The Pyramid Texts of Unas: Spells for a King Who Would Not Die

In 1880 workmen of Egypt's Antiquities Service broke into a ruined pyramid at Saqqara, the pyramid of the Sixth-Dynasty king Pepi I. They found its inner walls covered in columns of hieroglyphs. Auguste Mariette, the head of the service, was dying and doubted the report: no Old Kingdom pyramid had ever been found inscribed. His successor, Gaston Maspero, pressed on. In 1881 he entered the smaller, older pyramid of Unas, last king of the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2350 BCE). From floor to ceiling its chambers were carved with spells, the signs filled with blue pigment. Above them, on the gabled ceiling, were carved stars. It is the oldest large body of religious writing known from anywhere in the world.

The texts

• 283 spells (called utterances in older scholarship) in the pyramid of Unas. Later pyramids of the Sixth Dynasty kings and some queens add others, giving a corpus of about 800.
• They cover the burial chamber, the antechamber and the corridor: the route the king's spirit (ba) was believed to take from the sarcophagus out towards the sky.
• They were written for no living reader: sealed inside the pyramid, they worked by being there, in the belief that written words, like spoken ones, acted.
• They were published by Maspero from 1882 and edited by Kurt Sethe (1908–1922), whose spell numbers are still used. Standard English translations are by R. O. Faulkner (1969) and James P. Allen (2005).

What the spells do

Deny death. "You have not gone away dead: you have gone away alive" (Utterance 213) opens the burial-chamber texts. The king becomes Osiris, the god who died and lives again, and at the same time joins the sun-god Ra in his daily journey.

Feed the dead. An offering ritual lists bread, beer, linen and ointment with a spoken formula for each, so that the king would be provided for for ever, even if the priests stopped coming.

Protect. Among the oldest spells are short charms against snakes, scorpions and other dangers, some in language that was already archaic.

Ascend. The king climbs to the sky by a ladder, rises on smoke, or flies up on wings as a bird, to join the "imperishable stars", the circumpolar stars that never set.

The "Cannibal Hymn." In Utterances 273–274 the sky is darkened and the stars tremble as the king appears as a hunter who catches, cooks and eats the gods, "their magic in his belly", and so takes in their power. It shocked early Egyptologists. It is now read as a ritual image of royal supremacy, drawing on the language of sacrifice and butchery, not as evidence of real cannibalism.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Writing that could hurt. In some Pyramid Texts, hieroglyphs of dangerous creatures, such as snakes, scorpions and lions, are cut in half or drawn without legs, so that the signs themselves could not come alive and harm the king. This is some of the clearest evidence for the belief that hieroglyphs were living images (see Egypt, ch02).

Blue and stars. The signs were filled with blue, the colour of the sky and of the waters of creation, and the ceilings were carved with five-pointed stars, making the burial chamber an image of the night sky the king would enter.

The cartouche. The king's name Unas (wnjs) is written inside a cartouche, the oval ring of rope that symbolised all that the sun encircles: the king as ruler of the world. The cartouche in the interactive object spells his name in hieroglyphs.

Connections

Egypt (ch02), Sacred Kingship (ch49), Journeys to the Underworld (ch47), and The End of Days (ch50). The Pyramid Texts are the ancestors of the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead; see the Papyrus of Ani (V20).

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/pyramid-texts-of-unas.html