THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN UNDERWORLD
The Egyptian underworld, known by many names including Amduat or Field of Reeds, is a dark and frightening place populated by demons, anti-animals and deities.
Descriptions of the underworld are found in numerous funerary texts painted onto the walls of tombs, coffins, funerary objects and papyri. The descriptions vary across the texts although the general premise is that the deceased travelled through the Amduat and would be reborn should specific rituals be carried out adequately.
The contents of the funerary texts evolved over the thousands of years of Egyptian history. However, all of the texts were laid out as a series of hundreds of spells or utterances and were not designed to be read as a continuous text. Spells for preparing the deceased for the afterlife could be used in isolation and out of sequence (i.e. instructions for hour one do not need to be next to hour two) and it is very rare for entire copies of the texts to be discovered in one place.
There are numerous texts, however, dating back as far as the 24th century BCE and each offers a different insight into the evolving relationship ancient Egyptians had with death and the world beyond. They feared it, revered it and built gigantic monuments to it. What’s more, it is clear that death was not seen as the end, but rather an important junction in the life of a soul. It seems only right that we should tackle it with no less care and deference here.
PYRAMID TEXTS
The earliest funerary texts we have are the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts and unlike later texts they did not include images, consisting purely of hieroglyphic text.
The underworld described in the Pyramid Texts was very similar to the landscape of Egypt itself
