Eternal life for every citizen

Eternal life for every citizen

The texts that used to be written on the walls of pyramids and mastabas, started being carved onto stone and painted on the panels of wooden sarcophagi. The so-called Coffin Texts and finally the Books of the Dead that were written on papyri are a kind of summary of the Pyramid Texts.

Once the Books of the Dead had been introduced into funerary rituals, eternal life was within arm’s reach of every citizen. It was only necessary to order papyri with a few selected chapters and place them into the tomb so that the deceased, whose name was contained in the spells and utterances, could use it as a kind of guidebook to the afterlife.

During the mummification process and the funeral, lector-priests pronounced magical texts invoking the deceased’s transformation into Osiris and sending the soul on a journey by the solar boat across the sky. It was in that way that eternity was guaranteed to the soul.