The Funerary Texts


The Funerary Texts

Nevertheless, the netherworld was a strange and potentially dangerous place, and the Egyptians were not a society to leave even a sure thing to chance, especially when eternal life was the reward. And they didn't: over the course of some 2,500 years they recorded an elaborate series of "funerary texts," made up of special types of spells (or "utterances"), which together described the necessary rituals that should be performed for the dead, and also provided crucial instructions to be used by the dead in the afterlife. It is largely from these texts, written in columns on royal tomb walls (the "Pyramid" texts), on coffins (the "Coffin" texts), and on papyri (in later collections called "books") left in mummy tombs, that we have learned from the Egyptians about how they saw the world and the promise of life after death.