RICH and GREAT

RICH
and
GREAT

edited by Renata Landgrfov

and Jana Mynov
Studies in Honour of Anthony J. Spalinger
on the Occasion of his 70th Feast of Thoth

edited by Renata Landgrfov

and Jana Mynov
ISBN 978-80-7308-668-8
 RICH
and
GREAT

Studies in Honour of Anthony J. Spalinger

on the Occasion of his 70th Feast of Thoth

edited by Renata Landgrfov

and Jana Mynov

Charles University in Prague

Faculty of Arts
2016
2

The book was published through a non-investment subsidy of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic
for the purpose of the development of international cooperation with the Arab Republic of Egypt and the Republic of the Sudan.

Reviewed by G. Pieke and B. Vachala

Contributors: L. Bare, M. Brta, V. G. Callender, F. Coppens, L. Depuydt, T. Dobbin-Bennett, E. Frood, O. Goelet, Jr.,
C. R. Hamilton, J. Hellum, C. A. Hope, J. Hsieh, D. Kahn, M. I. Khaled, R. Landgrfov, A. von Lieven, E. A. Mackay,
J. Malek, M. Megahed, J. Mynov, H. Navrtilov, A. Niwiski, J. F. Quack, K. Smolrikov, D. Sweeney, K. Szpakowska,
M. Verner, H. Vymazalov

Cover: Drawing of the image of Amun-nakht in the gateway at Ayn Birbiyeh, Dakhleh Oasis, courtesy of Olaf Kaper; a photo
of a statuette of an Asiatic captive, Abusir (Archive of the Czech Institute of Egyptology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University
in Prague).

Type-setting layout: Agama poly-grafick atelir, s.r.o., Praha

Print: TISKRNA PROTISK, s.r.o.

Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts, 2016

ISBN 978-80-7308-668-8
@b Ssp mnx.t. A Feast of Re-Harsomtus of Khadi on Mesore 29
The King, His Body, and His Relatives in the Pyramid Texts
JENNIFER HELLUM
Professor Anthony Spalinger was, for many years, the sole
professional Egyptologist not only at the University of Auck-
land, but in the country of New Zealand. Despite that
isolation, he managed to guide the librarys purchase of
Egyptological books with the result that the library is now
of an international standard. He also single-handedly main-
tained and nurtured the programme in Egyptology through-
out that time. On top of this, he has brought international
recognition to the department through his outstanding re-
search and publication record. As a result, Egyptology in
New Zealand is a vibrant and growing field. We owe a great
debt of gratitude to Professor Spalinger, which will forever
be in his favour.
It is axiomatic that the king is the paramount figure in
the Pyramid Texts in whom the deities invest their energy.
The integration of the king into the Pyramid Texts as a fully-
developed member of the afterlife, however, is complex, in-
volving both the deceased royal body and royal relatives.
Ontologically, the metaphysical body of the king is under-
stood as the celestial shape inhabited by the deceased ruler.
The corpse provides an anchor to the mundane world, but
the assimilation occurs in the afterlife, and provides the king
with a divine validity therein. The kings limbs and body are
rejoined, and given divine provenance. His faculties are then
restored, generally by means of divine antecedents again, and
he is inserted into the company of the deities. His acceptance
in this company does not appear to be assured, however;
throughout the texts, the deities are continually referenced
as members of his immediate family. As will be seen, this
process involves a number of different deities taking on the
roles of his father, mother, brother, and sisters, as well as his
son and daughter. The reconstruction of the body, its asso-
ciation with various deities, and his ancestral alignment
works on a fundamentally basic level, using referential magic
1
All references to PT numbers and translations (all authors own) are from Sethe 1908 and 1910.
2
PTs 364, 368, 447, 450, 452, 457, 576, 703, 606, 637, 665A, 666, 667C, 669, 670, 676, 690, and 700.
3
PTs 13, 17, 254, 355, 450, 451, 452, and 603.
4
PTs 20, 369, and 447.
5
PTs 15, 37, 45, 80, 364, 450, 453, 595, 598, 638, and 639.
6
This harks back to the scenes from the Step Pyramid complex, and the two half-moons in the court of the complex around which the king was to run to prove
his worth and ability to rule for another 30 years. See, for example, Lauer 1962: 144171, and pls. xxvxxvi, and Friedman 1995: 142 for discussions of this
phenomenon.
115
to give the king the stature or gravitas necessary to interact
with deities as their equal.
Several themes or single, specific applications of imagery
regarding the king and his physical body are used through-
out the texts (Miosi 2006: 143144). Preponderant among
these was the reintegration of the body of the king in the af-
terlife, the knitting together or reassembly of the kings
bones. Instances of the iteration of the wish that the king be
whole and able to function physically ranged from PT 131
to PT 700; in other words, for all intents and purposes, from
the beginning to the end of the texts. The corpse of the king,
both in the mundane life and after, seems to have been seen
as being in danger of disintegration throughout the entire
mythic process of ascension and occupancy. It was necessary,
therefore, to guard against such an occurrence through fre-
quent and constant repetition of prophylactic texts. This de-
sire for reintegration took the linguistic form of assertions
that the kings body had been reassembled,2 that his head
had been knit back on,3 that his lips and mouth had been
attached to the head and were operational,4 and that various
other parts of his body, for example his eyes5 or heart (PTs
4 and 5), were set into the rest of his body. Much less often,
the desire came as a request for complete assembly (PT 488).
The desire for reassembly and for functionality resulting
from that reassembly indicates a strong need for a physically
healthy and hale body, and hence, king. Presumably, this
need was engendered by the mundane need for a king who
could rule the country with strength.6 One with physical de-
formities or disabilities (such as the inability to speak or see
through lack of a mouth or eyes) would have had difficulty
negotiating the afterlife and would have appeared before the
deities in a weakened condition as a result of both the trip
and the disabilities themselves. It seems unlikely, for exam-
ple, that Siptah of the 19th Dynasty would have entered the

116
afterlife with his foot still deformed, or that Tutankhamun
would have needed his many walking sticks therein. Regard-
less of the mundane truth of the matter, the representation
of vigour would have been necessary for the king to have
been an apt representative for humanity in the afterlife,
standing before them on strong legs and with all the knowl-
edge needed for entry into their company.
Within the texts, it appears that the faculties of sight and
speech were of particular importance to the king in the af-
terlife. The essential nature of sight is grounded in the pro-
saic, but it can take on a philosophical significance, in
a distinction that can be made between seeing the king
and perceiving him. The forms of the deities, and indeed,
of the king himself, had to be seen. PT 246 states,
They (i.e. the gods) go in and they fight evil, they
come forth and lift up their faces, and they see you,
Min indeed, at the head of the sanctuaries of Upper
and Lower Egypt.
The gods saw the king at the head of the Conclaves of
Upper and Lower Egypt, and perceived him as Min, and as
a result, the royal status was confirmed. It was vital that the
king be able to confirm this for himself, as well. In his jour-
neying through the afterlife, he needed his sight both to see
and to perceive,7 using both the faculties of sight and of
mind. His human eyes were often substituted with Horus
magical Eyes which not only gave the king divine eyes, but
also eyes that had the mythical property of healing, among
others. They also gave the king the resource of sight itself,
the requisite mundane corollary to the metaphysical prop-
erties. In using Horus eyes, the king was granted both sight
and perception, thereby entering an optical state approxi-
mating that of the gods.
The use of a mouth, similarly, had an importance
grounded in the metaphysical and the mundane.8 As with
the statues in the temples, the mouth of the king had to be
struck open each morning in order for him to eat. This was
accomplished by both the Opening of the Mouth cere-
mony and by other magical means,9 and was performed for
both the temple statues and the king.10 The mouth as
a means of speech, then, was the corollary of the eyes as the
organ of sight. The other, less prosaic use of the mouth in-
7
See, for example, PT 167 O Osiris N, open your eyes that you may see with them.
8
For an example of the closing of the mouth of a snake in order that it be made less dangerous, see PT 230.
9
The Eye of Horus, for example, in PTs 47, 54, 93, 155, 156, and 185, and other unidentified means in PTs 48 and 153.
10
PTs 20, 21, 34, 38, and 369.
11
An exception to this is PT 369. This particular text, however, is less concerned with the mouth being a serviceable instrument for the king and more concerned with
the restoration of the kings body by his divine son, Horus. It is included among a group of texts which stress the protection and care that Horus will give the king
in the afterlife PTs 369372.
Jennifer Hellum
volved the capacity for speech and was related to the eyes
sense of perception. When speaking of the reassembly of the
kings body, particular mention was made of the necessity
for the mouth to be attached to the facial bones (PTs 20 and
369). If this did not occur, the king would be denied both
the ability to eat as well as the use of speech.
A sense of divine and earthly reciprocity was found in
the daily performance of the Opening of the Mouth cere-
mony (Finnestad 1978; Hikade 2003). The divine essences
of the statues and of the kings corpse were felt to be pres-
ent in the afterlife, with static representatives on earth, i.e.
the statues and the body of the king. Finnestad notes (in
a discussion of the ritual in New Kingdom Theban tombs)
that the cult statue, upon which the ritual is performed first,
functions as the dead mans living body (Finnestad 1978:
124). Similarly, Cruz-Uribe makes the point that at Hibis
temple, the ritual is used to animate protector deities of the
temple (Cruz-Uribe 1999: 71). Schulman (1984: 175176)
feels unequivocally that the scenes of the ceremony represent
actual rituals performed in a mortuary context. Roth under-
stands the ritual as a ceremonial rebirth of the dead king into
the afterlife (Roth 1992 and 1993). The first three studies
were done on much later artefacts and temples, and in vary-
ing contexts, while Roths articles focus on the ritual and its
accompanying tools in the Old Kingdom. They all indicate
that the Opening of the Mouth ceremony is one that has
enlivening and protective purposes, simultaneously. The
same principle is in operation in the Pyramid Texts, with the
kings body taking over the role of the cult statue, making
the magic more direct. Through the ceremonies performed
each morning on the temple statues and the ceremonies used
in the Pyramid Texts, the essences of the statues and the king
were brought in to the mundane world, inhabited the
mummy and the statues, and were crucial aids to the per-
ception of the divine world of the deities as an invisible part
of the mundane world.
It is to be expected that those texts mentioning splitting
open the mouth are predominantly found early in the corpus
(for the example of Unas corpus, see Allen 2005: 1929).11
The first requisite was the awakening of the king, a necessity
in both this world and the next. The king required food ini-
tially upon animation in the afterlife. It was necessary for
his bA to be provided with sustenance in order for the king
The King, His Body, and His Relatives in the Pyramid Texts
to wake into the afterlife and remain there. Later, in order
for the king to protect, introduce, and establish himself in
the company of the gods, the use of language was required,
which in turn necessitated the use of a mouth. The language
used in the act of speaking was akin to the idea of the eyes
perception. The king perceived the presence of the deities
and understood himself to be their equal; the words chosen
for that understanding, in order to attain the desired deified
end, had to be magical in themselves. Often, the exact words
to be spoken were given to the king by various named and
unnamed deities, indicating how necessary it was to perform
these ceremonies and rituals correctly. A clear example of the
instructive nature of some of these uses of speech is found
in PT 666:
O N, when they will ask your name from you, you
shall not allow them to say your name. Who acts for
you? they will say. It is my successor who acts for
me. Spread out his field; install his brick. you shall
say, Pour his mortar? (mAHi translation Allen 2005:
325) between the walls, so that <he> may descend
himself .
Here, the king was instructed by sympathetic deities on
the correct words to use in the event of questions addressed
to him by unnamed foes. The consequences of not following
the instructions are not elaborated upon; it is perhaps
enough that the king should know the proper answers.
Other less explicit uses involved the king in unscripted con-
versation.12
Despite the necessity of the king being in the form of
a healthy human being in the afterlife, the eventual goal of
the Pyramid Texts was to insert him into the company of
divine beings. Thus it was understood that the king should
eventually be a god in human or other form. One method
in which the sense of this was communicated was through
the inhabitation of the kings body of or the assignment
of various limbs to deities or exalted mortals.13 Another
means was by creating a form that did not resemble the
kings earthly form, but that contained his essence. Through
the use of these two approaches to the concept of divinity,
the divine became divine both inside and out, in form and
in essence.
Different entities were taken within the kings body and
were literally incorporated (Miosi 2006: 143144). Gener-
12
For example, PT 660 and 667B, both of which include speech by the king without instructions regarding what must be said.
13
See Hornung 1982: 9092 for a reiteration, following H. Bonnet, of the idea of syncretism as inhabitation, rather than alignment.
14
PTs 721 and 734 these PTs mention the face only, which those in the footnote below include the face, the middle and the hind-parts, as indicated.
15
PTs 582 and 619, the latter being the reference also for the hind-parts as a broad hall.
117
ally, either deities or divine animals are used. PT 539, in par-
ticular, makes full use of this type of allusory imagery, work-
ing from the kings head and face down to his toes and the
soles of his feet. In this example, found only in Pepi Is cor-
pus (Allen 2005: 407) and the longest of the few texts of
this type, the kings nose was Thoth (PT 539 1305), his
heart was Bastet (PT 539 1310), his thighs were Neith and
Selket (PT 539 1314), and the soles of his feet were the
two barques of righteousness (PT 539 1315). PT 485C,
making use of Sethes reconstruction, states that there was
no limb of the king devoid of god, meaning here divinity or
the essence of deity (PT 485C). In only one anomalous
text, the king assumed the essences of a group that was on
a lower rung of the social register than he was himself, by
taking the nobles (or humanity pat) as a limb (PT 268).
Every part of the king was imbued with a divine essence.
Overall, it would appear that he was protected with such
variation of divine essences as to preclude the notion of an
attack against him. He was one with the deities in the after-
life as a social equal and as one of their collective body.
The king also appeared in a nonhuman form, as mythi-
cal constructed creatures (Miosi 2006: 143). These were de-
scribed as having the forepart of a jackal and the hind part
of a falcon (PT 459), the face of a jackal,14 the middle of the
Celestial Serpent, and (rather oddly) the hind-parts of
a broad hall,15 or alternatively the front of a jackal, the hind-
parts of a Celestial Serpent, and a spine which was the door-
bolt of the god (PT 691B). It is interesting, although not
surprising, that PT 539, the most complete catalogue of the
kings body parts and their divine equivalents, does not agree
with the other PTs regarding the quality of the spine (the
Wild Bull [ 1308]), and the middle, which has numerous
deities attached to it, from the shoulders as Seth to the toes
as the Souls of On ( 13091315). It is doubtful that any
such creatures were meant to be assumed to be the king, al-
though these amalgamations have much in common with
deities such as Taweret, Bes, Ammet, and Seth. This kind of
incorporation can be attributed both to Frankforts multi-
plicity of approaches (Frankfort 1961: 18), and to the un-
derstanding that what was necessary was for the kings parts
to be divine, not for them to be filled particularly with the
same divine essence. PT 649 tells the king, or Osiris the
king, that he is the kA of all the gods, thus doing away with
the notion of specialisation when it came to deities and
limbs.

118
Violent imagery involving the king as a butcher is found
in several texts in the corpora. Clear examples are PT 535,
appearing in the corpora of Pepi I, Merenre, and Pepi II:
Seize them, remove their heads, cut off their limbs,
that you may disembowel them, and cut out their
hearts, and drink from their blood.
and PT 477, in the same corpora:
Hone your knife, Thoth, which hacks and is sharp,
which cuts off heads and cuts out hearts. It will cut
off the heads and it will cut out the hearts of those
who oppose themselves to NN. I will eat a limb
of your foe. When I slaughter it for Osiris, I will
place it before the slaughterers.
PT 254, in Unas and Tetis corpora, also used similarly
vehement imagery:
their hearts fall to <my> fingers, their entrails are
for those who are of the sky, their reddening (i.e.
blood) is for those who are of the earth.
In all instances, the unknown they are alluded to as
evil spirits, waiting to dismember the king and relieve him
of a second life. Another aspect to this is found in the infa-
mous consumption of deities found in PT 273/4, or The
Cannibal Hymn (Faulkner 1924; Foster 19781979;
Goebs 2008: 349358, and 2009). This text has had several
different interpretations, including its use in a ritual of
slaughtering cattle (Eyre 2002), as a description of sunrise
(Goebs 2004), or as a remnant of a prehistoric ritual of can-
nibalism (Barta 1979). The question at hand is how to in-
terpret the actions of the king, which appear to be so out of
character within the texts that they have the appearance or
flavour of metaphor. The ingestion of human body parts or
fluids, however, had a close correlation to the assertion that
the kings body was made up from the essences of various
deities. In this type of imagery, however, the king was phys-
ically and, perhaps more important, knowingly taking divine
beings into his own body. He was operating under his own
16
PTs 356, 357, 369, and 423.
17
PTs 2, 3, 214, 254, 307, 373, 485A, 510, 536, 553, 592, 606, 640, 666, 669, 673, 676, and 717.
18
PTs 205, 222, 467, 470, 485A, 539, 573, 575, 576, 681, and 691.
19
PTs 216, 222, 269, 273-4, 480, 555, 570, 571, and 660.
20
PTs 553, 576, 582, 666, 677, and 691B.
21
All three are found in PT 222.
22
All four are found in PT 222.
23
PTs 1, 3, 6, 7, 356, 368, 422, 427, 446, 447, 450, 451, 452, 468, 474, 485A, 510, 540, 565, 476, 588, 593, 609, 650, 669, 677, 684, and 690.
Jennifer Hellum
steam and doing so with strength and power. He was in con-
trol of the events and would act decisively to control them.
He would also take into himself the power that motivates
these evil spirits, making that power part of himself and thus
incapable of causing him further harm. By ridding himself
of his enemies through anthropophagy, the king was at once
adding to his own power and firmly asserting his stature as
the one with whom any evil spirits or deities must reckon
in the afterlife. Not unimportantly, the king also became the
first king of Egypt, having done away with his predecessors,
a unique position, and hence, one that aided in elevating his
stature in the afterlife.
To maintain the myth of divinity (and entrance) for the
king in the afterlife, the myth had to be complete. Not only
was it necessary for the kings body to be composed of or
equivalent to various deities, it was also necessary for the
parentage of the king to be divine. Thus, the kings immediate
family father, mother, sisters, and brothers, (grand)mother
and (grand)father was composed of deities. It was acknowl-
edged once that the king had had a mother, presumably
human, previous to his entrance into the afterlife <I> do
not know (now) <my> first mother whom <I> knew (once)
(PT 565) but the texts did not linger upon the fact of mun-
dane birth; it was even repudiated outright (PTs 675 and
703). The gods saw the divine essence within the king, most
often seeing him as the father of Horus, Osiris.16 The notion
of perception mentioned earlier here is at work; Horus was
required to come and see the king in order for the essence, in
this case of Osiris, to be recognised (PT 357). The precise def-
inition of the nature of the divine essence does not seem to
have been of paramount importance, according to the evi-
dence in the Pyramid Texts. The kings father is variously
Geb,17 Re,18 Atum,19 Osiris,20 Shu (PTs 254 and 261), Re-
Atum (PT 217), Orion (PT 699), and a host of less familiar
divine objects and beings, most without particular designa-
tions: the sky (PT 442), the moon (PT 507), a beetle (PT
519), and ndi, pndn, dndn,21 the Great Wild Bull, the Great
Float-user, Soped, the One Sharp of Teeth.22 Some of these
fathers doubled as brothers: the moon (PT 481), Osiris (PTs
536 and 676), and Orion (PT 691A).
The mother of the king in the afterlife was named as var-
iously as was his father. Most often, she was Nut;23 however
The King, His Body, and His Relatives in the Pyramid Texts
she also took on the identity, or essence of a fairly wide range
of other goddesses, for example Isis,24 Nephthys (PT 511),
Ipy (PT 269), Sothis (PT 302), the great wild cow who
dwells in Nekheb,25 dawn-light (PT 422), the sky (PTs 422
and 650), the White Crown (PT 470), the two White
Crowns (PT 721), the living uraeus (PT 508 1108), Bastet
(PT 508 1111), the two vultures (PT 508 1118), pt wrt
(PT 571), the great Hwrt-serpent (PT 703), Meskhenet (PT
667C), Sekhmet (PT 704), and Shezmetet (PT 704). Again,
as with the father of the king, the legitimacy of the king was
not an issue in the afterlife, although it would perhaps be
expected that, in the mundane world, the Egyptians would
be concerned with the legitimacy of the king and thus have
the parentage of the king secure with one father and one
mother. Rather, of greater importance would have been the
fact of divine parents, whomever they might happen to be.
Divine parents guaranteed the king the right to claim divin-
ity in the afterlife, and the greater the number of those divine
parents, the greater the right for (already ostensibly present)
deification of the king.
A striking difference found in allusions to the kings af-
terlife mother from those of the kings afterlife father is those
PT sections that distinguish between the conception and the
birthing of the king. When this distinction is made, and it is
not always made by any means, two goddesses are named,
one who conceives and one who gives birth to the king. For
examples, in PT 511, Isis conceived the king and Nephthys
begat or gave birth to the king. In PT 704, Sekhmet con-
ceived and Shezmetet bore the king. A linguistic distinction
between conception and birth was not an unusual one for
the Egyptians to have made; the allocation of each to separate
goddesses, however, was. This would seem to be evidence for
a method of deification similar to that of having deities for
parents, siblings, and offspring. It is not possible to have more
than one woman involved physically in the process of carry-
ing a child to term and giving birth to that child in the mun-
dane world. The fact that it is conceived of as being possible
in the afterlife, as shown by the above examples, indicates the
necessity of associating deities with every moment of that
process which was so dangerous to both mother and child.
The difficulty with this and its use in the Pyramid Texts is
the king arises from the dead as a man, presumably fully-
grown. He has had his birth in the mundane world of a mun-
dane mother. Reference to it, then, in the afterlife is evoked
retroactively and apotropaically in justification for the kings
23
PTs 1, 3, 6, 7, 356, 368, 422, 427, 446, 447, 450, 451, 452, 468, 474, 485A, 510, 540, 565, 476, 588, 593, 609, 650, 669, 677, 684, and 690.
24
PTs 511, 609, 661, and 663.
25
PTs 412, 554, 582, and 675.
26
PTs 20, 21, 63, 106, 173, 179, 214, 247, 356, 371, 482, 510, 540, 541, 542, 606, 608, 641, 645, 665, 670, and 674.
27
Other examples of this type of sentence structure using the kings son and the name of Horus are found in PTs 106, 482, 510, 540, 606, 641, 665, and 670.
119
deification in the afterlife. Apotropaics come in with the need
to keep the king as sound, physically, as possible, and two di-
vine birth-mothers, each involved intimately with the very
act of childbirth, were a strong hedge against the possibility
of harm in the afterlife.
While the identity of the kings parents was fluid, the
identity of his siblings and offspring was less so. The identity
of parentage was vital for the sake of the kings divinity; it
provided him with the requisite divine familial descent that
gifted him with the proper inheritance that would allow him
to remain in the company of the gods. The identity of sib-
lings and offspring was of lesser importance with regard to
divine legitimacy. That the king had divine sisters, divine
brothers, and a divine son was to be expected given the the-
ological identity of the kings parents in the Pyramid Texts.
A wide breadth of examples was not as necessary to prove
the kings divinity when it came to siblings and sons. While
it might be of benefit to the king in showing divine ancestry
by naming a number of different goddesses and gods as
mother and father, it might be of negligible benefit to do so
with sisters and progeny. This is not to propose that the an-
cestry of the kings siblings and son were of no importance
or worse, of no benefit to the king; rather, that the ancestry
of these relations was self-evident, given the reputed divine
procreation of the king. Horus was almost uniformly men-
tioned as the son of the king, generally in unambiguous
terms.26 An interesting feature of the acknowledgement, or
assertion, of the king as the father of Horus and hence, as
Osiris, is the use of a parallel sentence structure in which the
word son or sA in one sentence is replaced with the name
of Horus, as in the example following:
I come to you, for I am your son; I come to you,
for I am Horus. (PT 674)27
This use of immediately allusory sentences serves to es-
tablish the idea of the son of the king as Horus. This is how
the son, the new king, was viewed on earth by his subjects;
he is filled with the essence of Horus. The assumption of
that essence occurred as a result of the assumption by his fa-
ther of the essence of Osiris who was, indeed, the very em-
bodiment of Osiris as the king in the afterlife.
A daughter was bestowed upon the king in only two in-
stances PTs 447 and 670. In PT 477, she is Sothis. In PT
670, however, she is not named but rather referred to as

120
your (i.e. the kings) eldest daughter who is in Qdm. Other
children of the king are alluded to as offspring. Once the
unnamed offspring is called the dawn-light (PT 263); the
rest of the references are to the morning star.28 Whether
we are to assume that these entities are feminine or mascu-
line in gender is unanswerable, and therefore, for our pur-
poses, they remain genderless.
The siblings of the king were sisters and much less often
and with much greater ambiguity, brothers. In an investiga-
tion into the identity of the siblings of the king, it is neces-
sary to mention first the tenuous grasp we have on Egyptian
kinship terms. The most obvious example of our vague un-
derstanding is the use of the term sister in the love poetry
of the New Kingdom from P. Harris (Budge 1923: pls. 41
46) and P. Chester Beatty I (Gardiner 1931). The term sAt
or sister, is used in the love poems in situations in which
we would expect the word lover or more colloquially, girl-
friend, to appear; however, the term for sister is used
throughout, rendering the poems seemingly incestuous to
the unwitting reader. When a strict meaning for the term
sister is eliminated, in other words when the association
of familial bond is removed, the poems become love poetry
of a more regular sort. The term sister, then, in Egyptian
would seem to mean not simply a woman or girl borne of
the same mothers body as a male, but in a wider sense, a fe-
male with whom one, here a male, has a close, if not inti-
mate bond. Evidence for a non-familial use of sister in
female relationships is not available; however, it is not un-
likely that the same breadth of meaning for sisters was
applied equally in male-female and in female-female rela-
tionships.
The sisters of the king were generally named as Isis29 and
Nephthys,30 however, Sothis is also well-represented in the
corpus as a sister of the dead king,31 and the Lady of Pe, and
the Celestial Serpent32 were mentioned as sisters of the king
as well. Having a number of different sisters is, of course,
within the bounds of possibility, unlike having a number of
different fathers and mothers. It is usually true, however, in
the texts that mention of Isis and Nephthys as sisters of the
dead king, the Osiris king, is found within an allusion to
the myth of the death of Osiris. The two deities wailed in
human form or as kites flying around the dead gods body
(PTs 535 and 701) and they collected the parts of the mur-
28
PTs 265, 473, 481, 507, and 609.
29
PTs 4, 42, 356, 366, 353, 593, 670, 691B, and 701.
30
PTs 5, 356, 366, 535, 593, 670, 691B, and 701.
31
PTs 263, 265, 266, 473, 509, 609, and 691A.
32
Lady of Pe PTs 258, and 259. Celestial serpent PT 690.
33
PTs 219, 478, 485, 519, 532, 546, 606, 615, and 667A.
34
PTs 219, 478, 485, 519, 532, 576, 606, 615, and 667A.
Jennifer Hellum
dered god and made him healthy once again (PTs 366 and
670). In these allusions, the king is not merely the Osiris
king of the texts, but he is Osiris participating in the allusion
to his death and discovery of his body. At work in PT 535
is the parallel sentence structure mentioned above with ref-
erence to the son of the king.
So said Isis and Nephthys: The one who screeches
comes, the kite comes, namely Isis and Nephthys;
they have come seeking their brother Osiris, seeking
their brother the king.
In this PT portion, the sentence containing the name
of Osiris comes first, before that containing the title of
king, unlike the example referred to earlier, in which the
son came before Horus. Regardless of the order, the
same principle of parallel sentence structure is in opera-
tion in the example directly above. The fact of alliance was
found in the exact similarity of sentence structure and
wording rather than in the order of persons named. The
king is allied with Osiris by means of Isis and Nephthys
seeking the two of them, i.e. the king and Osiris as one
entity.
Finally, the brothers of the king in the afterlife need
some discussion. The brothers of the king are mentioned
much less frequently than are sisters or other family of the
king. While Seth is the deity most often identified as
a brother of the king (or of Osiris),33 Thoth (PTs 218 and
219), anti (PT 484), and afti (PT 484) and the moon (PT
481) are also given that label. Thoth is called the brother
of Osiris twice (PTs 218 and 219), and Seth is referred to
as the brother of Osiris nine times.34 While the king is
generally called Osiris NN throughout most of the cor-
pora, except Unas, and is thus assumed to be Osiris in the
afterlife, Seth is always unambiguously the brother of
Osiris, and not the king. In each reference, Seth is blamed
as the brother who did ill to Osiris, or threw him down,
as in the examples below:
You35 have come seeking your brother, Osiris, his
brother Seth having thrown him down upon his side
in that side of Ghsty.36 (PT 478)
The King, His Body, and His Relatives in the Pyramid Texts
And
He to whom ill was done by his brother Seth comes
to us, say the Two Enneads. Indeed, it will not be
permitted that Seth be free from raising you for ever
(Dt), O my father Osiris the King, say the Two En-
neads concerning you, O my father Osiris the King.
(PT 606)
It should be noted about the above passage that Seth is
both mentioned as one who has committed a crime against
Osiris and as one who must pay for that crime for the rest of
time on earth. Interestingly, the allusions to Thoth as the
brother of Osiris are in the same vein. PT 218 mentions Thoth
and Seth together as the brothers who have done Osiris ill, and
in PT 219, they are used in a parallel sentence structure:
Seth, this is your brother, Osiris, who has been
caused to be restored, so that he may live, and so that
he may punish you. ( 173)
And
Thoth, this is your brother, Osiris, who has been
caused to be restored, so that he may life and so that
he may punish you. ( 175)
Within this particular spell, which is primarily con-
structed of these parallel constructions, of all the deities
mentioned, Seth and Thoth are the only two who are threat-
ened with punishment. The punishment of Seth (and less
so, Thoth) is important, as it illustrates the need to keep all
potential dangers away from the deceased king. In becoming
Osiris upon awakening in to the afterlife, the king was weak
and vulnerable, in need of divine aid. The same requirement
that led to the mutilation of dangerous signs on the walls of
the pyramids was put into practice for protecting the king
from dangerous beings in the afterlife. The signs were, in
a sense, crippled and so taken out of dangerous circulation;
Seth was punished for the crime of fratricide, rendering him
impotent as a potential criminal. In bringing his crime into
the light of day, his aspect was generally reduced from one
of danger to one of servitude. It should be noted, however,
that Thoth as the Osiris brother appears only twice, and the
others only once each. Given the quite different situation
with the kings other family members, it appears that, in
comparison, Seths fraternal position is of great importance
35
Feminine, singular suffix pronoun T. Faulkner (1969: 166) equates this with Isis, although the word referenced by the pronoun is mAqt or ladder (Wb. II 33, 6).
36
Gazelle-land, so Allen 2005: 279.
121
to the inherent myths within the texts. It is perhaps not a co-
incidence that in what narrative myth remains, the only fam-
ily member at whose hand Osiris suffered was his brother,
Seth. Logically, if the king was assumed to have entered the
afterlife and the realm of deities full of the essence of Osiris,
then a potential for danger from Seth might have been ex-
pected. His inclusion in the texts as Osiris brother points
to the importance of the myth of ascendance to the throne.
The Contendings of Horus and Seth, the most fully-realised
native Egyptian myth, provides the context for the familial
attribution of king and brother, and its importance in the
rule of Egypt is primary.
Through the use of alignment of body and family, the
king is firmly established within the Pyramid Texts divine
geography and its inhabitants. His body has become divine,
through the recognition of the deities in his limbs and torso;
his divine sight and speech now work on a metaphysical
level, as well as a more prosaic level of the senses; and he is
united with his divine family. Each of these associations is
fluid, and the positions within them are filled by assorted
members of the pantheon. There is very little standardisation
involved, except insofar as the standard is a widespread and
constant substitution of deities for the kings corporeal fea-
tures and relations. This, however, is a powerful indication
of the very nature and essence of Egyptian religious thought.
It is through this mutability and adaptability that the king
becomes a fundamental part of the structure of the Egyptian
universe upon his death and ascension.
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