Pyramid Texts

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The Pyramid Texts are a collection of Ancient Egyptian religious texts from the time of the Old Kingdom, mostly inscriptions found in pyramids. They depict the Egyptian view of the afterlife, and the ascent into the sky of the divine Pharaoh after death. They are the oldest collection of religious spells known to us from Ancient Egypt, dating back to the 5th and 6th Dynasty, approximately 2350 B.C. We do have, however, difficulties of absolutely dating the texts. They are written in Old Egyptian, and later evolved into the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead. The texts were non-illustrated funerary inscriptions written on the walls and sarcophagus of the early Ancient Egyptian pyramids at Saqqara.

Example:

Utterance 306: Words to say: "How beautiful indeed is the sight, how pleasant indeed is the view," say they, say the gods. "The ascension of this god to heaven, the ascension of (the King) to heaven, his renown over him, his terror on both sides of him, his magic preceding him!"

The oldest of these text come from the Pyramid of Unas, the last king of the 5th Dynasty, other texts were discovered in the pyramids of the 6th Dynasty kings Pepi I, Pepi II, and Teti. There are between 714 and 759 spells, depending on how duplicate spells are counted. The main theme in the Pyramid Texts is the king's resurrection and ascension to the Afterworld. The texts were first discovered by Gaston Maspero, and translations were made by Kurth Sethe (in German), Louis Speelers (in French), Raymond O. Faulkner, and Samuel Mercer.

Pyramid texts from Teti I's pyramid.

Another famous example of an utterance from the Pyramid Texts is the Cannibal Hymn, in which the deceased Pharaoh hunts and devours the gods.

In the first scene of Philip Glass's opera Akhnaten, the phrase "Open are the double doors of the horizon" is a quotation from the Pyramid Texts. More specifically, it seems to come from Utterance 220.