer fiery torment. In ancient Egyptian thought, the worst fate was not pain but erasure. A person whose heart was eaten by Ammit lost any afterlife and ceased to exist in intellectual form. For the blessed and the sleeping alike, one visitor each night mattered more than any reward: the sun god.

  75814

• 6. Ra's Night Journey

  ›

  Each night Ra entered the Duat in the ram-headed form known as Af. He crossed beneath the world on his Atet barge, travelling from west to east. Along the way he changed from the aged Atum into the youthful Khepri, the new dawning sun.

  His path was not safe. Apep, the personification of darkness and true chaos, tried to devour Ra and plunge the world into eternal disorder. According to the Amduat, Ra fought Apep so that order could return to the earth each morning.

  The journey also gave something to the dead. As the sun's rays lit the Duat, they revived its occupants and let them enjoy life after death for the hour they spent in the sun god's presence. Afterward they went back to sleep and waited for his return the following night.

  The dead king, worshipped as a god, was often shown as identical with Ra. He travelled with the sun god through the kingdom of Osiris, using special knowledge recorded in the Coffin Texts. Those texts served as a guide to the hereafter for all the deceased, not only for kings.

  148917

• 7. Competing Texts

  ›

  The Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, the Coffin Texts, the Amduat and the Book of the Dead all describe the Duat. Each one served a different purpose, and each pictures the realm in its own way. The Book of the Dead, also called the Book of Coming Forth by Day, is among the most studied texts in Egyptology. Its version of the Duat is therefore the one most often treated as the standard picture of Egyptian afterlife belief.

  The Book of the Dead and the Coffin Texts were collections of spells and prayers. Their job was to protect the dead from the dangerous landscape of the Duat. None of the available sources sets out a coherent geography or a single setting. Instead they describe a succession of rites of passage that the dead had to pass in order to reach eternal life. That lack of one fixed map left plenty of room for later storytellers.

  1431711

• 8. Modern Retellings

  ›

  Rick Riordan's The Kane Chronicles series uses the Duat as a major location. In The Crown of Ptolemy, the Duat is revealed to be connected to the Mist from Riordan's Camp Half-Blood Chronicles. The video game Assassin's Creed Origins also makes the Duat an important part of its story. Its main character, Bayek, enters the realm multiple times.

  In 2022, the Disney+ series Moon Knight brought the Duat to television in the episode titled Asylum. There the goddess Taweret guides Marc Spector and his alter Steven Grant through the afterlife after they are killed by Arthur Harrow. Earlier still, Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs sent a time-travelling gunslinger into the realm. In his book The Western Lands, the anti-hero Kim Carsons explores the Duat and confronts its inhabitants.

  1213