Page 30 - آثار مصر الفرعونية الجزء الأول

royal palace or a niched archaic mastaba. More notably, Unas
was the first king to have texts inscribed on the walls of his final
resting place.

Columns of beautifully carved blue painted hieroglyphs on
the remaining walls of the burial chamber, antechamber and parts
of the passages depict 283 'spells' which were part of a body of
texts known today as the "Pyramid Texts". These texts,
comprising almost 800 known "spells" or 'utterances', describe
the different stages of royal rebirth and were intended to
safeguard his or her journey from death to the Netherworld,
presumably to be read by the deceased. It is thought that the texts
were probably composed by the priests of the Heliopolitan sun
cult, but may had a predynastic origin. No single pyramid
contains the whole collection of spells and there was no standard
edition. One of the texts in Unas's pyramid (utterances 273-4) is
referred to as the cannibal hymn', which describes 'swallowing
the spirits of the gods'. It is suggested that this may be a remnant
of an extinct funerary practice such as human sacrifice, though
there is no evidence for this in Old Kingdom Egypt.

Pyramid Texts have been found in five kings pyramids of
Dynasties V to VI (Unas, Teti, Pepy I, Merenre and Pepy II) and
in the Dynasty VIII pyramid of king Ibi, as well as a few queen's
pyramids. Maspero collected more than 4000 lines of text from
the pyramids he investigated the inscriptions are thought to be

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