Book of Gates

About Book of Gates

The Book of Gates is a New Kingdom funerary composition describing the sun-god Ra's passage through the twelve divisions of the night, each division separated from the next by a fortified gate guarded by a fire-spitting serpent and a pair of mummiform deities. Its earliest complete attestation is on the walls of the tomb of Horemheb (KV57, Dynasty 18, c. 1300 BCE) in the Valley of the Kings, with a closely contemporary copy in the tomb of Seti I (KV17, Dynasty 19, c. 1290 BCE), whose magnificent alabaster sarcophagus (now in Sir John Soane's Museum, London) carries the composition incised across its surface. The Book of Gates then recurs across the Ramesside royal tombs from Ramesses I through Ramesses VI and beyond.

The composition belongs to the same genre as the older Amduat but reorganizes the night around the motif of the gate (Egyptian sebkhet or aryt) rather than the hour. Where the Amduat had presented each hour as a region of open cosmography, the Book of Gates renders the night as a sequence of walled and defended thresholds, each demanding that the solar barque and its crew know the name and password of the serpent-guardian before they may pass. This structural innovation reflects a sharpened emphasis on the dangers of the night and on knowledge as the means of overcoming them — the deceased who knows the names of the gates and their keepers is granted passage, while the ignorant and the damned are excluded, bound, and burned. Each gate is named, each serpent-guardian identified, and each pair of mummiform keepers labeled, so that the passage of the night becomes a sequence of defended thresholds at which the right knowledge must be deployed. The composition thus renders the night less as a landscape to be crossed than as a fortress to be entered division by division, every wall defended and every door barred against the unworthy.

The Book of Gates introduces material absent from the Amduat. Its most celebrated scene is the judgment hall of Osiris in the fifth and sixth divisions, where the enthroned god of the dead presides over a staircase guarded by the enemies of order, and where the balance of justice is implied by the punishment of the wicked. Equally famous is the scene in the fourth division depicting the four races of humanity known to the Egyptians — Egyptians, Asiatics, Nubians, and Libyans — presented as the cattle of the sun-god and as the joint creation of Horus, an early statement of a universal humanity under divine care. The composition also depicts the great serpent Apep bound and the regions of fire in which the condemned are annihilated.

Erik Hornung's text edition (originally Das Buch von den Pforten des Jenseits, 1979–80) and his accessible synthesis The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (German 1972; English 1999) established the modern scholarly understanding of the work. Like the Amduat, the Book of Gates began as a royal composition inscribed in the tombs of kings, embodying a theology in which the dead pharaoh's survival was bound to the sun's nightly self-renewal; only later did selections migrate onto private funerary equipment. The composition is one of the principal documents of the post-Amarna restoration of traditional solar-Osirian theology, articulating in monumental form the Egyptian conviction that the cosmos is renewed each night through a perilous, knowledge-dependent passage of the sun through a sequence of defended gates.

The Story

The Book of Gates narrates the nightly passage of the sun-god through twelve divisions of the duat, each entered through a guarded gate, from the moment of sunset to the rebirth of the sun at dawn. The action is continuous, but the rhythm of the composition is set by the gates: at the boundary of each division the solar barque arrives before a great portal, flanked by guardian deities and defended by an upright fire-breathing serpent whose name must be known for the gate to open.

As the sun sets, the introductory scene shows Ra in his ram-headed nocturnal form entering the western mountain, where the worshipping gods of the desert receive him. The first division is a vestibule between the visible world and the depths of the night. The barque, towed by deities and shielded by the coils of the protective serpent Mehen, begins its passage. At the threshold of the second division stands the first true gate, its serpent named and its keepers identified, and from here the pattern repeats: arrival, the naming of the gate, passage, and the encounter with the inhabitants of the new division.

Through the early divisions the sun-god allots provisions and land to the blessed dead, who labor and are sustained in the fertile regions of the underworld, and confronts the enemies of order, who are shown bound, decapitated, and consigned to punishment. A recurring image is the figure of time and the ages, and the regulation of the night's progress. The composition repeatedly contrasts the fate of the justified — sustained, provisioned, granted breath and light — with the fate of the damned, who are deprived of light, bound to stakes, and burned in lakes and pits of fire.

The central divisions contain the most theologically developed scenes. In the fourth division the four races of humankind appear — the Egyptians (the 'cattle of Ra'), the Asiatics, the Nubians, and the Libyans — presented together as the creatures of the sun-god and the joint care of Horus and Sekhmet, a vision of a single humanity under divine governance. Nearby, the souls of the dead and the blessed are marshaled. The judgment hall of Osiris, one of the masterpieces of Egyptian funerary art, shows the enthroned lord of the dead at the top of a staircase, before him the scales of justice implied in the ordering of the blessed and the damned, and beneath his feet the bound enemies of order. The wicked are excluded from this hall and consigned to annihilation, while the justified are admitted to the god's presence.

The great crisis of the journey, as in the Amduat, is the confrontation with the chaos-serpent Apep, who threatens to halt the barque and abolish the renewal of the world. In the divisions devoted to this struggle, Apep is bound by chains held by the gods, his coils pinned by the children of Horus and by the goddesses of the hours, and his power to swallow the river is broken so that the barque may sail on. The defeat of the serpent is the defeat of isfet, the disorder that perpetually threatens the created order; but it is never final, for Apep returns each night and each night must be overcome.

The later divisions prepare the sun's emergence. The dead are revived, the crews of the barque are renewed, and the approaching dawn is announced. The condemned receive their final punishment in the fiery places, guarded by fire-spitting goddesses and serpents who bear the names of the punished. In the twelfth and final division the composition reaches its climactic image: the primeval waters of Nun, personified as a pair of arms, lift the solar barque out of the depths, while the goddess Nut receives the reborn sun. The newborn solar disk, in the form of the scarab Khepri, is raised into the eastern sky, and the night-journey is complete. The dead king, in whose tomb the composition is inscribed, has traveled the whole circuit with the sun and shares in its rebirth.

The deceased participates in this drama not as a spectator but as a passenger and beneficiary. By knowing the names of the twelve gates, their serpent-guardians, and the topography of each division, the dead king passes the defended thresholds that exclude the ignorant and the damned, and so joins the regenerating sun in its perpetual return. At each gate the guardians demand recognition, and the king who can name them is admitted while the unworthy are turned back to the fire; the composition is thus as much a key to a sequence of locks as a map of a region. The Book of Gates collapses the distinction between the cosmic event — the sun's renewal — and the personal fate — the king's resurrection — making the two a single, knowledge-dependent process accomplished anew with every passage of the night, so that every dawn is both the rebirth of the world and the vindication of the dead king who has traveled the night with the sun and passed its every defended door.

Symbolism

The Book of Gates is built upon a single dominant symbol: the gate. Where the older Amduat had imagined the night as a continuous landscape, the Book of Gates renders it as a fortified sequence of defended thresholds, each a barrier that admits the worthy and excludes the unworthy. The gate is the image of transition under judgment — passage is not automatic but conditional, granted only to those who possess the requisite knowledge. The serpent that guards each gate, upright and breathing fire, is the danger of the threshold made visible; to name it is to disarm it.

This architecture of gates expresses a heightened concern with order and exclusion. The Egyptian conviction that to know a name is to gain power over its bearer is enacted at every division: the dead who knows the gates passes; the damned who does not is bound and burned. The composition thus dramatizes the difference between the justified and the condemned spatially, as admission to or exclusion from a sequence of guarded chambers. The fiery lakes and pits in which the enemies of order are annihilated are the negative image of the provisioned fields in which the blessed are sustained.

The judgment hall of Osiris is the moral center of the composition's symbolism. The enthroned god at the summit of a staircase, the bound enemies beneath his feet, and the ordering of souls before him render the principle of Maat — cosmic and ethical order — as a spatial hierarchy. The wicked are below and excluded; the justified are admitted to the presence of the god. The implied weighing of justice, made explicit elsewhere in the Weighing of the Heart, is here architectural: righteousness is proximity to Osiris, and sin is exclusion and annihilation.

The scene of the four races is among the most striking symbolic statements in Egyptian art. By depicting Egyptians, Asiatics, Nubians, and Libyans together as the creatures of the sun-god and the joint care of Horus, the composition asserts a single humanity under divine governance, all of them the 'cattle' that the sun shepherds. Whatever the realities of Egyptian ethnocentrism, the theological claim is universalist: the sun rises on all peoples, and all are the creation of the gods.

The binding of Apep symbolizes the perpetual struggle between order and chaos. The chaos-serpent is not killed but bound, pinned, and rendered harmless for the duration of the passage; he returns each night because isfet is not a finite enemy to be destroyed once but a permanent condition to be held back continuously. This expresses the Egyptian understanding of cosmic order as a ceaseless accomplishment rather than a settled state, dependent on the nightly cooperation of gods, rituals, and the knowledge encoded in the composition itself.

The final image — the arms of Nun lifting the barque from the primeval waters and Nut receiving the reborn sun — is the symbol of regeneration through return to origins. The sun is renewed by being drawn back through the waters of chaos from which creation first emerged, and is born again as the self-created scarab Khepri. The night-journey terminates not in the mere return of the same sun but in a re-created being, generated afresh from the primeval deep, an image of death as passage through dissolution back into new life.

Cultural Context

The Book of Gates emerged at the end of Dynasty 18 and the beginning of Dynasty 19 (c. 1300 BCE), in the period of the post-Amarna restoration. The exclusive cult of the Aten under Akhenaten (c. 1353–1336 BCE) had suppressed the traditional underworld theology and its imagery of the duat, Osiris, and the nightly solar journey. With the abandonment of Amarna and the return to orthodoxy under Tutankhamun, Ay, and Horemheb, the traditional funerary compositions returned and were elaborated. The Book of Gates is one of the principal monuments of this restoration, articulating in new and monumental form the solar-Osirian theology that the Amarna reform had interrupted.

The earliest complete attestation, in the tomb of Horemheb (KV57), and the closely following version in the tomb of Seti I (KV17) place the composition's origins firmly in the transition from Dynasty 18 to Dynasty 19. Seti I's reign saw a deliberate program of religious and artistic restoration, and the appearance of the Book of Gates in his tomb and on his sarcophagus belongs to that program. The incised version on Seti I's translucent calcite sarcophagus, discovered by Giovanni Belzoni in 1817 and now in Sir John Soane's Museum in London, is among the most celebrated single objects of Egyptian funerary art.

The Book of Gates belongs to the genre of royal Underworld Books, which transformed the conception of the royal afterlife from the Old Kingdom ascent to the stars into a descent with the sun into the duat and a regeneration through the nightly union of the solar and Osirian principles. The composition's restriction to royal tombs in its earliest phase marks it as part of the secret knowledge of kingship: the perilous gates of the night were the king's to traverse, and the composition was his guidebook to a journey only the pharaoh was theologically equipped to make.

The Ramesside kings of Dynasties 19 and 20 decorated their tombs with the Book of Gates alongside the older Amduat and the newer Book of Caverns, sometimes juxtaposing several compositions in a single tomb. This accumulation reflects a drive toward theological comprehensiveness: each book offered a partial cosmography of the hereafter, and the king's safety was best secured by deploying them together. The tomb of Ramesses VI (KV9) is the great compendium of this practice, carrying the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, the Amduat, and the Book of the Earth across its walls.

The scene of the four races places the composition in the context of New Kingdom Egypt's expanded horizons. The Egyptian empire of Dynasties 18 and 19 stretched into Nubia and the Levant, and the Egyptians were in sustained contact with Asiatics, Nubians, and Libyans. The composition's vision of these peoples as the joint creation of the sun-god reflects an empire that ruled diverse populations and a theology capacious enough to encompass them, even as it asserted Egypt's centrality.

The later migration of selections from the Book of Gates onto private sarcophagi and funerary papyri belonged to the broader democratization of afterlife knowledge that carried royal compositions to priests and elites in the Third Intermediate and Late Periods. What had begun as the exclusive theological property of the king became, in abbreviated form, available to a widening circle of the dead, paralleling the earlier passage of the Pyramid Texts into the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead.

Cross-Tradition Parallels

The Book of Gates maps a fundamental human intuition: that passage between the living world and whatever lies beyond it requires more than a body in motion. It requires knowledge — specific, demonstrable knowledge, naming names at successive thresholds. This structural assumption recurs across widely separated traditions, and the differences reveal how each culture answered the same question: who may pass, and on what terms?

Mesopotamian — The Descent of Inanna (c. 1800 BCE, Nippur tablets)

Inanna's descent through the seven gates of Ereshkigal's realm shares the Book of Gates' core architecture — a sequential series of defended thresholds — but the mechanism is inverted. Where the Book of Gates demands that the deceased name the guardian to pass, Inanna's gates strip her of a garment or regalia at each threshold until she enters the final chamber naked and powerless. Egyptian passage is additive: knowledge accumulates and opens gates. Mesopotamian descent is subtractive: power is removed and the gate opens regardless. The Egyptian dead must prove worthiness; Inanna must submit to dispossession. Both traditions understand the underworld's threshold as a place where identity is tested, but they disagree about whether the test rewards what you know or strips away what you have.

Hindu — The Garuda Purana, Chapter 2 (c. 9th–11th century CE)

The Garuda Purana describes the soul's seventeen-stage journey to the realm of Yama, with Yamadutas carrying the soul forward at each juncture. The decisive divergence from the Book of Gates: knowledge of names provides no leverage. Egyptian gates open to the one who can name the serpent-guardian; the Garuda Purana's checkpoints open or close according to the soul's recorded deeds, consulted from Chitragupta's divine book. Egyptian passage rewards the equipped; Hindu passage rewards the just. One system trusts ritual preparation; the other trusts the moral record.

Zoroastrian — Vendidad, Fargard 19 and the Gathas (Yasna 46.10–11, c. 6th–5th century BCE)

The Chinvat Bridge narrows or widens at death according to the soul's moral record. Three divine judges preside — Mithra, Sraosha, and Rashnu — and the tribunal is permanent, pre-existing, requiring no invocation or naming by the deceased. The Book of Gates requires the dead person to actively perform knowledge: name the guardian, speak the gate, be recognized. The Chinvat judgment happens to the soul. The Egyptian system places agency with the deceased; the Zoroastrian system places it entirely with the tribunal. Same defended threshold, opposite locus of control.

Buddhist — The Bardo Thodol (attributed to Padmasambhava, c. 8th century CE; transcribed c. 1326 CE)

The Bardo Thodol guides the consciousness through successive apparitions — peaceful and wrathful deities — that must be recognized for what they are. This recognition resembles what the Book of Gates means by naming: seeing the guardians clearly and passing through rather than being overwhelmed. The inversion is genuine: the Book of Gates is inscribed on the tomb walls so that the dead king carries the knowledge into the underworld. The Bardo Thodol requires a living lama reading aloud to the dying person's ear — passage depends on transmission from the living, not on written equipment the dead carry alone. The Egyptian tradition trusts the individually equipped; the Tibetan tradition trusts the community of the living.

Medieval Christian — Dante, Inferno (composed c. 1308–1320 CE)

Dante's descent through the circles of Hell follows the Book of Gates' spatial logic: a mapped, defended underworld with distinct regions, each governed by its own powers. Minos assigns each soul to its circle by winding his tail. What Dante's Inferno cannot share is the doubleness of each region: in the Egyptian composition, the same division sustains the blessed and destroys the damned simultaneously. Dante's Hell is purely punitive. The Egyptian underworld is always both, its architecture as much about renewal as about destruction, and the two impulses occupy the same cosmographic space.

Modern Influence

The Book of Gates entered modern awareness through the European exploration of the Valley of the Kings in the early nineteenth century. Giovanni Belzoni's discovery of the tomb of Seti I (KV17) in 1817, and his removal of the king's translucent calcite sarcophagus inscribed with the Book of Gates, brought the composition dramatically to public attention. The sarcophagus was acquired by the architect Sir John Soane, who installed it in his London house-museum and famously celebrated its arrival in 1825 with a three-day candlelit reception. It remains on display in Sir John Soane's Museum, among the most admired single objects of Egyptian funerary art in any European collection.

The imagery of the Book of Gates — the defended portals, the upright fire-breathing serpents, the bound enemies, and the lakes of fire — became part of the visual vocabulary through which nineteenth-century Europe imagined the Egyptian afterlife, reproduced in the great folio publications of Egyptian monuments such as Karl Richard Lepsius's Denkmaeler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien (1849–59). The meaning of the scenes, however, long remained obscure, and a coherent understanding awaited twentieth-century scholarship.

That understanding crystallized with Erik Hornung, whose critical edition of the composition and whose synthesis The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (German 1972; English 1999) established the modern interpretation of the Book of Gates within the broader genre of Underworld Books. Hornung demonstrated the theological coherence of the work and its importance for understanding the post-Amarna restoration of solar-Osirian religion, transforming the composition from a curiosity into a central document of Egyptian thought.

The scene of the four races of humankind has attracted particular modern attention, both scholarly and popular. As an early visual statement of a single humanity under divine care, it has been cited in discussions of ancient conceptions of ethnicity and in debates over the representation of skin color in Egyptian art. The scene has been reproduced and discussed widely, sometimes appropriated for modern ideological purposes that distort its original theological meaning; careful Egyptology continues to insist on reading it within its New Kingdom context.

The Book of Gates has also reached museum audiences through the display of the Seti I sarcophagus in London and through reproductions of the painted versions in the Theban royal tombs, which are visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists annually. The composition's vision of an underworld organized as a sequence of guarded gates has informed modern fictional and cinematic representations of the Egyptian afterlife, contributing to the popular image of the duat as a perilous itinerary of defended thresholds rather than a vague realm of shades.

In the academic study of comparative eschatology, the Book of Gates is cited alongside the Amduat as one of the earliest extended attempts to map the geography of the hereafter and to render that map operative through ritual knowledge — a project with structural parallels in later traditions from the gated descents of Mesopotamian myth to the tiered cosmography of Dante's Inferno, whose circles of punishment echo, at a vast distance, the Egyptian lakes of fire reserved for the enemies of order.

Primary Sources

The earliest securely datable attestation of the Book of Gates appears in the tomb of Horemheb (KV57, Dynasty 18, c. 1300 BCE) in the Valley of the Kings, where the composition is painted across the walls of the burial hall and antechamber. The closely contemporary version in the tomb of Seti I (KV17, Dynasty 19, c. 1290 BCE) provides the fullest and most artistically refined rendering of the composition, and the incised text on Seti I's translucent calcite sarcophagus — now in Sir John Soane's Museum, London — is among the most celebrated objects associated with the work. Later Ramesside copies appear in the tombs of Ramesses I, Ramesses II, Ramesses III, and Ramesses VI (KV9), the last being the great compendium of Underworld Books.

The critical modern edition of the Book of Gates is Erik Hornung, *Das Buch von den Pforten des Jenseits*, 2 vols (Aegyptiaca Helvetica 7–8, Basel: Ägyptologisches Seminar der Universität Basel, 1979–80), which publishes the hieroglyphic text with German translation and commentary. This remains the standard scholarly edition. Hornung's accessible English synthesis, *The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife* (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999; German original 1972), provides the best introduction to the work's structure, theology, and relationship to the Amduat and Book of Caverns, situating it within the broader genre of New Kingdom royal Underworld Books.

For the Amduat, the older Underworld Book with which the Book of Gates is in constant theological dialogue, the edition is Erik Hornung, *Das Amduat: Die Schrift des verborgenen Raumes*, 3 vols (Ägyptologische Abhandlungen 7 and 13, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1963–67). The Pyramid Texts (c. 2350 BCE), the Old Kingdom ancestor of the whole Underworld Book tradition, are edited in Kurt Sethe, *Die altägyptischen Pyramidentexte*, 4 vols (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1908–22), with English translations in 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 scene of the four races of humanity in the fourth division of the Book of Gates is discussed in the context of Egyptian conceptions of humanity in Jan Assmann, *The Search for God in Ancient Egypt* (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). The judgment hall of Osiris and its theological context are addressed in Jan Assmann, *Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt* (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), and in Mark Smith, *Following Osiris: Perspectives on the Osirian Afterlife from Four Millennia* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). The post-Amarna religious restoration within which the Book of Gates was composed is examined in Erik Hornung, *Akhenaten and the Religion of Light* (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). Plutarch, *De Iside et Osiride* (Moralia V; trans. F.C. Babbitt, Loeb Classical Library, 1936), preserves the most connected account of the Osiris myth that underlies the composition's judgment theology, though it is a Greek source of the 1st–2nd century CE and must be read alongside the Egyptian primary texts.

Significance

The Book of Gates holds a central place in the history of Egyptian funerary religion as the principal Underworld Book of the post-Amarna restoration and as a major elaboration of the genre the Amduat founded. By reorganizing the night around the motif of the guarded gate, it sharpened the theology of the nocturnal journey, making knowledge of names and thresholds the explicit condition of passage and dramatizing the separation of the justified from the damned as admission to or exclusion from a sequence of defended divisions.

Its judgment hall of Osiris is one of the great theological statements of Egyptian art, rendering the principle of Maat as a spatial hierarchy in which the blessed are admitted to the presence of the enthroned god and the wicked are excluded and annihilated. This scene complements the more familiar Weighing of the Heart of the Book of the Dead, offering a monumental, architectural vision of judgment that shaped the Egyptian conception of the moral order of the afterlife.

The composition's scene of the four races is significant beyond Egyptology as one of the earliest visual assertions of a common humanity under divine governance. By presenting Egyptians, Asiatics, Nubians, and Libyans together as the creatures of the sun-god, the Book of Gates articulated a theological universalism remarkable in an ancient imperial culture, however much that universalism coexisted with Egyptian assertions of their own centrality.

The Book of Gates is also a primary document of the post-Amarna recovery of traditional religion. Its appearance in the tombs of Horemheb and Seti I, at the moment when the Aten cult had been abandoned and orthodoxy restored, makes it a witness to one of the decisive turning points of Egyptian religious history. The composition embodies the reassertion of the solar-Osirian theology that the Amarna reform had suppressed, and its monumental form in the royal tombs declared the restoration in the most public and permanent medium available.

For the modern study of ancient religion, the Book of Gates is a rich witness to the Egyptian understanding of cosmic order as a continuous accomplishment, to the conception of the night as a perilous passage requiring knowledge to navigate, and to the use of religious writing as an operative technology for securing survival beyond death. Its detailed cosmography, alongside that of the Amduat and the Book of Caverns, offers historians one of the fullest surviving accounts of how an ancient civilization imagined the structure of the hereafter and the fate of the soul within it.

Connections

The Amduat is the older Underworld Book that the Book of Gates reorganizes and elaborates. Where the Amduat divides the night into twelve hours of open cosmography, the Book of Gates divides it into twelve divisions separated by guarded gates, sharpening the emphasis on the dangers of the night and the knowledge required to pass them. Reading the two together reveals the development of the Egyptian afterlife-book genre.

The Duat is the setting of the Book of Gates, the hidden underworld through which the sun and the dead pass each night. The composition is one of the principal maps of the duat, charting its divisions, gates, and inhabitants and complementing the cosmography of the Amduat and the Book of Caverns.

Apep, the chaos-serpent bound in the central divisions, is the great antagonist of the solar journey. The Book of Gates provides one of the canonical depictions of his binding by the gods, dramatizing the perpetual struggle between order and the isfet he embodies.

The Weighing of the Heart and the Hall of Two Truths represent the Osirian, judgment-centered strand of afterlife belief that the Book of Gates renders monumentally in its judgment hall of Osiris. Reading them together reveals the range of Egyptian conceptions of post-mortem judgment, from the intimate weighing of the individual heart to the architectural ordering of the blessed and the damned before the enthroned god.

The Pyramid Texts are the Old Kingdom ancestor of the funerary tradition the Book of Gates continues. Where the Pyramid Texts secured the king's ascent to the sky in discrete Utterances, the Underworld Books chart his descent and regeneration in connected cosmography, marking the New Kingdom transformation of royal afterlife belief.

The Valley of the Kings is the necropolis in whose royal tombs the Book of Gates was first inscribed. The tombs of Horemheb, Seti I, and Ramesses VI cannot be understood apart from the Underworld Books they carry, and the composition's appearance there belongs to the deliberate funerary theology of the New Kingdom royal necropolis.

The Osiris entry in the deities section addresses the lord of the duat who presides over the composition's judgment hall, while the Ra entry covers the sun-god whose night-journey through the twelve gates the composition narrates. The Horus entry concerns the god who appears as the divine governor of the four races of humankind, extending his role as prototype of kingship to a cosmic guardianship of all peoples.

The Opening of the Mouth ritual, performed to restore the faculties of the dead king, prepared the deceased to undertake the journey the Book of Gates charts. The ritual revival of the mummy and the cosmographic guidance of the Underworld Book together secured the king's incorporation into the regenerating cycle of the sun.

Further Reading