Aaru

The grain came up past the shoulders of the people cutting it. Five cubits of wheat and seven of barley, says one Eighteenth Dynasty papyrus, with reapers nine cubits tall wading through the crop; a later roll made for a scribe named Ani gives shorter grain and shorter spirits. Egyptian scribes were exact about a great many things and never once settled this. What every version agreed on was that the harvest did not fail.

This was Aaru, the Field of Reeds, and it was farmland. Not a hall, not a garden, not a city of light. The Egyptians looked at eternity and saw the Delta on its best morning: black soil going soft under the foot, straight canals, flax in flower at the plot edge, water standing bright in the ditches. Their name for it, sekhet-iaru, means exactly what it says. Reeds. Paradise was named after the marsh plant that grew where the water met the field.

The earliest form of it sat in the sky. In the Pyramid Texts, carved inside royal tombs at the close of the Old Kingdom, the Field of Rushes lies in the eastern sky, and what happens there is washing rather than farming. The doors of the firmament open at dawn, Horus and Ra go in to purify themselves, and the dead king goes in behind them and rises when they rise. The ploughs came later. As the promise of an afterlife spread outward from the king to anybody who could pay a scribe, the field acquired oxen, property lines and a labour roll.

By the Eleventh Dynasty it was being drawn. The oldest surviving pictures are painted inside coffins from Deir el-Bersha, among them the inner coffin of a man called Kua-tep, now in the British Museum. The field is a rectangle, ringed with water, cut across by canals, scattered with small islands. There is a flight of steps. There is a boat with a serpent’s head at either end and eight paddles laid ready in it. It is a map, and it is a map of nowhere: plan and elevation crushed into the same picture, the water lying flat and the palms standing upright off the same line, schematic as a surveyor’s sketch and just as confident about a place nobody had been.

On the east wall of Sennedjem’s burial chamber at Deir el-Medina, the workman and his wife Iineferti are getting on with it. They cut grain, they scatter seed, they pull flax up by the root the way flax has to be taken. In Ani’s papyrus the same work is broken across three bands: he paddles his own boat along the top, under a caption reading Field of Offerings; below that he harvests flax and drives oxen over a threshing floor, dust coming up off the beaten circle; below that he walks behind the plough in a band labelled, over the backs of the cattle, Field of Reeds.

Nobody wandered in. The field lay beyond the judgement, and beyond a great deal of procedure besides. One roll gives Aaru seven gates, each with a gatekeeper, a watcher to report that somebody had arrived and a herald to take down the name. Another counts twenty-one secret gates into the house of Osiris there, and gives each one a name long enough to be a sentence. The names mattered. You did not argue past the watcher at the fourth gate, you pronounced him correctly, and if you could not you stood outside.

Then the reward turned out to have a catch. Land in Egypt came with obligations attached: dig the canal, shift the sand, work the fields when your name came up on a list. The dead inherited the list. A man named Nebseni had his position set out plainly on his papyrus, asking that in the Field of Offerings he might eat, drink, plough, reap, fight and make love, that he might never be in a state of servitude there, and that he might be in authority instead. He was not being grand. He was being realistic about how his country worked.

The solution was small, mummy-shaped and mass-produced. Spell six of the Book of the Dead speaks directly to a figurine: if the dead man is called up to do any work down there, if the checkmarks are struck against his name on the roll, the figure is to stand in his place and say, I am doing it, see, I am here. Its duties are listed without a scrap of poetry. Cultivate the marsh. Irrigate the riverbank fields. Ferry sand to west or east. The spell first appears on Middle Kingdom coffins around 1900 BC, and mummiform figures carrying it turn up a century later at Lisht and Abydos. From about 1550 BC they are standard, one or two per burial at first, and by the Third Intermediate Period a well-supplied tomb held one shabti for every day of the year with an overseer for every ten of them. Four hundred and one small servants, so that a man could stand in seven-cubit barley and not have to cut it.

What the field gave was continuity rather than transcendence: the same river, the same crops, the same wife, the same body doing the same work under a sun that came up on time. The dead arrived already altered. At the plough in his own papyrus, Ani is not called Ani. He is called Osiris, and the little boat drawn beside him has the same hull as the barque the sun travels in.

The limits were real too. One of the channels in Ani’s field is said to hold neither fish nor worms, which sounds like a strange thing to advertise until you consider that a waterway with nothing living in it is a waterway with nothing in it that bites. Other districts of the same afterlife country were not so kind: one full of fire, one swept by roaring water, one holding the serpent Rerek, one where the spirits fed on the inert and the feeble, one sealed even against the gods. Aaru was a good neighbourhood in a dangerous land. And it could be lost. Fail the balance and there was no field. Forget the names and the gates stayed shut. Furnish the tomb badly and no figure stood up when the roll was called, and the eternity you had paid for became an eternity of ploughing.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Aaru in Egyptian mythology?

Aaru, the Field of Reeds, is the ancient Egyptian paradise: an eternal stretch of Delta farmland with canals, islands and grain that grows taller than the people harvesting it. It is described in the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead, and painted inside coffins and tombs from the Eleventh Dynasty onward. Its Egyptian name, sekhet-iaru, simply means “field of reeds”.

Who could enter the Field of Reeds?

Only the justified dead. Entry came after the weighing of the heart against the feather of maat, and after passing the gates of Aaru, which are variously counted as seven or as twenty-one and each guarded by named keepers, watchers and heralds. In Ani’s papyrus the gods grant him a holding in the field only once his heart has balanced and Thoth has reported the result.

Did the dead have to work in Aaru?

Yes. Aaru was farmland, and land in Egypt carried labour obligations, so the dead were liable to be called up to dig canals, irrigate fields and shift sand. This is the reason for shabtis, the small mummiform figurines inscribed with spell six of the Book of the Dead, which were meant to stand up and answer the roll in the owner’s place. By the Third Intermediate Period a rich burial could hold one for every day of the year plus overseers.

Where was the Field of Reeds believed to be?

The earliest references, in the Pyramid Texts, place the Field of Rushes in the eastern sky, where the king purified himself at dawn alongside Horus and Ra. In later funerary texts it becomes a mapped agricultural landscape reached through the underworld after judgement. The Egyptians drew it as a rectangle surrounded by water and divided by canals rather than fixing it to any real geography.

What is the difference between Aaru and Sekhet-Hetepet?

Sekhet-Hetepet, the Field of Offerings or Field of Peace, is the wider blessed country, and Sekhet-Aaru is the reed-grown district within it. The two names are used loosely and often interchangeably in the funerary papyri. In Ani’s Book of the Dead the upper band of the scene is captioned Field of Offerings while the ploughing band below is captioned Field of Reeds.

Related Entries

Osiris, Maat, Anubis, Thoth, Ahemait, Ra, Ba, Bennu, Isis, Horus, Hapi, Nut, Mictlan, Sheol