The Bark of Ra

About The Bark of Ra

The Bark of Ra is the celestial vessel in which the Egyptian sun-god sails across the sky by day and through the underworld by night, the cosmic vehicle whose unceasing voyage carries the sun on its eternal circuit and sustains the order of the world. The Egyptians distinguished two barks for the two phases of the journey: the Mandjet or 'morning bark' (sometimes called the day-bark), in which Ra sails from dawn across the daytime sky to dusk, and the Mesektet or 'night bark' (the evening-bark), in which he sails from sunset through the twelve hours of the duat to be reborn at dawn. The sun-god transfers from one to the other at the eastern and western horizons.

The bark is at once a vehicle and a place — a moving cosmic location inhabited by a crew of gods who tow, steer, and defend it, and a region of the cosmos in its own right. The crew that accompanies Ra includes the deities who navigate and protect the vessel and the personified powers of authoritative utterance (Hu) and perception (Sia) who stand beside the sun-god, along with the magician-god Heka, whose creative power sustains the voyage. The serpent Mehen coils protectively around the cabin in which Ra sits, shielding the god through the dangers of the night.

The great drama enacted aboard the bark is the nightly battle against the chaos-serpent Apep, who lies in wait in the duat to halt the vessel and abolish the renewal of the sun. Each night the defenders of the bark — Set, Mehen, Isis, Selket, and others — repel and bind the serpent so that the voyage may continue and the sun be reborn. The journey of the bark is thus not a serene cruise but a perpetual struggle to maintain cosmic order against the chaos that perpetually threatens it, a struggle that must be won anew with every passage of the night.

The Bark of Ra is one of the central images of Egyptian solar theology, attested from the Pyramid Texts (c. 2400–2300 BCE), where the dead king seeks to join the sun-god's crew, through the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead, where the deceased aspires to sail in the bark, to the great New Kingdom Underworld Books — the Amduat, the Book of Gates, and the Book of Caverns — which depict the bark's nightly voyage hour by hour through the duat. To board the bark and join the sun-god's crew was, for the Egyptian dead, to participate in the eternal cycle of solar renewal, the surest of all hopes of immortality. The conception of the sun as a boat sailing a celestial river reflects the centrality of the Nile to Egyptian life: in a land where the river was the principal artery of travel and transport, it was natural to imagine the sun crossing the sky as a vessel crossing the water, and the heavenly waterway along which the bark sailed was the cosmic counterpart of the earthly Nile. The bark and its crew thus translate the familiar world of river travel into the register of the cosmos, rendering the movement of the sun in terms of the most ordinary of Egyptian experiences. Stephen Quirke's The Cult of Ra (2001) surveys the solar theology in which the bark stands at the center.

The Story

The narrative of the Bark of Ra is the story of the sun's eternal voyage — its daily passage across the sky, its nightly journey through the underworld, and the perpetual battle against chaos that the voyage entails — a story the Egyptians told as the master narrative of the cosmos.

The voyage begins at dawn, on the eastern horizon, where the sun-god emerges from the duat reborn and boards the Mandjet, the morning bark. As the day-bark, the Mandjet carries Ra across the vault of the sky from east to west, the sun-god seated in his cabin, attended by his crew. The Egyptians imagined the sky as a great waterway, the celestial Nile, along which the sun sailed as a boat sails the river, and the daytime journey of the bark is the visible passage of the sun across the heavens from sunrise to sunset.

At dusk, on the western horizon, the sun-god transfers to the Mesektet, the night bark, and begins the perilous voyage through the duat, the hidden underworld through which the sun must pass during the hours of darkness to return to the east. This nocturnal journey is the great drama of Egyptian solar theology, narrated in detail in the Underworld Books that decorate the royal tombs. The bark, towed by the gods along the subterranean waterway, passes through the twelve hours of the night, each a region or a gate with its own inhabitants, dangers, and rituals.

Through the early hours the sun-god allots provisions to the blessed dead and confronts the enemies of order. At the deepest point of the night, in the sixth hour, the sun-god unites with the body of Osiris in the regenerating mystery that lies at the heart of the journey: the moving sun and the static lord of the dead fuse, and from their union the renewal of the sun and of all the dead becomes possible. This is the turning point of the voyage, the moment at which the spent sun receives the spark that will carry it toward rebirth.

The great crisis comes in the seventh hour, when the chaos-serpent Apep lies across the waterway, having drunk up the river to strand the bark, and threatens to halt the voyage and abolish creation. The defenders of the bark spring into action: the serpent Mehen, coiled around the cabin, shields the sun-god; Set, standing at the prow, drives his spear into the monster; Isis and Selket deploy their magic; and the serpent is bound, knifed, and dismembered so that the water returns and the bark sails on. The defeat of Apep is the defeat of isfet, the chaos that perpetually threatens the order of the world, and it must be accomplished anew every night.

Through the later hours the regenerated sun gathers strength. The crews are renewed, the dead are revived, and the approaching dawn is prepared. In the twelfth and final hour, the bark passes through the body of a great serpent and emerges, the sun-god reborn as the scarab Khepri, lifted into the eastern sky to begin the daytime voyage anew. The cycle that the Egyptians believed sustained the entire cosmos begins again, and the bark sails on, its voyage without end.

The drama aboard the bark is not the sun-god's alone but the work of his whole crew, and the cooperative effort of the voyage is one of its recurring themes. The deities who tow and steer the vessel, the personified powers of utterance, perception, and magic who stand beside the sun-god, and the defenders who repel the chaos-serpent each have their part to play, and the renewal of the sun depends on their combined labor. The bark is a community as much as a vehicle, an image of the divine collaboration by which the order of the world is maintained, and the dead person who joins the crew is incorporated into that sustaining effort, taking his place among the gods who keep the sun on its course.

For the Egyptian dead, the supreme hope was to join the crew of the bark and sail with the sun-god through this eternal circuit. The Pyramid Texts seek to place the dead king aboard the vessel; the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead equip the deceased to board it; and the Underworld Books, decorating the royal tombs, render the bark's voyage in detail so that the dead king might travel with the sun and share in its perpetual renewal. To sail in the bark of Ra was to participate in the deathless cycle of the sun, the surest immortality the Egyptians could conceive.

The narrative of the bark thus has no ending, for the voyage it describes is eternal. Every day the sun crosses the sky in the Mandjet; every night it traverses the duat in the Mesektet and battles the chaos-serpent; every dawn it is reborn. The bark sails forever, carrying the sun and the souls of the blessed dead through the unceasing renewal of the cosmos, and the story the Egyptians told of it is the story of the world's perpetual maintenance against the chaos that would otherwise overwhelm it.

Symbolism

The Bark of Ra is among the richest symbols in Egyptian religion, condensing into a single image the whole theology of the sun and its eternal renewal. Its primary symbolism is the sun's voyage itself: the daily passage across the sky and the nightly journey through the duat model the cycle of death and rebirth that governs the cosmos, and the bark is the vehicle that carries the sun through this perpetual circuit. To imagine the sun as a boat upon a celestial river was to render its movement as a journey with a crew, a destination, and a drama.

The duality of the two barks — the Mandjet of the day and the Mesektet of the night — symbolizes the two phases of the solar cycle and the two halves of existence, light and darkness, life and death. The sun-god's transfer from one bark to the other at the horizons marks the thresholds between day and night, between the visible world and the hidden duat, and the alternation of the two vessels embodies the rhythm of the cosmos. The bark is the instrument by which the sun passes from one realm to the other and back again, forever.

The crew of the bark symbolizes the cooperative effort required to sustain cosmic order. The sun does not sail alone but is towed, steered, and defended by a company of gods, and the personified powers of utterance (Hu), perception (Sia), and magic (Heka) who stand beside the sun-god represent the creative faculties by which the voyage is accomplished. The bark is a community, an image of the divine collaboration that maintains the world, and the dead person who joins the crew becomes part of this sustaining effort.

The battle against Apep, enacted aboard the bark each night, symbolizes the perpetual struggle between order and chaos. The chaos-serpent who threatens to halt the voyage embodies isfet, the disorder that perpetually menaces the created world, and his defeat by the bark's defenders is the nightly triumph of Maat, cosmic order. That the battle must be fought and won anew every night expresses the Egyptian conviction that order is not a permanent achievement but a continuous accomplishment, dependent on unceasing vigilance and effort. The bark is the embattled ship of order sailing through the sea of chaos.

The serpent Mehen, coiled protectively around the cabin of the sun-god, symbolizes the protective power that shields the divine center against the dangers of the night. The same animal — the serpent — that embodies chaos in Apep embodies protection in Mehen, expressing the Egyptian sense of the ambivalence of the serpent and of the powers that surround the sun. The bark's cabin, encircled by the protective coils, is the secure heart of the vessel, the sanctuary of the sun-god amid the perils of the voyage.

For the dead, the bark symbolizes the hope of participation in the eternal cycle of the sun. To board the vessel and join the crew was to escape the finality of death and to share in the perpetual renewal of the solar cycle, the surest immortality the Egyptians could imagine. The bark thus carries a double symbolism: it is both the cosmic engine that sustains the world and the vehicle of personal salvation, the ship on which the blessed dead sail forever with the sun-god through the deathless circuit of the heavens and the duat.

Cultural Context

The Bark of Ra belongs to the heart of Egyptian solar theology, which placed the sun-god at the center of the cosmos and made his daily and nightly cycle the master narrative of existence. This theology, rooted in the cult of Ra at Heliopolis and elaborated across the whole of Egyptian history, reached its fullest development in the New Kingdom, when the sun's journey through the sky and the duat became the principal subject of the royal funerary literature and the organizing image of Egyptian conceptions of the cosmos, time, and the afterlife.

The conception of the sun as a boat sailing a celestial river reflects the centrality of the Nile to Egyptian life and thought. In a civilization where the river was the principal artery of travel, transport, and communication, it was natural to imagine the sun crossing the sky as a boat crossing the water, and the celestial waterway along which the bark sailed was the heavenly counterpart of the earthly Nile. The bark and its crew translate the familiar world of river travel into the cosmic register, making the sun's movement legible in terms of the most familiar of Egyptian experiences.

The bark is attested from the earliest religious literature. The Pyramid Texts (c. 2400–2300 BCE) already seek to place the dead king aboard the sun-god's vessel, and the distinction between the morning and evening barks, the Mandjet and the Mesektet, is established in the Old Kingdom. The Coffin Texts (c. 2100–1700 BCE) and the Book of the Dead (c. 1550 BCE onward) develop the deceased's aspiration to board the bark, and the New Kingdom Underworld Books — the Amduat, the Book of Gates, and the Book of Caverns — render the bark's nightly voyage through the duat in elaborate hour-by-hour detail on the walls of the royal tombs.

The theology of the bark is bound up with the central mystery of New Kingdom solar religion: the nightly union of the sun-god with Osiris in the depths of the duat. This union, enacted aboard the bark at the sixth hour of the night, fused the solar and Osirian afterlife traditions and made the sun's regeneration dependent on the static, enduring principle of the lord of the dead. The bark is the vessel in which this union is accomplished, and the voyage it makes is the cosmic process by which the sun, and with it all the dead, are renewed.

The physical cult of the bark connected the cosmic vessel to the religious life of the Egyptian temple. Cult-models of the solar bark were placed in temples and tombs — Tutankhamun's burial equipment included models of the solar vessel — and the processional barks in which the images of the gods were carried during festivals echoed the cosmic bark of the sun. The boundary between the celestial bark of Ra and the ritual barks of the temple cult was permeable, and the imagery of the sun's voyage pervaded Egyptian religious practice.

The Bark of Ra thus occupies a central place in the cultural and religious world of ancient Egypt, the focal image of a solar theology that dominated Egyptian thought for three thousand years. It integrated the observation of the sun's daily movement, the experience of Nile travel, the drama of the battle against chaos, and the hope of immortality into a single coherent vision, and made the voyage of the sun the great story through which the Egyptians understood the maintenance and renewal of the cosmos.

Cross-Tradition Parallels

The Bark of Ra is the Nile world's answer to the question every solar culture faces: how does the sun move? The answer — it sails — translates the most familiar technology of Egyptian life into the register of the cosmos. But the bark is not only a vehicle. It is a community, a battlefield, and an image of what cosmic order requires. Traditions that imagined the sun's movement differently reveal, by contrast, what the Egyptian answer implies.

Polynesian — Maui's Canoe (Maori oral tradition, first written accounts c. 1840 CE)

Maui's canoe is an instrument of creative transformation: from it he fishes up the North Island of New Zealand, snares the sun, reshapes the world. The Polynesian sacred vessel is a platform for heroic agency extending the cosmos outward. The Bark of Ra's crew does not extend the world — they maintain it. The Egyptian bark defeats chaos nightly not to create new territory but to ensure that tomorrow's sun is identical to today's. Two cultures whose lives depended on water imagined the sacred vessel as the instrument of opposite ambitions: Polynesian sailing extends the world; Egyptian sailing perpetually renews it.

Norse — Skidbladnir (Prose Edda, Skáldskaparmál, c. 1220 CE)

Skidbladnir, the dwarves' magical ship for Freyr, can hold all the Aesir with full armor yet folds to pocket-size; it always has favorable wind. The Norse sacred vessel is a wonder of craftsmanship, not a cosmic maintenance engine. No crew defends it against a chaos-serpent because the Norse cosmos operates differently: its world-ending forces (Fenrir, the Midgard Serpent) are bound and waiting for Ragnarök, not attacking nightly and being repelled nightly. Egyptian order is a perpetual victory; Norse order is a deferred defeat.

Hindu — Surya's Chariot (Rigveda 10.37, c. 1200 BCE; elaborated in Puranas)

Surya crosses the sky in a radiant chariot drawn by seven horses, driven by the charioteer Aruna, the pre-dawn red sky born prematurely from Aditi's egg. The chariot is swift, gleaming, unstoppable — it does not battle a chaos-serpent but simply moves. The Hindu solar vehicle emphasizes brilliance and the sun's inherent illuminating power. The Bark of Ra emphasizes the precariousness of the voyage and the cooperative labor required to keep the sun moving. The Hindu chariot assumes the sun will rise; the Egyptian bark makes the rising the outcome of a battle that must be won anew. One tradition's solar technology expresses confidence; the other expresses vigilance.

Mesopotamian — The Hymn to Shamash (c. 1300 BCE, Nineveh tablets, British Museum)

Shamash opens the great cedar door of the sky, crosses the heavens, and descends into the sea at night — solitary and uncontested, with no crew, no chaos-serpent, no cooperative divine labor. The hymn celebrates Shamash as cosmic judge and the revealer of all human deeds, but his journey requires nothing to succeed. The Bark of Ra's genius is precisely its elaboration of what must go right: the named crew, Mehen's coils, the binding of Apep, the midnight fusion with Osiris. Egyptian solar theology turned the sun's movement from a given into a nightly achievement requiring temples, priests, and the knowledge inscribed in the royal tombs. Shamash simply rises; Ra rises because his crew makes him rise.

Modern Influence

The Bark of Ra entered modern awareness through the study of Egyptian solar theology and the great New Kingdom Underworld Books, whose hour-by-hour depictions of the sun's nightly voyage through the duat were copied, published, and interpreted from the nineteenth century onward. The strange and striking imagery of the towed bark, the coiled protective serpent, and the battle against the chaos-monster became part of the visual vocabulary through which Europe imagined the Egyptian afterlife, reproduced in the great folio publications of the royal tombs.

The scholarly understanding of the bark and its voyage was deepened by the study of the Underworld Books, above all the work of Erik Hornung, whose editions and synthesis The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (German 1972; English 1999) made the solar journey accessible and demonstrated its theological coherence. Stephen Quirke's The Cult of Ra: Sun-Worship in Ancient Egypt (2001) surveyed the broader solar theology in which the bark stands at the center, situating the vessel within the whole Egyptian conception of the sun-god and his worship.

The discovery of the great cedar ship buried beside the Great Pyramid of Khufu, excavated by Kamal el-Mallakh in 1954 and reassembled as one of the marvels of ancient shipbuilding, brought the imagery of the solar bark dramatically before the public. Though scholars debate whether the Khufu ship was intended as a literal solar bark for the king's afterlife voyage or served some other ritual function, its association with the idea of the sun's vessel has made it among the most celebrated objects connected to the bark of Ra, now displayed at the Grand Egyptian Museum.

The image of the sun-god sailing across the sky and through the underworld has had a notable afterlife in modern depth psychology, where Carl Jung and his followers drew on the sun's 'night sea journey' through the duat as an archetype of psychological transformation — a descent into darkness from which the self emerges renewed. The bark's voyage through the underworld, with its battle against the serpent and its rebirth at dawn, has been read as a symbol of the inner journey of integration, carrying the ancient image into the vocabulary of analytical psychology.

The Bark of Ra and its voyage have also pervaded popular representations of ancient Egypt in fiction, film, and gaming. The motif of the sun-god's vessel sailing through a perilous underworld, battling a cosmic serpent, and emerging reborn has informed creative reimaginings of Egyptian myth, and the imagery of the solar bark appears in works ranging from novels and graphic art to video games set in the Egyptian afterlife. The vision of the sun as a boat upon a celestial river stays among the most evocative images bequeathed by Egyptian religion to the modern imagination.

In the academic study of comparative mythology, the bark of Ra is cited as a paradigmatic instance of the solar boat — the conception, found in various cultures, of the sun as a vessel sailing the sky — and of the cosmic battle against a chaos-serpent that the sun's voyage entails. The Egyptian elaboration of these themes, with its detailed cosmography of the night and its theology of solar-Osirian renewal, ranks among the fullest developments of the solar voyage in the religious literature of the ancient world.

Primary Sources

The Bark of Ra is attested in Egyptian religious literature from the Old Kingdom onward. The Pyramid Texts (c. 2350–2180 BCE) contain the earliest references to the solar bark and the dead king's aspiration to board it: Utterance 263 (Sethe § 341) speaks of the king joining the sun-god's crew, and Utterances 271–272 (§§ 383–90) describe the bark's passage across the sky. The distinction between the day-bark (Mandjet) and the night-bark (Mesektet) is established in the Old Kingdom and recurs throughout. Edition: Kurt Sethe, *Die altägyptischen Pyramidentexte*, 4 vols (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1908–22); English translations: R.O. Faulkner, *The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts* (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969) and James P. Allen, *The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts* (SBL Writings from the Ancient World 23, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005).

The Coffin Texts (c. 2100–1700 BCE) develop the deceased's aspiration to join the solar bark as a major theme. Spell 397 and related spells equip the deceased to board the night-bark; the Book of Two Ways sub-corpus depicts the route to the eastern horizon where the sun is reborn. Edition: Adriaan de Buck, *The Egyptian Coffin Texts*, 7 vols (Oriental Institute Publications, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935–61); translation: R.O. Faulkner, *The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts*, 3 vols (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1973–78).

The New Kingdom Underworld Books provide the most detailed depictions of the bark's nocturnal voyage hour by hour. The Amduat (attested from the reign of Thutmose I, c. 1504 BCE, in the royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings) shows the bark towed through each of the twelve hours, the confrontation with Apep in the seventh hour, and the emergence of Khepri at dawn in the twelfth. Edition and commentary: Erik Hornung, *Das Amduat: Die Schrift des verborgenen Raumes*, 3 vols (Ägyptologische Abhandlungen 7 and 13, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1963–67). The Book of Gates (earliest complete copy in the tomb of Horemheb, KV57, c. 1300 BCE) depicts the bark at each of the twelve gates; edition: Erik Hornung, *Das Buch von den Pforten des Jenseits*, 2 vols (Aegyptiaca Helvetica 7–8, Basel: Ägyptologisches Seminar der Universität Basel, 1979–80).

The Book of the Dead Spell 100 ('For causing the spirit to enter the great bark of Ra') and Spell 130 ('For making a spirit worthy on the birthday of Osiris and for making a soul live forever') directly address the deceased's boarding of the solar bark. Edition: R.O. Faulkner, *The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead* (London: British Museum Press, 1985, ed. Carol Andrews). The Papyrus of Ani (British Museum EA 10470, Dynasty 19) includes vignettes of the solar bark among its most celebrated images. The central mystery of the bark's voyage — the union of the sun-god with Osiris at the sixth hour — is the subject of extended analysis in Jan Assmann, *Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt* (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), and the whole solar theology of the bark is surveyed in Stephen Quirke, *The Cult of Ra: Sun-Worship in Ancient Egypt* (London: Thames & Hudson, 2001).

Significance

The Bark of Ra holds a central place in Egyptian religion as the vessel of the sun's eternal voyage and the focal image of the solar theology that dominated Egyptian thought for three thousand years. It is the vehicle by which the sun-god crosses the sky by day and traverses the duat by night, and its unceasing journey is the master narrative of the cosmos, the process by which the order of the world is maintained and renewed against the chaos that perpetually threatens it.

Its significance for solar theology is foundational. The conception of the sun as a boat sailing a celestial river, attended by a crew of gods and battling the chaos-serpent through the hours of the night, is the organizing image of the whole Egyptian understanding of the sun-god and his cycle. The Underworld Books that render the bark's voyage in detail are among the principal documents of New Kingdom religion, and the theology of solar renewal they articulate stands at the center of Egyptian conceptions of the cosmos, time, and the divine.

The bark is equally significant for the union of the solar and Osirian afterlife traditions. The nightly fusion of the sun-god with Osiris, enacted aboard the vessel at the sixth hour of the night, reconciled the two great strands of Egyptian afterlife belief — the cyclical renewal of the sun and the enduring existence of the lord of the dead — and made the regeneration of the sun dependent on the Osirian principle. The bark is the vessel in which this central synthesis of Egyptian theology is accomplished, and its voyage is the cosmic process of renewal it entails.

For the Egyptian conception of the afterlife, the bark carried the supreme hope of immortality. To join the crew and sail with the sun-god through the eternal circuit was, for the dead, to escape the finality of death and to share in the perpetual renewal of the solar cycle. The aspiration to board the bark pervades the funerary literature from the Pyramid Texts to the Book of the Dead, and the rendering of the voyage in the royal tombs was intended to secure the dead king's place aboard the vessel. The bark is thus bound to the whole Egyptian hope of life beyond death.

For the modern study of religion and mythology, the Bark of Ra is a primary witness to the Egyptian vision of cosmic order as a continuous accomplishment, maintained by the unceasing voyage of the sun and the nightly defeat of chaos. Its elaborate cosmography of the night, its theology of solar-Osirian renewal, and its integration of the observation of the sun, the experience of Nile travel, and the hope of immortality make it one of the richest and most coherent expressions of the religious imagination of the ancient world, and one of the enduring images bequeathed by Egypt to the history of human thought.

Connections

Ra, the sun-god, is the master of the bark whose voyage the vessel makes, and the deities entry on Ra addresses the solar god whose daily and nightly journey is the master narrative of the cosmos. The bark is the vehicle of his eternal circuit across the sky and through the duat.

The Amduat and the Book of Gates are the New Kingdom Underworld Books that render the bark's nightly voyage through the duat in elaborate hour-by-hour detail. These compositions are the principal sources for the journey of the bark and for the dangers, rituals, and inhabitants of each hour of the night.

The Duat is the hidden underworld through which the bark sails by night, the cosmic region traversed during the hours of darkness. The bark's nocturnal voyage is the journey through the duat, and the two entries illuminate each other directly, the vessel and the realm it traverses.

Apep, the chaos-serpent repelled aboard the bark each night, is the great antagonist of the voyage. The battle against Apep, enacted on the vessel in the seventh hour of the night, is the nightly triumph of order over the chaos he embodies, and the bark is the embattled ship of order sailing through the sea of chaos.

The Osiris entry addresses the lord of the dead with whom the sun-god is united aboard the bark at the sixth hour, in the regenerating mystery at the heart of the journey. The Set entry covers the ambivalent god who, despite his disorderly nature, stands at the prow of the bark as one of its chief defenders against Apep.

The principle of kheper and the scarab-god Khepri, the self-renewing form into which the sun emerges from the duat at dawn, are the culmination of the bark's voyage. The sun reborn as Khepri is lifted from the vessel into the eastern sky to begin the daytime journey anew, the daily enactment of the becoming that the bark's voyage accomplishes.

The dead pharaoh as Osiris and the broader hope of the dead to join the crew of the bark connect the vessel to the whole Egyptian conception of the afterlife. To sail with the sun-god through the eternal circuit was, for the Egyptian dead, the surest of all hopes of immortality, and the bark is bound to the funerary aspiration that pervades the mortuary literature. The Field of Reeds, the paradise of the blessed, and the bark of the sun together formed the twin destinations of the Egyptian afterlife, the one Osirian and the other solar, and the dead hoped to share in both.

Further Reading