The Pyramid Texts: Pyramid of King Unas (Wnjs)

The Pyramid Texts is a modern name given to an Egyptian corpus of entextualized ritual utterances and religious texts that were inscribed on the walls within the burial chambers of royal pyramids in the later Old Kingdom. The corpus was fluid, altogether containing over 800 Pyramid Texts—individually called "utterances" or "spells"—although no source contains every Pyramid Text utterance. The purpose of the Pyramid Texts as a whole was to ensure that the deceased passed safely into the afterlife to become an akh (ꜣḫ), or "effective spirit." A large number of the ritual utterances in the corpus focus upon this transfiguration. Other utterances in the corpus represent mortuary and offering rituals, hymns to important deities, and apotropaic rituals for the protection of the tomb and the deceased. This diversity of textual genres of utterances are evidence that the Pyramid Texts were compiled in part from diverse, pre-existing textual (and likely oral) sources. While many of the utterances originated in rituals composed and practiced specifically with the king as beneficiary, others have been demonstrated to have non-royal origins. This illustrates that the ancient editors of the corpus—likely high ranking priests and religious officials—drew upon a number of different sources when deciding which specific rituals and religious texts to incorporate into the Pyramid Texts corpus. The first attested Pyramid Texts are in the tomb of King Unas (Wnjs, alternately romanized as Unis or Wenis), the last king of the Fifth Dynasty. The Pyramid Texts of King Unas are the best preserved of the Old Kingdom sources, but also only contain 226 of the ~800 total Pyramid Text utterances. The Fifth Dynasty was a time of great religous change during which the god Osiris (Wsjr) first appears in Egyptian religion. It is in the Pyramid Texts of Unas that Osiris first appears in a royal context. After King Unas, the Pyramid Texts continued to be inscribed in the burial chambers of the pyramids of Sixth Dynasty kings, as well as some Sixth Dynasty queens. These later Old Kingdom sources added additional utterances and subtracted some as well, such that no two individuals' tombs included the same repertoire of utterances. Although restricted to royal burials during the Old Kingdom, the Pyramid Texts were later revived and re-used throughout ancient Egyptian history in the tombs of non-royal individuals. Some utterances of the Pyramid Texts were also adopted into later mortuary corpora, including the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead.