Conclusion

According to the written sources, access to a beatified afterlife was not dependent on the possession of texts on one’s tomb walls. It was dependent on knowledge and ritual, both of which in the Egyptian world are epitomised in the language of recitation. Access to a desirable afterworld was dependent on these two features, and therefore it was necessarily linked to education and economic power, both of which were conditioned by the king’s mighty command.

He Pyramid Texts are a profoundly important manifestation of a wider body of mortuary literature that transcended the bounds of what has survived. Texts of this literature were also copied on perishable furniture and papyri, virtually all of which are lost. More than one social stratum contributed textual content to the Old Kingdom mortuary literature. Among the Pyramid Texts there were surely texts originally composed for non-royal persons. heir inclusion in the Pyramid Texts indicates that social categories of origin were not restrictive, but that texts were transported across social boundaries by adoption.

As is vividly brought home by the shared manner of pictorially representing the same stereotypical scenes of mortuary service, there was a common fund of rites equally valid for king and elite, and there is concrete evidence of their use for non-royal persons already in the fourth dynasty. Along with this, the fact that non-royal persons label certain kinds of texts as sshw in the Middle Kingdom gives one tangible basis to propose that the sshw shown performed in Old Kingdom elite tombs were precisely texts from the mortuary literature of which the Pyramid Texts formed part. hese same rites were those that made the deceased into an Akh. Upon their performance and through their knowledge, the dead were supposed to attain to an exalted state.

Not so the theory of the democratisation of the afterlife.