the the royal tombs of the new kingdom appear to be models of the netherworld
we actually know this because the architecture of the tombs matches the
architecture of the netherworld in the book of the hidden chamber the
text that we often refer to as the Amduat so on the walls of some of the tombs are
a type of Illustrated religious text prototype for the very architecture of
those tombs when we think about Egyptian funerary texts I think most people
think about The Book of the Dead which the ancient Egyptians called The Book of
going forth by day but there's a whole additional tradition that we have to
talk about that culminates in the New Kingdom royal tombs in the Valley of the
Kings so it actually starts as early as the fifth dynasty the final king of the
fifth dynasty a king named Unas is the first king to have Pyramid Texts so to
have spells and rituals written down inside his burial chamber and then those
pyramid texts many of them continue into the coffin texts which then continued into
the Book of the Dead with additional spells added but the netherworld books
are an entirely separate tradition so you can't really say that the Pyramid
Texts become the coffin texts become the book of the dead although some spells
actually do that like new ones come in as we go new ones coming in and some
stay the same this kind of architecture and text relating that there being a
significance not just of what a text says but where the text says it and
that's why reading texts out of books can be somewhat misleading because those
texts in a book on the pages are in three dimensions in the original
Monument so getting to see what they look like
and some of the amazing 3d models that are being made available now through the
Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt you get a sense to be there you get a sense of
what it's like to be surrounded by these texts in a larger architectural setting
another interesting thing to point out is that there isn't an idea that there
is a single there's a book of the Pyramid Texts and that's it because each
pyramid has a slightly different grouping and
additional text may come in and some text may not appear again or may not
appear in that particular Monument and when we look at the netherworld books
that becomes overwhelmingly significant because the book of Amduat you will
also hear about the book of gates the book of caverns the book of the earth
also known as creation of the solar disk all that these texts describe the same
twelve hours of the night but in radically different ways there
are overlaps particularly on Amduat and Gates but there's also these huge
divergences and for the Egyptians it's not as if one is right one is wrong one
is from one place one is from one group of priests but they take a multiplicity
of approaches when thinking about something that is by its very nature the
beyond the interesting thing about the netherworld books is that although they
are concerned with the Duat although they are concerned with the nocturnal
journey of the Sun they are in many ways primarily a solar text and they revolve
frequently if not exclusively some of them around this concept of
reconciliation of life and death the joining of the god Osiris who is equated
with yesterday and the god ray who is tomorrow the male/female elements of the
solar disk the aton, and the khat, the corpse the horizon the akhet as the
female elements this reconciliation of cosmic opposites to achieve maat that
brings about rebirth a number of the royal tombs have been open really since
the end of the New Kingdom apparently during the greco-roman period
when a lot of visitors came to Egypt became a tourist attraction the tombs
were visited there are a number of greco-roman graffiti in the tombs and
the Greek term for a tomb in the Valley of the Kings was syrinx a flute a long tube -
going into the mountain side the Greeks named Egyptian
things rather odd terms sometimes like obelisk the sky piercing tekhen is
called in Greek obelisk meaning a meat skewer a roosting spit kebab stick I
love this idea of greco-roman tourists and we know that there were guides that
local Egyptian priests would give tours of Egyptian monuments Herodotus and his
Histories records talking to priests and getting tours of ancient sites so just
how tourists today visit the Valley of the Kings in Greek times and Roman times
visitors would have gone and unfortunately this idea of graffiti
izing of adding your name to an ancient monument has a multi thousand year
history in the greco-roman period the tomb of Ramses the 6th seems to have
been one of the more popular places to visit and it was actually known as the
tomb of metempsychosis as though there was a concept of wandering of the soul
and ancient Egypt as though they were possibly even some concept of
reincarnation that doesn't really seem to come out of the Egyptian text as such
but the tombs did receive name so Ramses the 6th tomb for instance is treated in
some texts I believe is the tomb of memnon and all of the West Bank would
even be called the Memnonia the realm of eMmnon possibly based on epithets of
some of the pharaohs is "mery Amun" and beloved of Amun that's fascinating and the
two really famous statues of Amunhotep the 3rd the colossi often erroneously
called the colossi of memnon is only one colossus exactly only one only the North
Colossus was actually memnon so both of the colossi were in front of the
mortuary temple of Amunhotep the 3rd who had a golden age in his 38th year reign
although his tomb in the Valley of the Kings is fairly rarely visited because
it was in the West Valley so this idea of a
sacred statue was interesting because although in the greco-roman period the
northern colossus of Amunhotep the third was called memnon the leader of
the Ethiopian contingent fighting for the Trojans even though the northern
statue is the divine image in the greco-roman period we know from
inscriptions on the backs of the colossus of the southern Colossus that the
southern statute when erected in the reign of Amunhotep the third the southern
statue has its own name and is a divinity in its own right by whom the
king himself may be said to be beloved and this brings up a really interesting
ancient Egyptian practice which is the ritual of the opening of the mouth and
this is something that we see in the New Kingdom royal tombs it is certainly
something that we see in private tombs and you could perform the ritual of
opening the mouth both on the mummy which is how we traditionally think
about it as well as a statue so for the Egyptians doing this ritual of the adze
that's being touched to the mouth of either the statue or the mummy that
enables the mummy or the statute to receive the spirit of the deceased or
the spirit of the reigning king this goes to the heart of ancient Egyptian
practice that an image of representation of a person or a king or a God could
receive the divine spirit
when you walk into an ancient Egyptian royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings
you go through a series of descending passageways and the architecture beyond
that can incorporate the angle change that we see in the 18th dynasty or
simply a jog in this series of descending corridors and the very first
corridor is called the path of Shu now Shu is the god of light and space we
could even say the god of luminous space and he is the god who stands between Geb
a God who can personify the earth and Nut a goddess who can personify the sky
and remember that these tombs would have only been visited during the actual
funerary ceremonies as well as by medjoy who patrolled the Valley of the
Kings and check to make sure that nothing had been disturbed in the tombs
but otherwise they were sealed the rituals the ceremonies those were taking
place in the mortuary temple but at the same time those first two corridors of
the pathway of Shu are where we see representations of the forms of the Sun
and a text that we call the book of Adoring Re in the West or commonly
called the Litany of Re, the first is the ancient title the other is the
conventional modern title the netherworld books as we call them that
adorn the walls of primarily the royal tombs of the New Kingdom although they
have occurred elsewhere and later as well these texts we call the netherworld
books begin to appear around the time of hatshepsut and Thutmose III she's a
great innovator she does seem to be we have blocks associated with one of the
burials of Thutmose the first that have the book of Amduat on them the book
of the hidden chamber and then we also see both the book of the hidden chamber
and the book of Adoring in the West in the tomb of Useramun Thutmose the
Third's vizier which is one of the very few times we see it in a private tomb - and
it's interesting that the book of the hidden chamber contains directions as to
how it is to be laid out on wall and it also contains some
instructions as to how to lay out apparently this index that appears along
with it and it's rather interesting composition we don't really know the
origins of these texts some people have tried to push them back much farther
than their earliest occurrences others assume they probably date to just about
the time of the earliest occurrence grammatically it doesn't seem likely
that they existed in their present form prior to the Middle Kingdom and this is
an important point as well that when we think about funerary texts in ancient
Egypt most people would think Book of the Dead that that's the classic the
papyrus scrolls with various spells showing you how to pass the gates
transformed into a scarab go through the judgment hall chapter 125 where your
heart is weighed against the feather of truth against Maat but that's a separate
tradition from the netherworld books so the Book of the Dead can occur in New
Kingdom royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings but it's a much smaller percentage
of the wall space right it says I mean interestingly on the second shrine of
Tutankhamun that contains one of the three versions of a cryptographic
netherworld book that revolves around this concept of the union of Re and
Osiris we get a mixture of cryptographic netherworld text and book the dead
passages so there are just hieroglyphs there are cryptographic hieroglyphs
right and we'll talk about that later!