Pyramid Texts

The Pyramid Texts are the oldest ancient Egyptian funerary texts, dating to the late Old Kingdom. They are the earliest known corpus of ancient Egyptian religious texts. Written in Old Egyptian, the pyramid texts were carved onto the subterranean walls and sarcophagi of pyramids at Saqqara from the end of the Fifth Dynasty, and throughout the Sixth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, and into the Eighth Dynasty of the First Intermediate Period. The oldest of the texts have been dated to c. 2400–2300 BCE. Unlike the later Coffin Texts and Book of the Dead, the Pyramid Texts were reserved only for the pharaoh and were not illustrated. The use and occurrence of Pyramid Texts changed between the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms of Ancient Egypt. During the Old Kingdom (2686 BCE – 2181 BCE), Pyramid Texts could be found in the pyramids of kings as well as three queens, named Wedjebten, Neith, and Iput. During the Middle Kingdom (2055 BCE – 1650 BCE), Pyramid Texts were not written in the pyramids of the pharaohs, but the traditions of the pyramid spells continued to be practiced. In the New Kingdom (1550 BCE – 1070 BCE), Pyramid Texts were found on tombs of officials. French archaeologist and Egyptologist Gaston Maspero, director of the French Institute for Oriental Archaeology in Cairo, arrived in Egypt in 1880. He chose a site in South Saqqara, a hill that had been mapped by the Prussian Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius in 1842, for his first archaeological dig. There, Maspero found the ruins of a large structure, which he concluded must be the pyramid of Pepi I of the Sixth Dynasty. During the excavations he was able to gain access to the subterranean rooms, and discovered that the walls of the structure were covered in hieroglyphic text. Maspero contacted the 'director of the excavations' in Egypt, Auguste Mariette, to inform him of the discovery. Mariette concluded that the structure must be a mastaba, as no writing had previously been discovered in a pyramid. Maspero continued his excavations at a second structure, around south-west of the first, in search of more evidence.