Amduat

The composition calls itself the Book of the Hidden Chamber, and it is organised as a journey with a schedule. At sunset the ram-headed night form of Ra boards the solar barque and enters the western horizon; each of the twelve hours that follow is a region with its own name, gatekeepers, inhabitants and business, rendered in three registers of figures with the barque travelling the middle one, and the text names them all, for knowing the names is the book's repeated point. The early hours pass through abundance and the fields of the Nile-like waters of the netherworld; the fourth and fifth hours cross the desert realm of Sokar, where the waters fail and the barque must be towed as a snake over sand, past the hidden cavern and the lake of fire. The sixth hour is the turning point of cosmos and book alike: in the depth of night the ba of Ra unites with the corpse of Osiris, sun and dead god become one, and from that union the renewal of all life proceeds.

The seventh hour brings the crisis, Apophis the great serpent sprawled on the sandbank to drink the waterway dry, subdued by Isis's magic and Seth's spear and bound by his captors. The remaining hours gather strength, the drowned are rescued in the tenth, and in the twelfth the god is drawn through the body of a great serpent, entering old and emerging young, reborn as the scarab Khepri into the arms of Shu at dawn.

The Amduat's first complete exemplars line the burial chambers of Thutmose III and his vizier's king-list generation in the Valley of the Kings, drawn in the spare linear style of a papyrus unrolled on stone, and fragments in the tomb of Thutmose I may push the composition earlier still; its intellectual origins likely reach back before the New Kingdom. For two centuries it remained an almost exclusively royal text, the knowledge it conferred, the book insists, being useful on earth and in the beyond, and its placement turned each royal tomb into the netherworld itself, the sarcophagus lying at the point of the sun's midnight union.

Amenhotep II, Thutmose IV, Amenhotep III and, after the Amarna interruption, the kings through the Ramesside age carried versions complete or abridged; the tomb of Tutankhamun holds its first hour, and a long version covers the sarcophagus hall of Seti I. From the Third Intermediate Period the priesthood of Amun at Thebes took the book to themselves, copying hours onto coffins and funerary papyri, and by the Late Period excerpts appear on sarcophagi of officials, the old royal monopoly fully dissolved. Egyptology's modern editions and studies, above all those of Erik Hornung, established the Amduat as the first book of its genre and the model for the Book of Gates and its successors, and its imagery of the sun's nightly death and renewal remains the most complete statement of Egyptian regeneration theology.