Djed Pillar

Also Known As: Egyptian ḏd, “stability” or “endurance”; also called the djed column, the djed sign, or simply the djed
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Egyptian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Objects
Mythical Attributes: The djed confers stability, endurance and permanence, and in its funerary use it restores the spine of the dead so that they can rise.
Role in Mythos: Read from the New Kingdom onward as the backbone of Osiris, it was hauled upright each year in a rite that staged the murdered god getting back to his feet.
Relation to Humans: Ordinary Egyptians wore it as a cheap moulded amulet and were buried wearing it, on the promise that a djed at the throat would keep the gates of the west open to them. Kings performed the far larger version in public, taking the ropes themselves with priests and their own children pulling alongside.

On the last day of the fourth month of flood, when the water had pulled back off the fields and left them black and soft enough to plough, priests laid ropes on a wooden column and pulled. It came up out of the horizontal by degrees, and a man at the base steadied it with both palms flat against the shaft, and when it finally stood the king was standing beneath it. Egypt kept doing this for well over a thousand years. The morning is carved on the wall at Medinet Habu under Ramesses III, written into a papyrus in the late Ptolemaic period, and still being cut into a roof chapel at Dendera under the Romans, always on the thirtieth day, always the last thing to happen.

What they raised was the djed: a column crossed near the top by four horizontal bars, one of the oldest signs in Egyptian writing and one of the most stubbornly unexplained. It meant stability, though stability is a thin word for what the Egyptians wanted out of it. Endurance. Permanence. The quality of not falling over, of still being there next year and the year after that.

Nobody knows what it is.

Suggestions have been accumulating for a century and most of them have been discarded: a tree with its branches lopped away, a column bundled out of reeds, a pole with sheaves of grain lashed round it at the end of harvest, a human spine seen from behind. The tree reading has a certain appeal in a country that grew almost no usable timber and shipped its cedar in from the Levantine coast. The grain reading fits the season the rite falls in. The spine reading is the one the Egyptians themselves eventually settled on, whatever the sign may have started as.

Its history is long enough to have a before. Djed pillars run as decorative friezes through the subterranean chambers of Djoser’s step pyramid complex in the Third Dynasty, and one stands on the base of a statue of Imhotep, the man who designed it. That is centuries earlier than any attestation of Osiris. In those first years the djed belonged to Sokar, the falcon god of the Memphite necropolis, and it stayed in the orbit of Memphis, close to Ptah, the craftsman god whose city it was. Osiris arrived later and absorbed it, the way he absorbed a great deal.

Once he had it, the sign acquired an anatomy. The column became his vertebrae and the four crossbars his ribs, and the Book of the Dead put the identification into words to be spoken over a small gold pillar as it was laid at the throat of a mummy: Osiris, you have your backbone, you have your vertebrae. Anyone equipped with one, the same text promises, would not be kept away from the gates of the west.

Most of them were nothing like gold. The surviving amulets are small and extremely common, blue-green faience pressed out of a mould, four or five centimetres tall, with four bands wrapping the column and a hole pierced through the back so a cord could pass. A workman finishing one would run a thumb down the thin vertical grooves cut between the crossbars, notice that nobody had bothered to repeat them on the reverse, and set it on the rack with the rest of that week’s hundred. It would end up round the neck of somebody’s mother.

Somewhere along the way the pillar grew a face. Eyes open at the top between the bars, arms come out of the sides holding the crook and flail, and the tall plumed atef crown goes on above, and the object stops standing for the god and simply becomes him. On a wall in the tomb of Kheruef, steward to Queen Tiye, the personified pillar stands in a shrine on a high base with lotus and papyrus set in front of it, facing a table piled with fowl, cucumbers, bread, heads and ribs of beef, and tall jars of unguent with bundles of lettuce jammed in among them.

The fullest surviving account of what the raising actually involved is a papyrus from the Ramesseum, and it reads like a script. Kurt Sethe published it as a play, complete with speaking parts and stage directions, and Egyptologists have been arguing about that reading ever since, but the sequence itself is hard to mistake for anything other than a performance. Grain is laid out on a threshing floor in the shape of Osiris. Cattle and donkeys are driven across it to thresh it, and they are the followers of Seth, trampling the god. Horus tells them to stop. They do not stop. He binds them, and they are killed for it. The heads of a ram and a goose are set down in front of the pillar, and then the king’s own descendants take up the ropes.

The princesses sing while it goes up. To you the sistra, and to your kindly face the menat necklaces, as you arise, O august Djed Pillar, Osiris Sokar, the Lord of Shetyet. There is dancing, and a hymn calling the god a rudder in the boat, reborn as the disc in the sky. Then the pillar is lowered again. Seth is shackled and breaks loose, he and Horus fence with sticks while their followers box, Horus wins, and the crown goes on his head.

The same rattle and the same boxing turn up in the Kheruef reliefs, where Amenhotep III hauls the pillar upright with Tiye beside him and four priests helping, and rows of young women shake sistra and hold menat necklaces, captioned in the line of hieroglyphs above their heads as children of the king praising the noble djed pillar. Below them, food-bearers thread between men dancing with heavy steps, and other men box. Some of those stick dances are still performed in Egypt.

Whatever power the object had, it had by standing up. A djed on a coffin, a djed in a frieze, a djed pressed into faience and hung at a throat, all of them make the same flat claim: this will hold. It ran alongside the ankh and the was sceptre so consistently that the three of them became something close to a grammar of well-being, and it paired so often with the tyet, the looped knot of Isis, that the two signs read almost as a couple.

Its limits are built into the same gesture. A pillar that has to be hauled upright is a pillar that was lying down, and the Ramesseum text makes the point without flinching by lowering it again before the fighting starts. The stability was never a property of the world. It was something a specific number of men had to manufacture, on a specific morning, with rope, and then manufacture again the following year. And whatever the original object had been, the Egyptians had lost it long before the Romans were carving the rite into the ceiling at Dendera. They went on hauling it upright anyway.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the djed pillar?

The djed pillar is an ancient Egyptian symbol shaped like a column with four horizontal bars near the top, and it means stability, endurance and permanence. It is one of the oldest signs in Egyptian writing, appearing as an architectural frieze in Djoser’s Third Dynasty step pyramid complex. Egyptologists have never agreed on what the original object was, proposing a stripped tree, a bundle of reeds, a grain pole and a human spine.

Why is the djed called the backbone of Osiris?

The djed was identified as the spine of Osiris, with the column read as his vertebrae and the four crossbars as his ribs. The Book of the Dead confirms the equation directly, in words spoken over a gold djed amulet laid at the throat of a mummy: Osiris, you have your backbone, you have your vertebrae. The association is not original to the sign, which belonged to Sokar of Memphis before Osiris is attested at all.

What was the raising of the djed ceremony?

It was a rite in which priests and the king used ropes to haul a large wooden djed pillar from lying flat to fully upright, staging the murdered Osiris getting back on his feet. It fell on the thirtieth and final day of the fourth month of flood, closing the Khoiak festival, and is recorded at Medinet Habu under Ramesses III, in Papyrus Jumilhac, and in a roof chapel at Dendera. Amenhotep III is shown performing it in the tomb of Kheruef, with Queen Tiye beside him.

What was a djed amulet used for?

A djed amulet was placed on a mummy, according to the Book of the Dead at the throat, to restore the spine of the dead and let them rise like Osiris. The text promised that anyone so equipped would not be kept away from the gates of the west, the domain of the blessed dead. Most surviving examples are cheap moulded blue-green faience only a few centimetres tall, rather than the gold the spell specifies.

Is the djed the same as the ankh?

No. The ankh means life and the djed means stability, and they are separate signs, though Egyptian decoration pairs them constantly along with the was sceptre. The djed is also frequently paired with the tyet, the looped knot associated with Isis.