Pyramid Texts

The ancient Egyptians worshipped Isis as far back as the third millennium BCE.

She's mentioned as the Great Isis in the so-called Pyramid Texts.

and she's probably best known as the wife and sister of the god Osiris.

You may have heard the story of her recovering Osiris's body parts and reviving him after he was killed and dismembered by his brother Seth.

In the late 5th dynasty, around the 24th century before the Common Era, workers and scribes covered chambers beneath the pyramid of King Unas at Saqqara with hieroglyphic texts.

These are the pyramid texts, the oldest large surviving body of Egyptian religious writing.

They were not written as a book of myths for curious readers.

They were funerary utterances.

To become Osiris is not to vanish.

It is to receive a form of life that death cannot simply cancel.

The Pyramid texts also preserve the conflict behind that promise.

They speak of Horus acting for Osiris.

But the reason it was called this is that one of the main focus in this text, and this is a focus to some extent also in the text that led up to it.

So you might have heard of, for example, the pyramid texts and the coffin texts, which really actually are not totally separate texts from the Book of the Dead.

But really, these are basically a continuum or like an evolution over time of these kinds of texts that were used.

And so really it's just about how they change over time rather than being completely distinct groups of texts.

And this is something that I talked about in a video I actually just recorded for my program, Master Scribes, all about the Book of the Dead and the texts that came before it and led up to it and how those evolve and what they were really for, how they were used, how they were made, and a lot of misconceptions about all of them.

including things like the pyramid texts, which you'll often hear were really just for royals, for example, and we talk about why that's probably not the case.

And this is just one of the many things that's in the program.

In Master Scribes, this is my six-month next-level program for learning hieroglyphs that includes all the curriculum you need to learn everything from the very basics up through more advanced texts like reading the Book of the Dead, and we have read multiple spells from the Book of the Dead in the program.

And to make life go as he wished, he must be able to please and propitiate or to coerce those forces outside himself.

The point of interest to us is that in the Pyramid Texts, the oldest chapter in human thinking preserved to us, the remotest reach in the intellectual history of man, which we are now able to discern.

One of their sixfold contents relates to the practice of magic.

A deep belief existed as to its efficacy, particularly in guiding the dead, who were said to be glorious by reason of mouths equipped with the charms, prayers, and ritual of the Pyramid Texts, armed with which alone could the soul escape the innumerable dangers and ordeals of the passage through another world.

Man has never lost his belief in the efficacy of magic, in the widest sense of the term.

Only a very few of the most intellectual nations have escaped from its shackles.

Hebrew Medicine.

The medicine of the Old Testament betrays both Egyptian and Babylonian influences.

This idea appears repeatedly throughout the oldest Egyptian religious literature.

The Pyramid Texts, carved into the burial chambers of the fifth and sixth dynasty pharaohs beginning around the twenty-fourth century BC, contain repeated references to the king ascending into the imperishable stars.

Rather than remaining forever within the tomb, the deceased ruler was expected to join the celestial realm, becoming one with the divine order governing the heavens.

Later funerary compositions, including the Coffin Texts and eventually the Book of the Dead, expanded these ideas beyond royalty, offering ordinary Egyptians increasing hope that they too might navigate the cosmic landscape after death through proper knowledge, ritual, and moral conduct.

And there are, there's like a ritual that, written and painted on the wall of the pyramids.

And by the way, are there eight pyramid texts? Something like that, seven or eight of them.

Over the course of a few hundred years, pyramids are built and there are different iterations of the pyramid text, but they're all basically the same thing.

And they are...

He becomes Osiris.

By the way, he also becomes a star.

So the pyramid texts, on the one hand, talk about how the king becomes Orion.

He is the constellation Orion.

Some people might call it the afterlife, some people, whatever you wanna call it.

That's why those, those inscriptions in the, uh, pyramid of Unas is known, uh, are known as the Pyramid Texts.

So you can look that up.

U-N-A-S, Unas, is the name of the Pharaoh.

She represented the ultimate crossroads where yesterday and tomorrow meet.

In the oldest magical spells ever found in Egypt, which are the Pyramid Texts, the deceased king tries to scare off the demons of the underworld by shouting the following, I have shattered the sky.

I have stepped on the earth because I am Bat with her two faces.

The claim that you were Bat meant that you had total all-seeing cosmic awareness.

These were connected with scribal, religious and intellectual activity.

Texts could be copied there.

Knowledge could be preserved and transmitted.

Priests, scribes and specialists could receive training connected with temple life.

It is stronger evidence for temple-based scholarship and specialised priestly knowledge.

Egyptian funerary literature gives another reason the culture became associated with sacred wisdom.

Texts now grouped under names such as the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, the Book of the Dead, the Amduet, and the Book of Gates offered ritual language and sacred knowledge for the dead.

A successful passage beyond death could involve knowing divine names, recognising dangerous beings, speaking correctly, and moving through the geography of another world.