So…what have we here with these lines of hieroglyphics? These lines come from early in the Resurrection Sequence, texts or “utterances” or spells conventionally numbered 213-222 in the Pyramid Text corpus. As you can see, we are in six different versions of spell 214 as presented in http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-new-concordance-of-pyramid-texts.html.
The concordance was assembled by James Allen. The labels at the top are the traditional ones since Sethe’s edition in 1908: W for the Pyramid of Wenis/Unis/Unas, T for Teti’s Pyramid, N for Pepi II, Nt for the Pyramid of the first of Pepi II’s three queens, Queen Neith, Jp for Queen Iput and Wd for Queen Wedjedtni. Pepi II is sometimes given credit for causing the ending of the Old Kingdom by reigning for 90 years. Supposedly this long reign caused the administration of the kingdom to fail to respond well while the Nile floods lessened, agricultural production kept falling and provincial officials gained power.
Still, Old Kingdom or no, the texts of the Resurrection Sequence itself are a pretty stable set of spells all the way from the Pyramid of Unis – the first set of Pyramid Texts – in about 2350 BC clear down to the Middle Kingdom mastaba tomb of Senewosret-Ankh in 1900 BC. In “Reading a Pyramid” (https://www.pyramidtextsonline.com/), Allen notes that the Resurrection Sequence is placed on the SE wall, associated with the night sky. The end of Spell 214 (which is in the hieroglyphics here) reads:
…become clean in the cool waters of the stars, and board the sunboat on ropes of metal…
You can see the sunboat at the bottom of the left columns for W, N and Wd and the stars and the ropes of metal as well. (translation from Allen’s A Grammar of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts Vol I Unis – for other translations see Allen’s The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, which includes spells from later Old Kingdom pyramids)
I think, with Unis coming clean, hoisting himself into the skyboat and just generally getting resurrected and joining the gods, it is time to leave the Pyramid Texts and get back to early twentieth-century physics, particularly the quanta of light, which have been hanging suspended somewhere between Einstein’s notice of them in 1905 and Compton’s demonstration in 1922 that X-ray quanta carried momenta related to their wavelengths.
But first a few notes on departing from the Pyramid Texts and how they turned out to be (I think as most people will find these days on looking into them from James Allen’s work and the contexts provided by John Romer) quite different in many intriguing ways from what I expected.
First, I’d say, if you’ve seen a lot of later Middle and New Kingdom texts from Ancient Egypt, these late Old Kingdom texts will seem very different. Although they are the core of all the later details about journeying through the underworld, the Pyramid Texts seem to be more about on reaching the doors of the Akhet (where the sun rises), unbolting them and rising into the sky by means of moderately technical gear – which I find intriguing compared to all the lakes of fire and poison and what-not that fill the massively expanded verbiage of the underworld by times of the New Kingdom. At the same time, I feel there is an overall tone of intentionally (or even manipulative, but still fully evocative) primordiality to the spells of the Pyramid Texts. The late Old Kingdom’s pyramids are smaller but are deliberately situated in a network of cosmic positions that suggests a cosmos with more working parts – a magical history that evades whatever it was that was going with the focus on the giant pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty but also evokes that power – whatever it was.
I guess also magical power itself in the Old Kingdom was different at least stylistically than what it became later. For one thing, while there is a lot of liturgical repetition, there is not as much piling on of dreary detail as all the hours of the night voyage of the sun’s passage through the underworld. Moreover, the ways of leaving the earth and journeying with the nightboats and the skyboats have a certain adventurous, rustic simplicity: the persons joining the gods appear mysteriously and sometimes keep their name secret. The newly-dead are clever and agile, climbing into boats and evading many dangers. The adventurous atmosphere even extends to the quasi-technical details such as the bolts of the doors of the Akhet or the metal ropes and metal hatchways in the sky. In the Old Kingdom, it’s not the Bronze Age yet – metal is still experienced as the copper brought by royal power from far away to cut stone for huge monuments and meteoric iron that suggests the unearthly or celestial modes of operation of divine powers in the sky.
Anyway, farewell to the Old Kingdom. The Pyramid Texts of Queen Neith in one of the very last Old Kingdom pyramids are the most complete and well-preserved of all the texts from the Old Kingdom, surpassed in completeness and preservation only by the very first Pyramid Texts in the Pyramid of Unis. So we say good-bye to Queen Neith by noting some of the last stanzas of her Resurrection Sequence:
When this time comes tomorrow, prepare for a journey of three days, for a footpath will be set out for you walk to the sky and wander amid the Imperishable Stars.