Term referring to a group of over a thousand spells, selections from vihich were inscribed on coffins during the Middle Kingdom, par-ticularl_ the 11th and 12th Dynasties (2055-1795 lic). Man of the Coffin Texts were derived from the nitwiin tkxts, a sequence of often-obscure spells carved on the internal walls of the Old Kingdom pyramids.
During the Old Kingdom the afterlife had been the prerogative of the king, who in death was identified with o. stin. s and transformed into a god. For this reason Old Kingdom courtiers sought burial close to the king, hoping for inclusion in his funerary cult so that they loo might be granted some form of afterlife, although the best that they could hope for was a continuation of their eanhl} status. However, with the collapse of the Old Kingdom came greater self-reliance and with 't a process which is sometimes described by Egyptologists as the di'.moc. r vit/a'I'Ion or tin-; AI'TI'Rufk. 'Phis meant that everyone could have access to the afterlife, \ ithout being associated directly with the royal cult. These neu aspirations of the deceased are set out in a collection of spells painted in cursive hieroglyphs inside the wooden coffin.
J he Coffin Texts were intended to jirovide a guarantee of survial in the afterworld and some of them are the ancestors of spells found •n the New Kingdom book oftmk Di-'.AD. They have titles such as the self-explanatory ‘Not to 'f>t and not to do work in the kingdom of the dead', and ‘Spell for not dying a second death', which was designed to prevent the deceased from being judged unfit to enter the kingdom of Osiris and so condemned to oblivion.
Both the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts present more than one version of the destination of the deceased: they might travel the sk> with the sun-god r or, alternatively, might pass down into the underworld of Osiris. T’his latter view became increasingly common from the time of the Coffin Texts onwards, setting the scene for the funcrarv beliefs of the New Kingdom.
R. O. ]'Li. K. R, The Egyptian Cpffn Texts.
3 vols (Warminster, 1973-8).
J. Spi;ci;r, Death in ancient Egypt (Ilarmondsworth, 1982), 141-2.
H. Wii.).i;ts, Chests of life: a study of the typology and conceptual development of Middle Kingdom standard class coffins (l. eiden, 1988), 244-9.
The internal decoration of the coffin of Gnu. inscrihed with extracts front the Coffin Texts. I2tb Dynasiy. c. I%S-l70S tic, painted mood, from Deir el-Bcrsha, /.. of coffin 2.0 m. (i:.i30S40)
World History
