Pyramid Texts

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Pyramid Texts are the oldest religious writings ever recovered from ancient Egypt, carved into stone sometime around 2400-2300 BCE. They were not meant for human eyes. Sealed inside the subterranean chambers of pyramids at Saqqara, these columns of hieroglyphs were addressed to the dead, intended to carry a pharaoh through the darkness and into the sky. What were these spells meant to do? Who was allowed to use them, and who was not? And how did they survive thousands of years to reach us?

• 2. The Discovery at Saqqara

  ›

  Gaston Maspero arrived in Egypt in 1880. A French archaeologist and director of the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, he chose his first dig site based on a hill in South Saqqara that had been mapped by the Prussian Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius back in 1842. What Maspero found there was the ruin of a large structure he concluded was the pyramid of Pepi I of the Sixth Dynasty. When he reached the subterranean rooms, the walls were covered in hieroglyphic text.

  Maspero contacted Auguste Mariette, the director of excavations in Egypt at the time, to report what he had found. Mariette rejected the finding outright. No writing had ever been found inside a pyramid before, so Mariette concluded the structure must be a mastaba, a flat-roofed tomb of a different type entirely.

  Maspero pressed on. Around one kilometer south-west of the first site, he identified a second structure as the pyramid of Merenre I, successor to Pepi I. Inside, the same hieroglyphic text covered the walls. This time Maspero visited Mariette in person. On his deathbed, Mariette still refused to accept it, saying he had never in thirty years of Egyptian excavations seen a pyramid whose underground rooms bore hieroglyphs.

  Maspero did not stop. Throughout 1881, he directed investigations across Saqqara and found the same texts in the pyramids of Unas, Teti, and Pepi II. He began publishing his findings in the journal Recueil des Travaux from 1882. In 1894, he published the first complete corpus of the texts in French under the title Les inscriptions des pyramides de Saqqarah.

• 3. The Scholars Who Translated Them

  ›

  German Egyptologist Kurt Heinrich Sethe produced translations into German between 1908 and 1910 in a work called Die altägyptischen Pyramidentexte. The concordance Sethe published became the standard version of the texts, the one all subsequent scholarship built from. Sethe's work identified 714 distinct spells in total.

  Samuel A. B. Mercer translated Sethe's German work into English in 1952. British Egyptologist Raymond O. Faulkner then produced a fresh English-language edition directly from the source material in 1969, under the title The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. Later excavations at Saqqara eventually brought the total count of recorded spells to 759, though no single published edition contains all of them.

  Between 1926 and 1932, Gustave Jéquier conducted the first systematic investigations of the pyramids of Pepi II and his wives, Neith, Iput II, and Wedjebetni, as well as the pyramid of Qakare Ibi. Jéquier published the complete corpus from all five of those structures. Since 1958, successive expeditions under Jean-Philippe Lauer, Jean Sainte-Fare Garnot, and Jean Leclant undertook a major restoration project at the pyramids of Teti, Pepi I, Merenre I, and Unas. By 1999, the pyramid of Pepi I had been opened to the public, and its full corpus of texts was published in 2001. In 2010, still more texts were discovered in the tomb of Behenu.

• 4. What the Spells Were For

  ›

  The central goal of every text in this corpus was the transformation of the dead pharaoh into an akh, a spirit form that could mix with the gods. The spells were divided into two broad types: sacerdotal texts and personal texts.

  Sacerdotal texts were ritual in nature. A lector priest addressed the deceased directly, in the second person. These included offering spells, short recitations accompanying gifts to the dead, and predominantly instructional passages. They appear within structures identified as the Offering Ritual, the Insignia Ritual, the Resurrection Ritual, and in four pyramids, the Morning Ritual. The writing style of these so-called Dramatic Texts suggests they were formulated as early as the Second and Third Dynasties.

  Personal texts served the spirit directly. One category, the provisioning texts, depicted the dead king taking command of his own food supply and demanding nourishment from the gods. A specific example of this type appears in the king's response found in Unas' pyramid. A second type, called the Sakhu or Glorifications, guided the spirit's transformation into an Akh and its ascent into the sky, mirroring the motion of the gods. These texts form the largest portion of the entire corpus and were composed mainly in the Fifth and possibly Sixth Dynasties. A third type, the apotropaic texts, are short protective spells against threats to the body and tomb. Their archaic style of writing marks them as the oldest texts in the collection, and the most difficult to interpret.

  The utterances were meant to be chanted aloud. They were full of action verbs: fly, leap, climb. They described every possible route a pharaoh might take to reach the afterlife, including ramps, stairs, ladders, and flight. The spells could summon the gods to help, and even threaten them with consequences if they refused.

• 5. Inside the Pyramid of Unas

  ›

  Unas, the last pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty, ruled from around 2353 to 2323 BCE. His pyramid, situated in North Saqqara between those of Djoser and Sekhemkhet, was the smallest built in the Old Kingdom. Its core was constructed in six steps of roughly dressed limestone, then encased in carefully cut fine white limestone. The base measured 57.75 meters per side; the incline of 56 degrees gave it a height of 43 meters.

  The entrance passed through a chapel on the north face, leading down a sloping corridor, through a chamber with three granite portcullises, and into a horizontal passage guarded by a fourth portcullis. That passage ended at an antechamber. To the east sat the serdab, a room with three recesses for statues. To the west lay the burial chamber holding the king's sarcophagus.

  Apart from the walls immediately around the sarcophagus, which were lined with alabaster and painted to resemble reed mats within a wood-frame enclosure, every surface of the antechamber, burial chamber, and a section of the horizontal passage was covered in vertical columns of hieroglyphs. Unas' sarcophagus itself was left without inscription.

  A total of 283 spells appear in this pyramid. They form the smallest and best-preserved corpus from the Old Kingdom. Copies of nearly all of them spread into later periods: all but a single spell, PT 200, appeared again in the Middle Kingdom, including a near-complete replica inscribed in the tomb of the Twelfth-Dynasty High Priest Senwosretankh at El-Lisht. The causeway of Unas' pyramid ran 750 meters long and remains in good condition today.

• 6. The Cannibal Hymn

  ›

  Utterances 273 and 274 from the pyramid of Unas carry the name "the Cannibal Hymn", because on their surface they appear to describe the king hunting and eating the gods. The passage declares that Unas is "the bull of heaven, who rages in his heart, who lives on the being of every god, who eats their entrails when they come, their bodies full of magic from the Isle of Flame."

  When the hymn was first published, the scholar Renouf cautioned against reading it literally. He observed that the passage echoes how the goddess Nut, understood as the sky, causes the stars to disappear at dawn in the way that a sow might eat her offspring. Unas, as the dawn sun, absorbs the stars. Utterance 217 reinforces this reading by describing the king in stellar form being "swallowed up" at dawn alongside the other stars.

  The same hymn that uses such violent imagery also closes with a passage of reciprocal love: "May I be with you, you gods; may you be with me, you gods. I love you, you gods; may you love me, you gods." The butchery and the devotion exist in the same text, side by side.

  The Cannibal Hymn represents an early royal butchery ritual in which the deceased king, assisted by the god Shezmu, slaughters and incorporates the gods as sacrificial bulls to gain their divine powers. Outside the pyramid of Unas, only the pyramid of Teti also displays this hymn. The text later reappeared in the Coffin Texts as Spell 573, then was dropped entirely by the time the Book of the Dead was being copied.

• 7. Queens, Curses, and Continuity

  ›

  Pyramid Texts were not confined to kings. During the Old Kingdom, texts also appeared in the pyramids of three queens: Wedjebten, Neith, and Iput. All three are associated with the Sixth Dynasty, and all three are believed to have been wives of Pepi II.

  The pyramid of Neith preserved her texts in better condition than those of the other two queens. The structure of the queens' tombs was simpler than those of the kings, but the placement of the texts followed analogous conventions. The Resurrection Ritual appeared on the east end of the south wall, just as it would in a king's pyramid. Because Neith's tomb had no antechamber, spells that would have gone there were instead written on the south wall.

  The texts in Neith's pyramid share a feature with the kings' texts in that they shift between first and third person, and her name appears throughout to personalize them. Many of the pronouns are male, a reflection of how closely the queens' texts mirrored the royal template, though a few female pronouns do appear.

  Utterance 534, found only in the pyramid of Pepi I, shows a different dimension of the texts entirely. Known as the Curse Hymn, this apotropaic text was aimed at anyone who might damage or rob the pyramid. It warned that a person who raised a finger against Pepi's enclosure "has given his finger against Horus's Enclosure in the Cool Waters," and would be left without a house, cursed, reduced to eating his own body. The presence of this text only in Pepi I's pyramid marks it as a singular artifact within the broader corpus, and Pepi I's texts were not published in their complete form until 2001.