The Pyramid Texts

Saqqara is the most excavated site in Egypt.   For over 200 years the site has been the centre of excavations and projects that have revealed so much about life in ancient Egypt.  Saqqara is the largest necropolis (city of the dead) anywhere in the world.

This extraordinary day will take you experiencing the following:

• Unas’s Pyramid – the site of the famed Pyramid Texts which dictated how Unas and pharaohs transcended to the gods. You will go inside the pyramid to see the Pyramid Texts. There is only a maximum of 15 persons allowed daily into the tomb and you will be one of them.
• Imhotep’s Museum in the Saqqara Necropolis contains a sample of the amazing finds from the excavation sites. Imhotep was the architect of the Stepped Pyramid and there has also been a concerted effort to locate his burial tomb. The Museum provides a snapshot of the importance of the site in ancient times.
• The Stepped Pyramid and an exploration of a subterranean tomb which, in 2022, showcased some amazing recent finds of tomb decorations and mummies. There are over 400 underground chambers beneath the Stepped Pyramid.

Unas’s Pyramid

Unas  was a pharaoh, the ninth and last ruler of the Fifth Dynasty of Egypt during the Old Kingdom. Unas reigned for 15 to 30 years in the mid-24th century BC (circa 2345–2315 BC),

Unas’s pyramid and its immediate area became the subject of investigation in the 1880’s.  The hieroglyphics fund on the walls of the pharaohs burial chamber corridor, antechamber and passageway was an astonishing ‘find’.

On the walls and surrounding the sarcophagus of Unas was the spiritual roadmap for the pharaoh’s ascension to the afterlife.  And as new pyramids and tombs were discovered, the unifying factor for the burial chambers and tombs that followed this pharaoh, was the roadmap to eternal life.

This tour is an amazing experience, and our guide will take you through the very practical steps that pharaohs and their priests undertook each day to ensure an eternal life for the pharaoh and for peace and prosperity for his subjects.  This was not an after-death experience, because the planning for it had gone on with the pharaoh when he or she was alive.

The Pyramid Texts – A Hugely Consequential Discovery

• The discovery of Pyramid Texts, within Unas’s pyramid and burial chamber to help and direct Unas into the afterlife, was an enormous event. The gateway to the afterlife!
• The 283 spells in Unas’s pyramid constitute the oldest and best preserved corpus of religious writing from the Old Kingdom.
• Their function was to guide the ruler through to eternal life and ensure his continued survival, even if the funerary cult, ceased to function.
• The inscriptions, known as the Pyramid Texts, were the central innovation of Unas’s pyramid but thereafter adorned the walls of many pharaohs burial chambers.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Unas’s Accession to the Afterlife

• The spells of Una’s Pyramid Texts are divided into two broad categories: Sacerdotal and Personal
• The Sacerdotal texts are ritual in nature and were conducted by the priest. They consist of offering spells and were conducted daily.
• The remaining texts are Personal and are broadly concerned with guiding the spirit out of the tomb, and into their new life. They consist of provisioning (how the pharaoh secures their food), how they can transition (almost like a self-help guide), and protective texts. They are amazingly practical steps.

The Funeral Complex of Pharaohs

The pharaohs pyramid was just one part of structures which supported the spiritual guidance by the priests and the cult of the pharaoh.  Other structures included a temple (called a Valley Temple), a causeway, a mortuary, a cult pyramid and the main pyramid which contained the pharaohs mummified remains.  It was crucial that the pharaoh’s mummified body were kept secure.  For if it was destroyed, then the purpose of the priests was irrelevant.   Hence the colossal effort to secure the remains in chambers with elaborate security or to hide them below the monuments.

Such structures were part of a pharaohs funeral compound.  Without them (such as the pyramid of Meidum) Egyptologists are in doubt about the purpose of the structure and whether any pharaoh had been buried there.   But all these structures were part of Unas’s pyramid compound.  And specifically:

• The causeway that connects the valley temple to the mortuary temple of Unas’s pyramid complex. Unas’s causeway is also the best preserved of any from the Old Kingdom.
• The interior walls of the causeway were highly decorated with painted reliefs. The remnants depict a variety of scenes including the hunting of wild animals, the conducting of harvests, scenes from the markets, craftsmen working copper and gold as well as famine.
• The site required an exceptionally long causeway to a former, but now dried up lake, suggesting the site held some significance to Unas.

Ancient Egyptian belief held that the individual consisted of three basic parts.

• The body, the ka, and the ba.
• When the person died, the ka would separate from the body and return to the gods from where it had come, while the ba remained with the body.
• The body of the individual, interred in the burial chamber, never physically left; but the ba, awakened, released itself from the body and began its journey towards new life.
• The purpose of the pyramid texts was to enable the reunion of the ruler’s ba and ka leading to the transformation into an akh, and to secure eternal life among the gods in the sky.
• Significant to this journey was the Akhet that is, the horizon, a convergence between the earth, the sky, and the underworld
• The Akhet, according to the Ancient Egyptians, was the place from where the sun rose and symbolised birth or resurrection
• In the Pyramid Texts, the king is called upon to transform into an akh, literally meaning another being or life force. This is a resurrected form of the deceased, achieved by individual action and the spiritual rituals of the priest.
• If the deceased failed to complete the transformation…they died.
• Sections of the Pyramid Texts were passed down into the Coffin Texts found on non-royal tombs of the Middle Kingdom and the Coffin Texts formed the basis for the Book of the Dead in the New Kingdom.