CHAPTER II

THE PYRAMID TEXTS


"Pyramid Texts" is the name now commonly given to the long hieroglyphic
inscriptions that are cut upon the walls of the chambers and corridors
of five pyramids at Sakkārah. The oldest of them was built for Unas, a
king of the fifth dynasty, and the four others were built for Teta, Pepi
I, Merenrā, and Pepi II, kings of the sixth dynasty. According to the
calculation of Dr. Brugsch, they were all built between 3300 and 3150
B.C., but more recent theories assign them to a period about 700 years
later. These Texts represent the oldest religious literature known to
us, for they contain beliefs, dogmas, and ideas that must be thousands
of years older than the period of the sixth dynasty when the bulk of
them was drafted for the use of the masons who cut them inside the
pyramids. It is probable that certain sections of them were composed by
the priests for the benefit of the dead in very primitive times in
Egypt, when the art of writing was unknown, and that they were repeated
each time a king died. They were first learned by heart by the funerary
priests, and then handed on from mouth to mouth, generation after
generation, and at length after the Egyptians had learned to write, and
there was danger of their being forgotten, they were committed to
writing. And just as these certain sections were absorbed into the great
body of Pyramid Texts of the sixth dynasty, so portions of the Texts of
the sixth dynasty were incorporated into the great Theban Book of the
Dead, and they appear in papyri that were written more than 2000 years
later. The Pyramid Texts supply us with much information concerning the
religious beliefs of the primitive Egyptians, and also with many
isolated facts of history that are to be found nowhere else, but of the