The Duat, the Egyptian Underworld

The Egyptians called the realm of the dead the Duat. It was not simply a cave under the ground. In the oldest texts it lies partly in the sky, among the stars of the night, and later texts place it beneath the earth or inside the body of the sky goddess Nut, who swallowed the sun each evening and gave birth to it each morning. What all these pictures share is that the Duat was the hidden side of the world, the place where the sun went at night and where the dead continued to live.

The ordered world itself floated in Nun, the dark primeval waters from which creation had first risen. Egypt, with the Nile at its centre, lay under the sun’s path. In the west, where the sun set, lay the desert cemeteries, and the dead were called “westerners”. The Duat could therefore be entered at the western horizon, and its gates, caverns and rivers were crossed during the twelve hours of the night until the sun, and the dead who travelled with it, rose renewed in the east.

The royal underworld books, painted in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings from the fifteenth century BCE, describe this night journey hour by hour. The Amduat, “what is in the underworld”, shows the sun god in his boat passing through regions of water and sand, greeting the blessed dead, punishing enemies and, in the deepest hour, uniting with the body of Osiris. Each night the great serpent Apep tried to swallow the boat and bring creation to a halt, and each night he was defeated. The vertical order of the diagram on this page is schematic: the Egyptians used several overlapping pictures rather than a single map.

For the Egyptians a person was made of several parts that death separated. The body had to be preserved, which is why mummification developed. The kaka The life force of a person in ancient Egyptian belief, which lived on after death and received offerings. Glossary, the life force, needed food and drink, provided by offerings at the tomb. The ba, often drawn as a bird with a human head, could fly out of the tomb by day and return at night. The goal was for these elements to be reunited so that the dead person became an akh, a transfigured and effective spirit.

Burial was therefore a sequence of careful rites. After embalming, the wrapped body was protected with amulets, among them the heart scarab, inscribed with a spell asking the heart not to speak against its owner. At the tomb, priests performed the opening of the mouth, touching the face of the mummy or a statue with special tools so that it could breathe, eat and speak again. The tomb was filled with what the dead would need: food, furniture, clothing and, from the Middle Kingdom on, shabti figures who would answer for their owner when called to work in the fields of the afterlife.

Above all, the dead were equipped with words. The Pyramid Texts, first carved in the pyramid of King Unas around 2350 BCE, were spells for the king’s rise to the sky. In the Middle Kingdom, the Coffin Texts brought similar spells to the coffins of officials, including the Book of Two Ways, a map of paths through the beyond. In the New Kingdom, scribes copied selections from the Book of the Dead, which the Egyptians called the spells “for going forth by day”, onto papyrus rolls buried with the dead.

The most famous moment of the journey took place in the Hall of the Two Truths. The dead person entered before Osiris, king of the dead, and declared before forty-two judges that he or she had not committed a long list of wrongs: “I have not stolen”, “I have not killed”, “I have not made anyone weep”. Then, in the scene painted on many papyri, the jackal-headed Anubis placed the heart on one pan of a balance and the feather of Maat, the principle of truth and right order, on the other. Thoth, the ibis-headed god of writing, recorded the result.

If the heart was heavy with wrongdoing, it was thrown to Ammit, a creature part crocodile, part lion and part hippopotamus, and the person suffered the “second death”, ceasing to exist. Texts also describe places of fire and destruction for the enemies of the gods. But the illustrations almost always show success. The dead person is declared maa-kheru, “true of voice”, and led into the presence of Osiris.

The justified dead could then enjoy several kinds of eternal life at once. They could live in the Field of Reeds, an ideal Egypt of canals and abundant harvests, where the grain grew taller than a man. They could join the sun god in his boat, dying and being reborn with him every night. And their ba could return to visit the tomb and receive the offerings of the living. Egyptians saw no contradiction in these images: each expressed the hope of renewal in its own way.

Egyptian ideas about the Duat developed over nearly three thousand years. Early on, the hope of joining the gods in the sky was expressed for the king. By the Middle Kingdom, officials and their families used similar spells, and the god Osiris, murdered and restored to life, became the model for every dead person, who could be called “the Osiris” followed by his or her own name. Scholars debate how far this amounted to a “democratisation” of the afterlife, since only those who could afford a proper burial benefited fully.

In the New Kingdom, Book of the Dead papyri became a profitable craft. Workshops prepared rolls with blank spaces for the owner’s name, and wealthy buyers could order lavish versions such as the Papyrus of Ani. Funerary texts continued to be produced into the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, when Egyptian and Greek ideas mingled, until the spread of Christianity in the fourth century CE brought the old burial customs to an end.

The modern world rediscovered the Duat through Egyptology. Karl Richard Lepsius gave the Book of the Dead its name in 1842, and the translations of E. A. Wallis Budge brought it to a wide public. Today the weighing of the heart is among the best-known images from the ancient world, reproduced in museums, novels, films and video games, and scholars continue to read the funerary books as a window on how the Egyptians understood life, order and renewal.