Duat

Also Known As: Egyptian dwꜣt, also transliterated Tuat or Dat; written with a star set inside a circle
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Egyptian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Mythological Places
Mythical Attributes: The Duat is where the sun dies each evening and is remade before dawn, and where the dead are judged and then either renewed or wiped out entirely.
Role in Mythos: It is the hidden half of every circuit the sun, the stars and the dead are obliged to make, and the place where regeneration actually happens.
Relation to Humans: Every Egyptian expected to travel it, and the texts buried with them were route knowledge rather than consolation, naming its gates, guardians and serpents so the traveller could answer each one correctly. Those who could went on to the Field of Reeds; those who could not were destroyed rather than punished forever.

A woman named Gautsoshen was buried on the west bank at Thebes around three thousand years ago with a painted papyrus rolled tight and tucked between her thighs. It is a little over a metre long and still bright, reds and yellows laid over the fibre in flat confident strokes. Four columns of text in the middle of it explain what she wanted from it: that the great god, ruler of the west, cause the secret gates of the necropolis to open to Gautsoshen, so that she may come forth as she wishes. She had not been buried to rest. She had been buried to travel, and the papyrus was her route map.

The country she was going to was the Duat, and the Egyptians wrote its name with a star set inside a circle. Where it actually was is a question they never settled, or rather one they answered several ways at once and saw no reason to reconcile. The oldest funerary texts, carved inside the burial chambers of late Old Kingdom pyramids, send the dead upward to live among the stars and the sun. The great New Kingdom compositions painted across the royal tombs put the Duat firmly underground, in the body of the earth. A religious treatise known as the Book of Nut goes further and defines it as whatever is neither earth nor sky, a region lying outside the created world altogether. Three answers, all of them official, all of them in use at the same time.

What survives is less a location than a landscape, and an unusually specific one. A river runs down the middle of it, the way the Nile runs down the middle of Egypt, and the sun god’s boat sails on that river. On either bank live the inhabitants: gods, guardians, gatekeepers, the blessed dead, the enemies of the sun. Not all of the crossing is water. There are stretches of dry country around Rosetau and the land of Sokar who is on his sand, where the river fails and the boat has to be hauled bodily over the grit. Elsewhere the geography turns to mounds and walled compounds, each with its own name and its own occupant. One is a mountain three hundred rods long and ten wide with a serpent on it called Shooter of Two Knives, seventy cubits round, which lives by cutting down spirits. Another has water that is fire and waves that are fire, so that gods and spirits see it from a distance and go on thirsty. A third, Ikesy, is disposed of in a single flat line: those who enter it cannot come out.

The Field of Reeds sits among these mounds and is the one address in the Duat anybody actually wanted. Its walls are iron. Its barley grows seven cubits tall, with ears two cubits long, and it is harvested by spirits seven cubits high working beside Horakhty at the eastern door of the sky. Egyptian paradise was a farm with better yields and taller farmers.

The nightly journey through this country is the central story. Twelve hours of darkness, twelve divisions of the Duat, and the solar boat working through them in order. The scenes are laid out in three bands: the river across the middle, the two banks above and below, hundreds of figures with their names written beside them. Some hours are given over to sound rather than event, and the texts record what reaches the crew as they pass, the noise of the netherworld coming to them as buzzing bees and screeching cats. At the sixth hour, the deepest point of the passage, the thing the whole composition exists for happens. The sun god, often drawn with a ram’s head because the ram is the sign of the ba, meets the mummified body of Osiris, and for one hour the travelling soul and the motionless corpse are a single being. Both are made new by it. In the seventh hour Apophis lies waiting on a sandbank to run the boat aground and has to be put down before anything can continue. By the twelfth the sun comes out of the eastern horizon as a scarab.

The Duat came into being, as far as it can be reconstructed, out of watching the sky. The sun went down in the west every evening and was back in the east every morning, visibly unharmed, and that circuit was the only proof of resurrection anyone required. The west became the direction of the dead. The sky goddess Nut was said to swallow the sun at nightfall and give birth to it again at dawn, which turned the hours of darkness into a gestation rather than an absence and made her body one more place the Duat could be. Later, when kings began cutting their tombs deep into the Theban cliffs and covering the walls with these compositions, the architecture stopped describing the Duat and started being it.

What the place offers is not safety. It is knowledge, which the Egyptians rated the more useful of the two. The spells buried with the dead are very largely names: the name of the mound, the name of the serpent lying on it, the name of the god who guards the burning water. Address the obstacle correctly and it stops being an obstacle and starts being an advantage. The netherworld books say so outright, promising that whoever knows these secret images becomes a fully equipped akh, an effective spirit, able to go into the Duat and come out again. Somewhere in the passage every traveller is judged. Their words are weighed in front of Osiris and his court and the ruling is short. The blessed are fed. The rest are destroyed.

That is where the Duat parts company with the hells it gets compared to. There is fire in it, and there are knives, and there is a place of annihilation, but the sentence handed down is not endless suffering. It is erasure: a second death that removes the offender from the beyond and from the memory of the living in the same stroke. The threat is not pain. The threat is that afterwards nobody will be able to say your name, which is why the texts have their owners insisting, again and again, that they will not perish and their name will not perish.

The Duat also has a fixed limit, and it is the only reassuring thing about it. It is half a circuit and never the whole one. The sun is only ever passing through, and everyone who gets the answers right is passing through as well. Chapter 149 of the Book of the Dead walks its owner past all fourteen mounds, serpent by serpent, burning lake by burning lake, and then the scribe signs off in five words. This is its end in peace.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Duat in Egyptian mythology?

The Duat is the Egyptian netherworld, the region the sun crosses during the twelve hours of the night and the country the dead must travel to reach a new life. It is described as a landscape with a river down its centre, inhabited banks on either side, stretches of sand, and a series of named mounds guarded by serpents and gods. Egyptian sources place it in the sky, beneath the earth, and outside the created world entirely, sometimes within the same period.

Where is the Duat located?

The Egyptians never fixed a single location and did not appear to want one. The earliest funerary texts put it in a celestial domain among the stars, the New Kingdom netherworld books put it deep underground, and the treatise known as the Book of Nut defines it as whatever is neither earth nor sky. These versions coexisted and were treated as complementary rather than contradictory.

Who rules the Duat?

Osiris presides over the Duat as ruler of the west, and judgement takes place before him and his court of judges. The sun god also passes through it every night, and at the sixth hour of the journey the two are briefly united, an event that renews both of them. The Duat is therefore shared ground rather than one god’s private kingdom.

What happened to the wicked in the Duat?

They were destroyed rather than tortured indefinitely. After judgement the blessed were fed and the condemned were consigned to annihilation, a second death that ended their existence in the afterlife and erased their memory among the living. This is why Egyptian funerary texts repeatedly have their owners declare that they will not perish and that their name will not perish.

How did the dead survive the journey through the Duat?

By knowing names. The spells written on coffins and papyri supplied the names of the mounds, the serpents, the gatekeepers and the guardian gods, and correctly addressing an obstacle converted it into a source of power for the traveller. The netherworld books state that whoever knows these secret images becomes a fully equipped akh, an effective spirit able to enter the Duat and leave it again.