Pyramid Texts (-2300s to -2100s) are the endless columns of hieroglyphs you see on the walls inside later pyramids. They are the oldest surviving large body of writing about anything in any language. In this case they are in Old Egyptian and are religious – prayers, hymns, funeral rites, magic spells, and so on, to help the pyramid’s king or queen in the afterlife. They were the forerunners of the later Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead.
Time: They are found in the pyramids of the kings and queens who ruled for the 250 years from about -2375 to -2125, namely:
- 5th Dynasty: Unas.
- 6th Dynasty: Teti, Pepy I, Merenra, Pepy II (and his queens Neith, Iput II, Wedjebten).
- 7th/8th Dynasty: Ibi.
In Unas’s burial chamber they are carved into alabaster and painted in the blue of the watery abyss of the underworld.
Location: The pyramids that have them are in Saqqara, the ancient city of the dead near Memphis (near present-day Cairo). The famous pyramids, like the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Step Pyramid, do not have them. They are a later innovation. In fact, the pyramids that have them look like mounds of rubble. That is no accident: kings had lost faith in mere stone and placed it in magic spells.
Spells: The Pyramid Texts are made up of hundreds of spells or “utterances”. Some are just a line, others run on for several paragraphs. Pyramid Texts have between 236 and 675 spells. There are 759 different spells altogether. They were seen as so powerful that hieroglyphs of dangerous creatures, like lions or scorpions, were dismembered. Many of the spells would have been said during the funeral or later as part of the king’s cult.
Sources: Most probably came from the “secret knowledge” found in the now-vanished libraries of temples and palaces. Some utterances seem to be new – they mention pyramids or feature the latest in Osirian theology – while others seem to have been ancient even then – back to a time before mummies, before writing (before -3200).
Theology: The theology is mostly solar, the main Egyptian religion based on the god Ra, but some of it is based on the newer Osirian theology, or even the ancient stellar theology. The theologies are inconsistent with each other but also melt into each other right before our eyes: the theology changes markedly from the oldest to the newest Pyramid Texts.
Afterlife: There were several on offer even within the same Text:
- The king “becomes one with the imperishable stars”, one of the northern stars that never set.
- The ba part of his soul becomes a human-headed bird that flies between tree and tomb.
- The king travels to Osiris’s paradise, the Fields of Reeds (sḫt-jꜣrw) or Yaru, in the north-eastern heavens, guarded by the ferryman Turnface.
Democratization of the afterlife: Some of these spells show up later in the Coffin Texts (fl. -2055 to -1795) or even later in the Book of the Dead (after -1500). They offered the afterlife to more than just kings and queens, but one where the gods judge the dead.
– Abagond, +2023.
See also:
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Abagond 
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