Centers of Writing or Drawing the Afterlife: Rituals and Eternal Regeneration

From 2500 to 525 Bc, images and words relating to embalming and burial are preserved on stone or painted plaster walls of offering chapels and, less often, burial chambers and on manuscripts made for the tomb or, rarely, used in rituals and then, in unknown circumstances, deposited as part of burial equipment (Assmann 2005). The earliest evidence comes from late third-millennium BC chapels of officials (Table 7.1 Burial scenes) and includes the ritual for consecrating statues, later applied to embalmed body (Opening the Mouth; see Table 7.2) A little later are inscriptions first found in underground chambers in pyramids of kings and their wives and so known in Egyptology as Pyramid Texts (Table 7.3). These are inscribed without any explicit overall order, and Egyptologists have debated how far they combine into longer sequences as liturgies (Hays 2012). From the end of the Old Kingdom, the compositions are attested outside the royal court (shroud of Medunefer, oasis governor, about 2200 bc; burial chambers of two high officials at Hutnennesut, perhaps a century later). During the following period, they appear alongside a developing branch of similar writing in the newer phase of the language, Middle Egyptian, and named in Egyptology Coffin Texts, because the most common medium is now the coffin. These are inscribed on the walls, lid, and floor of wood coffins or painted limestone burial chambers for regional governors and their entourages. The line between (inscribed) Pyramid Text and (handwritten)

Table 7.1 Burial scenes: The principal phases in depictions (2500-525 Bc) (Altenmuller 1975)

1.  Lament over the dead and procession of coffin from the house

2.  Procession of coffin by boat to place of embalming

3.  Offerings in the place of purification (of the body in embalming), installed as Sais

4.  Procession of coffin to a place of meat offerings, ritually named Sau (Sais)

5.  Procession of coffin on ox-drawn sled from Sau to Pe and Dep (Buto)

6.  Ritual dancers (muu) receive the coffin in Pe and Dep

7.  Procession of coffin to sunlit space, ritually named lunu (Heliopolis)

8.  Lament and purification; Opening the Mouth ritual; censing

9.  Dragging the coffin into place

10.  Procession of ritual crouching figure, named tekenu; censing

11.  Procession of the canopic chest, bearing papyrus stems

12.  Offering ritual

13.  Delivery of burial equipment, meat offerings

14.  Placing the coffin in the burial chamber

15.  Circuit of the statue

16.  Concluding rites

Table 7.2 Opening the Mouth and Eyes: The consecration ritual of images and bodies (Otto 1960)

Sources with longest series of episodes, all from Waset

1.  Offering chapel of Vizier Rekhmira at Thebes (Theban Tomb 100, 1400 bc)

2.  Tomb of King Sety I at Thebes (Valley of the Kings, 1300 bc)

3.  Tomb of Queen Tausret (Valley of the Kings, 1225 bc)

4.  Coffin of a man named Butehamun, secretary of the king's draughtsmen (Waset, now in Turin: no depictions, 1050 bc)

5.  Tomb chapel of the god's wife of Amun Amenirdis at Thebes (Madinat Habu)

6.  Tomb of a chief lector Padiamenipet (Theban Tomb 33)

Those fullest versions, with eighty additional shorter sources, record seventy-five ritual episodes, around the core of rites to animate the statue, including the crucial meat offering Episodes 1-9: preliminary rites

Episodes 10-22: sculpting and animation of the statue, including “sleep of the sem” Episodes 23-42: meat offerings aligned with Upper Egypt Episodes 43-46: meat offerings aligned with Lower Egypt Episodes 47-71: funerary meal Episodes 72-75: closing rites

Table 7.3 Principal Pyramid Text themes (for the corpus, see Allen (2005))

1.  Meals, cleansing, clothing, and especially the great offering list (23-171) and the accompanying rituals (204-212)

2.  Protection against enemies and against harmful creatures

3.  Bodily integrity and revival, especially around reassembling limbs, parts of body (heart, head, and bones, opening the mouth); release from wrapping; refrain Wake!; and address to children of Horus as they lift deceased and carry

Divine forms: star, swallow, falcon, Nut, Satet, ka of all gods, son of Atum/great one; kingship and rule, inheriting the throne

4.  Ascension: opening door of sky, rising to sky, decree of Nun to Atum to admit deceased to sky; ferrying (with purification and ascension); knowing name of Ra and reaching him; sun hymn

Coffin Text is not always easy to draw, but in later periods, the Old Egyptian grammar and spelling of Pyramid Texts seem to be consciously maintained as important points of distinction, with different proportions of each copied on coffins at different periods within 2000-1800 bc (Allen 1996). Certain sequences (liturgies?) in both branches also have separate histories. Otherwise, the thematic content seems broadly similar (Tables 7.3 and 7.4).

Coffins of a dozen wealthy individuals buried at the desert cemetery east of Khemenu, 1950-1850 bc, include on the coffin floor a composition designed as a graphic journey through the afterlife (Lesko 1972). Egyptologists have named this the Book of Two Ways, from one section with a black (earth) and blue (watery) path divided by a band of red (fire). Much of the accompanying wording reappears in later periods as compositions “to make the akh excellent.” In this period, too, the phrase “Going Out by Day” begins to emerge as technical term for the overall aims

Table 7.4 Principal Gojfin Text themes (cf. Barguet 1986)

1.  Food and clothing; not eating filth or walking upside down

2.  Protection against enemies, driving off Rerek-snake, Aapep, serpent, bird; escaping the net

3.  Bodily integrity and revival: power over the head, mouth, legs, limbs, heart, sexual potency, heka; reassembly of limbs, burial; not rotting; preventing theft of heka, head, heart; having property/inheritance, having family, constructing tomb; power over water, air, the four winds, breathing; not working in afterlife

Divine forms: ra, Atum, ruty, Horus, Osiris, Thoth, Imsety, Isis, Nun, Shu, reret, Nehebkau, Nile Flood, hathor, Khentykhem, Grain, Hu, Anubis, Baba, falcon, swallow, morning star, secretary of Atum/ra/hathor; be beside gods

4.  Free entry into next world, free movement there; opening door to heaven/underworld/ west; sailing to Iunu, landing, uniting the riverbanks, ferrying across winding water, river, sky; knowing paths to sky; knowing names of underworld places, knowing ba-souls of sacred places (Iunu, Djedu, Khemenu, Pe, Nekhen, eastern, western) ascension, tying together ladder in/to sky; going out by day

Of this literature. After 1600 bc, compositions begin to be copied on shrouds for burials of women and officials at the court at Waset. Then, after 1450 bc, comes a major change in medium and formal presentation; the compositions begin to be written regularly on papyrus book-rolls and combined with polychrome illustrations that echo coffin and temple wall decoration. From these papyri, Egyptologists name the Going Out by Day corpus the Book oj the Bead (Allen 1974). Each papyrus contains its own selection of content from a repertoire of about 150 compositions in circulation at any one time (Table 7.5).

Despite the flexibility, writers express the separateness of the corpus, when they comment that some passages are “added from another papyrus in addition to the Going out by Day” or, at Waset in the period 1000-850 bc, when they deposit with most individuals two papyri: one marked Going Out by Day and the other What Is in the Underworld (Niwinski 1989). The second papyrus draws from great compositions in the tombs of kings in the Valley of the Kings, 1450-1100 BC, dominated by images, projecting the night journey of the sun (Hornung 1990). The earliest version bears the ancient title Book oj the Hidden Chamber Which is The Underworld, abbreviated as imy-duat, “What Is in the Underworld”; the night is described in a sequence of twelve hours, with individual names to the figures depicted. Accompanying this, the Book oj Adoration ojRa celebrated in a litany the sun-god unfurled into 75 forms (in Egyptology named Litany of Ra), with passages on the mystery of the night union of Ra with Osiris as the Joined Ba-soul. During the reign of Akhenaten, the tomb of the king at Akhetaten was decorated instead with scenes of palace life and mourning and designed to include the burials of the women closest to him. After Akhenaten, new compositions proliferate in the tombs of kings at Waset, starting with a version of the imy-duat teeming still with images, but without the continuous naming of each feature; the first of these is the Book of Gates (ancient title unknown). The different versions cover similar themes, but

Table 7.5 Principal Going Out by Day (Hook of the Dead) themes (cf. Barguet 1979)

1.  Food and clothing; not eating filth or walking upside down; depiction of Marsh of Reeds with eternal miraculous harvest (tableau and accompanying writings chapter 110); receiving offerings as ka-spirit

2.  Protection against enemies, driving off rerek-snake, Aapep, crocodiles, serpents, worms, bugs, the two chant-goddesses

3.  Bodily integrity and revival: power over (or preventing theft of) the head, mouth, heart, movement, name, heka; reassembly of limbs; not rotting; not being butchered; power over water, air, the four winds, breathing; not working in afterlife; eternally active embalming rituals (tableau chapter 151)

Protection by material form of head cover (mask), headrest, broad collar, tiyet-amulet, djed-pillar (stability)

4.  Declarations of divine identity as ra, Atum, ruty, Osiris, Thoth, son of Hathor; be beside gods/Thoth/hathor

Divine forms: netjer, greatest of the tribunal, living ba-soul, Ptah, falcon (of gold), heron, benu-heron, swallow, snake, lotus

5.  Free movement into/in next world; opening door to heaven/underworld/imehet-chamber; ferrying across sky; knowing underworld place-names/ba-souls of sacred places (Iunu, Djedu, Khemenu, Pe, Nekhen, eastern, western); going out by day

6.  Passing the judgment of the dead, with scene of weighing the heart against right (tableau chapter 125)

7.  hymns to ra and Osiris without exact correspondence of contents for each segment of the night; the tenth hour of imy-duat depicts those marked as blessed by drowning, whereas the Book of Gates places this in the ninth (Table 7.6). Evidently, these descriptions of night cycle deploy motifs more with poetic than with literal force, even if the numerical measurements and precision of names produce an exact geographical effect. Dominant themes include the law-giving role of the sun-god (Hours 1-9), the punishment of enemies (Hours 10-12), and the life-giving light of the sun, even for the embalmed dead (Book of Gates, Hour 8).

Besides the Underworld Books, the ancient writers also kept other compositions separate from the core Going Out by Day, either never copied onto the papyrus books for the afterlife or included so rarely that they remain at the margins. This seems more a question of tradition, perhaps history of restricted use, than of theme. For example, the motif of eternal revival through the scent of the lotus flower appears in the Going Out by Day corpus as a short passage alongside the tall image of lotus flower on stem, found on dozens of papyri (1450-50 Bc). On the same theme, but never included in Going Out by Day manuscripts, a longer poem is preserved on a restricted range of sources, including temples for king and gods. In the earliest version, on the miniature chapel monument of a palace keeper of baboons, Amenyseneb (1800 Bc), the poem begins (Vandier 1963):

Formula for the floral garland of every day, brought to the mound-chapel. This is the great one, going out from the land, crossing the sky,

Going out from heaven, great power, born of Geb, who drives away Seth in his raging,

Who pushes back against the desert-people as they journey, the Nine Gods shrink back at the knowledge of his name, the one who grows from the body of that noble Marshland, the one who brings the body of the East, that assists Nemty.

In its references to deities and its poetic vocabulary, the composition that never entered the Going Out by Day corpus does not differ from the compositions that did. Thus, content alone does not explain why one composition and not another should have been included in the corpus. The reasons may lie in the place and timing of recitation, where some passages may have been confined to kingship, while others were considered more appropriate for the book for obtaining an afterlife. The manuscripts from each period set different boundaries of practice; for example, after 650 bc, papyri often include hymns to the sun-god and Osiris, previously found only in temple settings or in inscriptions more closely connected with the king. The focus and borders of sanctity are social constructs, changing over time.