Pyramid Texts inscribed in the Pyramid of Unas

Date

c. 2350 BCE

Category

Religion & ideology

Region

Lower Egypt (Egypt)

Era

Ancient Civilizations

Significance

Toward the end of the Fifth Dynasty, the burial chamber of the pharaoh Unas at Saqqara was inscribed with a corpus of about 283 spells now known as the Pyramid Texts, the earliest version of a tradition that would appear in nine late Old Kingdom pyramids.

These are the oldest known body of ancient Egyptian religious writing and among the oldest sacred texts in the world. Intended to protect the deceased king and guarantee his ascent and transformation in the afterlife, the spells include the earliest reference to the Opening of the Mouth ritual central to mummification and the first textual appearance of Osiris as ruler of the underworld, alongside the supremacy of the sun god Ra. The texts crystallise Old Kingdom funerary religion and the cult of divine kingship, and they form the ancestral source of later funerary collections such as the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead, shaping Egyptian beliefs about death for over two thousand years.

Empires active in c. 2350 BCE

• Egyptian Old Kingdom
  2686 BCE – 2181 BCE
• Indus Valley (Harappan) Civilization
  2600 BCE – 1900 BCE
• Elamite Kingdom
  2700 BCE – 539 BCE

Related religion & ideology events

• Great Ziggurat of Ur and temple-centred religion
  c. 2100 BCE
• Composition of the Rigveda
  c. 1500-1200 BCE
• Akhenaten's Atenist revolution and the Amarna period
  c. 1348 BCE
• Enuma Elish: the Babylonian epic of creation
  c. 1150 BCE
• Zoroaster and the rise of dualist religion
  c. 1200–900 BCE
• Chavín de Huántar and the first pan-Andean religious cult
  c. 900 BCE

Further reading

A Little History of Religion

The wider story

A Little History of Religion

Richard Holloway

Accessible sweep of humanity's faiths and belief systems from prehistory to the present.

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