Amduat

Also Known As: Egyptian imy-dwat, “What Is in the Underworld”; the Egyptians’ own title was the Writing of the Hidden Chamber; also written Am-Duat, Am-Tuat, Imydwat
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Egyptian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Events and Tales
Mythical Attributes: It maps the twelve regions of the underworld that the sun god crosses in the twelve hours of the night, naming the beings he meets in each and the words that open the way.
Role in Mythos: It is the fullest Egyptian telling of how the dying evening sun is renewed in the dark and born again at dawn.
Relation to Humans: New Kingdom kings had it painted around their burial chambers so that they could share the sun’s passage and rebirth. Its own text promises that whoever knows these figures will be fed in the underworld, and by the end of the New Kingdom people below royal rank were being buried with copies on papyrus.

Every evening the sun went down in the west, and every morning it came up in the east, and for twelve hours in between nobody could see what it was doing. The Egyptians decided to find out. What they wrote down is a map of the dark, hour by hour, with every gate, every guardian, and every monster in its proper place. They called it the Writing of the Hidden Chamber. Egyptologists call it the Amduat, “What Is in the Underworld”, and it is one of the strangest travel guides ever written.

Its title promises a great deal. In E. A. Wallis Budge’s 1905 translation it opens as the writings and drawings of the hidden palace, concerning the souls, the gods, the shadows and the spirits, with knowledge of the doors and the ways by which the great god passes. The book is not a hymn and not a prayer. It is a survey, drawn in three long bands, the sun’s boat sailing along the middle one while the inhabitants of each region crowd the banks above and below.

The oldest complete copy is painted in the burial chamber of Thutmose III in the Valley of the Kings, tomb KV34, which Victor Loret published in 1899. The Theban Mapping Project describes the room: rectangular with rounded corners, shaped like a cartouche, the oval ring that encloses a royal name. The hours run around its walls in order, the first three to the right of the entrance, the fourth split in two halves on either side of the door. The figures and hieroglyphs are done in a cursive hand more suited to papyrus than to plaster, so that standing inside is like standing inside an unrolled book. On the two pillars sit the seventy-four forms of the sun god from the Litany of Ra, beside a shortened version of the Amduat itself, and in one scene the king is suckled by a tree that personifies Isis. As Joshua Roberson of the Penn Museum explains, the design was meant to set the twelve divisions around the chamber in sequence, with the final hour on its eastern side. The dead king lay at the centre of the sun’s journey.

The journey itself begins in the west, where the light drains out of the sky and the boat slips into the Duat. The first hours are well watered. There are fields, and grain gods, and the kingdom of Osiris along a river, though even here there is a warning: in the third region, as Budge renders it, guardians hack souls to pieces in a place of fire.

Then the water runs out. The fourth and fifth hours belong to Sokar, the old god of the dead, and his land is desert. The ordinary boat is useless on sand, so the sun god rides in a vessel made from a two-headed serpent, which is hauled along steep sloping roads through a region called Rosetau, passing sealed doors. Light shines from the mouth of the boat, but not enough. The god cannot see the beings on either side of him. He calls out, and they hear him, and that is how the journey goes on in the dark: by voice. Somewhere nearby lies a lake of boiling water.

At the sixth hour, the middle of the night, the text reaches its secret. A great serpent with five heads coils around a figure lying on its back, the god’s own body, holding a scarab, the sign of the sun that will be born. It is the deepest point of the voyage, the moment the old sun and the new one lie in the same place. Here the text adds one of its promises: whoever knows this thing will be fully provided with food in the underworld and share in the offerings of the gods.

The seventh hour is the great danger. Apep, the chaos serpent, whom the text also calls Neha-hra, lies on a sandbank some 450 cubits long and has drunk the river down to shallows, so that the boat can neither float nor be towed. The rescue is brutal and exact. Serket catches the monster by the head and fastens it in fetters, another god binds its tail, and six great knives pin the coils to the ground. The words of power of Isis, the great sorceress, carry the boat across, and the sun god wraps himself in the protective serpent Mehen. Apep is not killed. He is only held down until tomorrow night.

After that the tide turns. The god calls doors open, the dead in their regions rise to answer him, crews of oarsmen haul the boat on toward the east, and the enemies of the light are dealt with along the way. In the twelfth hour the last marvel happens. Twelve gods tow the boat into the tail of an immense serpent, and it comes out through the serpent’s mouth. What went in as the tired night sun emerges as Khepri, the scarab of the morning. Shu, the air, receives him in the eastern horizon. The spent body of the night is left behind at the border of the dark, and the sun rises as though for the first time.

For its first few centuries the book belonged to kings. Roberson notes that it was central to the burial chambers of the Eighteenth Dynasty and still appeared, though less prominently, in Ramesside tombs, where it shared the walls with other books of the afterlife. Later it came down in the world. By the Third Intermediate Period, copies on papyrus were being made for burials below royal rank. One, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was inscribed around 1000 to 945 BCE for a person named Gautsoshen and found rolled up between the thighs of the mummy at Deir el-Bahri. It is a little over a metre long and brightly painted: twin lions for the two horizons, the sun going down into the earth, and four columns of text asking that the secret gates of the necropolis be opened for Gautsoshen.

The power of the Amduat was knowledge. Anyone who knew the names, the images and the order of the hours could travel with the sun rather than stay behind in the dark, and a king painted inside the story became part of the daily miracle of dawn. Its limit is built into the same structure. The book promises nothing to those who do not know it, and it never pretends the danger is over. Every sunrise it describes is won again the next night, against the same serpent on the same sandbank, and the book has to be read again from the first hour.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Amduat?

The Amduat is an ancient Egyptian funerary book that describes the sun god’s journey through the underworld during the twelve hours of the night. Its name means “What Is in the Underworld”, and the Egyptians called it the Writing of the Hidden Chamber. It ends with the sun being reborn at dawn.

Where is the oldest complete Amduat?

The oldest complete copy of the Amduat is painted on the walls of the burial chamber of Thutmose III in the Valley of the Kings, tomb KV34. The chamber is shaped like a cartouche, and the twelve hours run around its walls in order, drawn in a cursive style that looks like a papyrus roll.

What happens in the seventh hour of the Amduat?

In the seventh hour of the Amduat, the chaos serpent Apep lies on a long sandbank and blocks the sun’s boat in shallow water. The goddess Serket fetters his head, knives pin him down, and the words of power of Isis carry the boat past him. Apep is restrained rather than killed.

How is the sun reborn at the end of the Amduat?

In the twelfth hour of the Amduat, twelve gods tow the sun’s boat into the tail of a huge serpent and out through its mouth. The sun emerges as Khepri, the scarab of the morning, and the air god Shu receives him in the eastern horizon while the body of the night sun is left behind.

Who was buried with the Amduat?

At first the Amduat was reserved for kings of the New Kingdom, who had it painted in their burial chambers. By the Third Intermediate Period it was copied on papyrus for non-royal burials, such as the papyrus of Gautsoshen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, found rolled up with the mummy at Deir el-Bahri.