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Liber II · Ancient Magic

Liber II · Ancient Magic · Chapter III: Egyptian Magic

The Pyramid Texts: Egypt's Oldest Spells in the Tomb of Unas

The Pyramid Texts explained: the oldest Egyptian religious spells, carved in the pyramid of Unas at Saqqara to protect the king and lift him to the stars.

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The Pyramid Texts are the oldest large collection of Egyptian religious spells, carved in hieroglyphs on the inner walls of royal pyramids at Saqqara from the reign of Unas, last king of the Fifth Dynasty (usually dated to the twenty-fourth century BCE). They gave the dead king ritual words to protect his body, repel dangers, receive offerings and rise to join the sun god and the undying stars.

The Pyramid of Unas at Saqqara§

Before Unas, the great pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty at Giza were silent inside: their burial chambers carried no religious inscriptions. Unas's modest pyramid at Saqqara, south of the Step Pyramid of Djoser, broke with that custom. The walls of its burial chamber, antechamber and part of the entrance corridor are covered with columns of finely cut hieroglyphs, many filled with blue pigment, beneath ceilings painted with stars.

The interior was first entered in modern times in 1881, during the excavations directed by Gaston Maspero, who published the inscriptions of Unas and the following pyramids over the next decade. The great German edition by Kurt Sethe (1908–1922) divided the material into numbered "utterances", now usually called spells; this numbering of roughly seven hundred and fifty items, later extended as new fragments were found, is still used. Unas's own pyramid holds well over two hundred of them.

After Unas, the kings Teti, Pepi I, Merenre and Pepi II of the Sixth Dynasty inscribed their pyramids, as did several queens of Pepi II and a minor king, Ibi, of the following period. No two pyramids carry exactly the same selection, which suggests that priests drew on a larger body of ritual texts and chose and arranged them for each burial. Many spells use older grammar and spellings than the reign of Unas, so most Egyptologists think the texts had a long prehistory in oral performance and temple ritual before they were committed to stone. The wider religious background is described in Ancient Egyptian Religion.

What the Spells Contain§

Modern editors group the Pyramid Texts into a few broad kinds of material, although the categories overlap.

Offering and resurrection rituals§

The north wall of Unas's burial chamber carries a long offering ritual: short formulae spoken as the priest presented water, incense, natron, oils, linen, bread, beer and joints of meat, each one identified with a mythic act such as the restoring of the eye of Horus. Related spells address the king as Osiris, the murdered god whom his son Horus avenged and revived, and urge him to wake, gather his bones and take his throne in the next world.

Hymns and spells of ascent§

Many spells describe the king leaving the earth: climbing a ladder, flying as a falcon or goose, rising on smoke or crossing the waters of the sky by ferry. His goal is twofold. He joins the sun god Ra in his daily voyage, and he takes his place among the "imperishable" circumpolar stars of the northern sky, which never set. The texts move freely between these solar, stellar and Osirian images without trying to reconcile them.

Protective spells§

A third group protects the body and the tomb. Short spells against snakes, scorpions and other dangerous creatures are carved in the gables and on walls near the sarcophagus, often in archaic or obscure language. Some scholars have argued that a few of these snake spells preserve phrases in an early Semitic language, though this reading is debated.

The "Cannibal Hymn"§

Two spells in the antechamber of Unas, known since the nineteenth century as the Cannibal Hymn, depict the king hunting, cooking and consuming the gods so that he absorbs their power and knowledge. Most scholars read the hymn as a vivid metaphor of royal supremacy over divine forces rather than a memory of real ritual cannibalism, and it did not survive into later funerary collections.

Heka: The Power of the Spoken Word§

Egyptologists often call the Pyramid Texts spells, and the term is fair as long as it is understood in Egyptian terms. The Egyptians had a word, heka, for the effective power by which the creator god brought the world into being and by which gods, priests and the dead could act upon it. Heka was also personified as a god. It was not opposed to religion: it was part of the same divine order, and priestly ritual depended on it.

The Pyramid Texts are therefore built around speech that does things. They name gods and command dangers, identify the king with deities so that their victories become his, and use wordplay in which similar-sounding words bind objects to mythic meanings. Formulae are often in the first person, so that the king himself speaks, and many begin with the instruction "Words to be spoken". The texts assume that correct speech, written in durable signs, would continue to act for eternity even after the burial rites ended.

This idea of written words as permanent ritual is visible in one striking scribal habit. In some later pyramids, hieroglyphs depicting snakes, scorpions or even human figures were cut in half, left without legs or pierced, so that the images themselves could do no harm inside the tomb. The same logic stands behind the protective objects described in Amulets and Talismans. For the place of Egypt in the general history of ancient ritual power, see What Is Ancient Magic?

Reading the Texts as a Journey Through the Tomb§

How should the spells be read in sequence? Scholars have proposed several orders. One influential interpretation, developed by James P. Allen, treats the architecture of the pyramid as a map of the afterlife. The burial chamber corresponds to the Duat, the hidden realm where the dead and the sun regenerate during the night; the antechamber corresponds to the akhet, the "horizon" where the sun rises; and the corridor leads outward toward the sky.

On this reading the spells begin with the rituals spoken over the body in the burial chamber, proceed through texts of awakening and transformation, and end with spells of emergence and ascent near the exit, so that the king's spirit follows the path of the rising sun. Other scholars emphasise that the texts derive from several distinct rituals—offering services, mortuary liturgies and personal recitations—and that their placement may reflect the order in which they were performed during the funeral as much as a single cosmological plan. Both approaches agree that the inscriptions were not decoration but working texts tied to specific spaces.

From Royal Privilege to Wider Use§

In the Old Kingdom the Pyramid Texts belonged to the king and, later, the royal women. After the collapse of central authority at the end of the Sixth Dynasty, versions of many spells reappear in the Middle Kingdom on the inner walls of wooden coffins belonging to officials and local elites. These "Coffin Texts" combine adapted Pyramid Text spells with many new compositions, including guides to the paths of the underworld.

Older scholarship described this change as a "democratisation of the afterlife", in which hopes once reserved for the king spread to ordinary people. Recent work has qualified the idea. Non-royal Egyptians clearly hoped for an afterlife long before the coffins, and the inscribed coffins themselves belonged to a privileged minority. What changed was access to a particular body of written ritual, not the existence of afterlife belief.

From the New Kingdom onward the Book of the Dead took up the same role on papyrus, and it absorbed some Pyramid Text spells in revised form. The story of that collection is told in The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Later still, in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, priests and officials of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty deliberately copied Pyramid Texts in their own tombs as part of a wider revival of Old Kingdom art and language, showing that the inscriptions remained readable and prestigious nearly two thousand years after Unas.

Significance for the History of Religion and Magic§

The Pyramid Texts are among the oldest substantial religious texts anywhere in the world, and they offer a rare view of a royal theology at an early stage. They show the importance of Osiris already established by the late Fifth Dynasty, the centrality of the sun cult of Heliopolis, and a cosmology in which the king's survival depended on ritual speech that bound him to the gods.

For the history of magic they are equally important. They demonstrate that, in Egypt, protective and transformative formulae were not marginal practices of folk healers but part of the highest state ritual. Names, identifications with gods, threats against hostile beings and confidence in the power of written signs all appear here in developed form. These features recur in later Egyptian healing spells and, much later, in the Greco-Egyptian handbooks discussed in The Greek Magical Papyri. European readers knew nothing of the Pyramid Texts until 1881, yet the reputation of Egypt as a land of hidden wisdom, discussed in Hermes Trismegistus, rests in part on the genuine antiquity of the traditions they preserve.

Frequently asked questions§

Who wrote the Pyramid Texts?§

No author is named. The spells were composed and transmitted by priests over a long period, probably partly in oral form, and were selected and arranged by the specialists who planned each royal burial. Their language suggests that some material is considerably older than the pyramid of Unas.

Are the Pyramid Texts in the Great Pyramid of Giza?§

No. The Giza pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty contain no religious inscriptions. The first pyramid with texts is that of Unas at Saqqara, built at the end of the Fifth Dynasty, a little over two centuries after Khufu.

What is the difference between the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead?§

They are three stages of one evolving tradition of funerary ritual. The Pyramid Texts were carved in royal pyramids of the Old Kingdom; the Coffin Texts were painted inside Middle Kingdom coffins for elite non-royal burials; the Book of the Dead was written on papyrus from the New Kingdom onward. Each reused and reworked material from its predecessors.

Can the Pyramid Texts be read today?§

Yes. They have been edited and translated several times, notably by Kurt Sethe, Raymond O. Faulkner and James P. Allen. Their language is archaic and many passages remain obscure, so translations differ, but the general meaning of most spells is well understood.

Sources and further reading§