Pyramid Texts

The Pyramid Texts are a large collection of spells, prayers and ritual speeches carved on the walls of the underground rooms of Egyptian royal pyramids. They are written in Old Egyptian, the earliest stage of the Egyptian language, and are the oldest large group of religious texts known from ancient Egypt, and among the oldest religious writings anywhere in the world.

They first appear in the pyramid of Unas, the last king of the Fifth Dynasty, who ruled around the 24th century BC. Kings of the Sixth Dynasty and a king of the Eighth Dynasty, as well as several queens, also had them carved in their pyramids, all at Saqqara, the great royal cemetery of the ancient capital Memphis, near modern Cairo.

The texts had one main purpose: to make sure that the dead king would overcome death, be transformed into an akh, a glorified and effective spirit, and take his place among the gods in the sky. Unlike later funerary texts, they were not illustrated and, in the Old Kingdom, they were reserved for royalty.

The earliest great pyramids, such as those at Giza, have no writing in their chambers. Around 2350 BC this changed. In the small pyramid of Unas, the walls of the burial chamber, the antechamber and part of the corridor were covered with columns of hieroglyphs, carved in stone and filled with colour. The ceiling of the burial chamber was painted blue with stars, like the night sky.

The pyramid of Unas is the smallest pyramid of the Old Kingdom, only about 43 metres high, but its texts are the best preserved. It contains 283 spells. The walls around the stone sarcophagus were decorated to look like a reed-mat shrine, and the rest was filled with writing. Later pyramids of the Sixth Dynasty contain more texts and a greater variety of spells.

The placement of the texts was not random. Different rooms held different kinds of spells: rituals of offering near the sarcophagus, protective spells on the gables, and texts about leaving the tomb and rising to the sky in the antechamber and corridor. The architecture of the tomb and the words on its walls worked together.

Pyramid Texts were not only for kings. Three queens of Pepi II, Neith, Iput II and Wedjebetni, had texts carved in their own smaller pyramids, and in 2010 more were found in the tomb of another queen, Behenu. The queens’ tombs are simpler, and Neith’s pyramid has no antechamber, so spells that would normally be placed there were carved on other walls. Even so, the texts follow the same general plan as in the kings’ pyramids. Neith’s name is written throughout to make the spells her own, though many pronouns remain masculine, a sign that the texts were adapted from royal models.

Many spells tell the dead king to wake and rise. In one famous spell for Unas, the priest assures him that he has not departed dead but departed alive, and tells him to sit on the throne of Osiris and rule. Another spell, for King Teti, calls on him to lift his head, gather his bones, shake the earth from his flesh and take the bread that never goes stale and the beer that never turns sour.

The spells describe many ways to reach the sky. The king may climb a ladder held by the gods, go up a ramp or a stairway, ride a ferry across the waters of the sky, or fly as a falcon or on the wing of the god Thoth. If a ferryman refuses to carry him, the king threatens to find another way.

In the sky the king joins the sun god Ra on his daily voyage and becomes one of the “imperishable stars,” the circumpolar stars in the northern sky that never set below the horizon. He is also identified with Osiris, the god who was killed and brought back to life, and his son Horus acts for him. These different images of the afterlife, solar, stellar and Osirian, sit side by side in the texts.

Egyptologists divide the Pyramid Texts into two broad groups. The first are ritual or “sacerdotal” texts, spoken by a lector priest to the dead king in the second person (“you”). They include offering spells recited as each item of food, drink, cloth or incense was presented, and texts from rituals such as the Opening of the Mouth, which was believed to restore the dead person’s ability to eat, speak and see.

The second group are “personal” texts, which the king himself may speak or which concern his own transformation. These include provisioning spells, in which the king demands food from the gods; transition spells, also called glorifications (sakhu), about becoming an akh and ascending to the sky; and apotropaic spells, short protective charms against snakes, scorpions and other dangers.

The protective spells are written in an especially archaic style and are thought to be among the oldest material. The transition texts, which make up the largest part of the corpus, seem to be younger, composed in the Fifth and perhaps Sixth Dynasties. Some ritual texts may go back to the Second or Third Dynasty.

The Pyramid Texts are one of our main sources for early Egyptian mythology. They mention the creator god Atum, who produced the first divine couple, and the family of gods known as the Ennead of Heliopolis: Shu and Tefnut, the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut, and their children Osiris, Isis, Seth and Nephthys. Many later myths appear here for the first time, though often only in allusions.

The texts rely on ideas about the parts of a person. The ka was the life force that needed food offerings; the ba was a mobile aspect of the person, often imagined as a human-headed bird; the akh was the effective, transfigured spirit that the king hoped to become. The body, the name and the shadow were also important. Death was seen not as an end but as a dangerous transition that could be managed with the right words and rituals.

Language itself had power. Egyptians believed that correctly spoken or written words could make things happen. Some spells therefore address the gods boldly, even threatening them if they do not help the king. Priests occasionally altered signs of dangerous animals, such as snakes, or cut them in half in the inscriptions, so that the written creatures could not harm the king.

Spells 273–274, found only in the pyramids of Unas and Teti, are known in modern times as the “Cannibal Hymn.” In them the king, helped by the god Shezmu, hunts, butchers, cooks and eats the gods like sacrificial bulls, absorbing their magical power so that he becomes the greatest power in the sky.

Scholars read this text not as evidence of real cannibalism but as a mythological and ritual image. It echoes a butchery ritual and uses vivid metaphor and wordplay. The Victorian Egyptologist Peter le Page Renouf already warned against explaining such myths simply as memories of “savage” practices. Some connect the image with the sky goddess Nut, pictured as swallowing the stars at dawn.

Another unusual text, Spell 534 in the pyramid of Pepi I, is a curse against anyone who harms the pyramid. It is a reminder that the texts had practical aims too: to protect the royal tomb and its offerings as well as to guide the king’s spirit.

For centuries no one knew the texts existed. In 1880 the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero began digging at South Saqqara and entered a pyramid, which proved to be that of Pepi I, whose underground walls were covered in hieroglyphs. The leading Egyptologist in Egypt at the time, Auguste Mariette, refused to believe it was a pyramid, because no inscribed pyramid chamber had ever been found. Maspero found similar texts in the pyramid of Merenre and, in 1881, in those of Unas, Teti and Pepi II.

Maspero published the texts from 1882 onwards and brought them together in 1894 as Les inscriptions des pyramides de Saqqarah. The German Egyptologist Kurt Sethe then produced a standard edition, Die altägyptischen Pyramidentexte (1908–1922), which numbered the spells and arranged parallel versions from different pyramids; his numbering is still used. Samuel Mercer (1952), Raymond Faulkner (1969) and James P. Allen (2005) published English translations.

Excavations continued in the twentieth century. Gustave Jéquier studied the pyramids of Pepi II, his queens and King Ibi between 1926 and 1932. From 1958 a French mission under Jean-Philippe Lauer, Jean Sainte-Fare Garnot and Jean Leclant restored the pyramids of Unas, Teti, Pepi I and Merenre and reassembled thousands of fallen inscribed fragments. More texts were found in the tomb of Queen Behenu in 2010.

After the Old Kingdom, royal pyramids stopped carrying these inscriptions, but the spells did not disappear. During the First Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom, many of them, together with new compositions, were written inside the wooden coffins of officials and wealthier people. This collection, called the Coffin Texts, contains about 1,185 spells and places more emphasis on the underworld ruled by Osiris.

In the New Kingdom and later, a new collection developed, written mostly on papyrus rolls placed in tombs: the Book of the Dead. It includes descendants of some Pyramid Text spells, alongside illustrations such as the famous scene of the weighing of the heart. Pyramid Text spells were also copied in the tombs of officials, and in the Late Period there was a revival of interest in them.

One remarkable copy is in the tomb of Senwosretankh, a high priest of the Twelfth Dynasty at el-Lisht, which reproduces almost all of the Unas texts. This shows that the texts were preserved in temple or archive copies long after the pyramids were closed.

Although the texts were first carved in the 24th century BC, most Egyptologists believe many were composed earlier and transmitted orally or in writing on papyrus. The archaic grammar and spelling of some spells, references to practices of earlier periods, and the variety of their styles all suggest that the corpus is an anthology built up over a long time.

Scholars have tried to date individual spells by their language and content. The protective spells are usually seen as the oldest; the dramatic ritual texts may go back to the early dynasties; the large group of ascension spells seems to belong to the Fifth Dynasty, when the solar cult of Ra was especially important. Some spells mention burial practices or kinds of tombs that do not match the pyramids they were carved in, supporting the idea that they were adapted from older sources.

Why the texts suddenly began to be carved under Unas is still debated. Explanations include changes in religious ideas, especially the growing importance of Osiris; a wish to guarantee the rituals permanently in stone in case the funerary cult stopped; and developments in royal ideology at the end of the Fifth Dynasty. None of these is certain, and they are not mutually exclusive.

Early editions, including Sethe’s, treated the Pyramid Texts as a list of separate spells. Later research, especially from the 1970s onwards, has emphasised that each pyramid presents a carefully arranged programme. Scholars such as James P. Allen have argued that the texts should be read in relation to the architecture: the burial chamber represented the underworld (Duat), the antechamber the horizon (Akhet), and the corridor the way out into the sky.

On this view the texts trace the king’s journey from the sarcophagus, through the antechamber and corridor, towards the northern sky, matching the path along which his spirit was imagined to leave the pyramid. Other scholars have proposed different reading orders, starting at the entrance and moving inwards, following the funeral procession. Both approaches agree that the texts must be studied in their physical setting, not only as abstract texts.

The comparison of versions in different pyramids also shows how the texts were edited. Spells were selected, rearranged, adapted for queens (sometimes keeping masculine pronouns), and changed from first to third person. The texts of Queen Neith, for example, adapt the royal programme to a smaller tomb without an antechamber. This evidence helps scholars understand how Egyptian priests worked with a traditional body of religious knowledge.

The Pyramid Texts are a key source for the history of religion, language and kingship in Egypt. They show a king who is both a human ruler and a being destined to join the gods, whose afterlife is secured by ritual action. They preserve the oldest continuous texts in the Egyptian language and are essential for the study of Old Egyptian grammar.

A long-standing idea held that the afterlife was at first a royal privilege, and that the spread of funerary spells to non-royal people in the Coffin Texts represented a “democratisation of the afterlife.” Scholars such as Harco Willems and Mark Smith have criticised this model. They point out that non-royal people already had hopes and rituals for the afterlife in the Old Kingdom, and that the change was more about who could use certain written texts and royal symbols than about a sudden opening of eternity to all.

The texts also raise questions about how we translate and understand ancient religion. Their language is often allusive and full of wordplay, and the gods and places they mention can be interpreted in several ways. Different translations can differ considerably. This makes the Pyramid Texts both a treasure and a challenge for modern readers.