Amduat (Book of the Hidden Chamber)

Definition

The Amduat is the oldest and longest of the great New Kingdom "Books of the Netherworld" — funerary texts painted on royal tomb walls that map the sun god's journey through the night. Its ancient title was the Book of the Hidden Chamber; the modern name Amduat means "that which is in the Duat," the Egyptian underworld. It follows Ra, the sun, through the twelve hours of the night, from his setting in the west to his rebirth at dawn. It was the first fully illustrated Egyptian book, with text and pictures working as one.

In Tradition

Egyptologists read the Amduat as the earliest sustained attempt to chart the unseen underworld as a single connected route the sun must travel. Each of the twelve hours is its own region, and the picture is laid out in three horizontal bands, called registers, with the sun's boat (its "barque") always in the middle band. Crossing all twelve and rising renewed is the drama on which the dead person's own hoped-for rebirth is modelled.

In Practice

"The Amduat" is this specific named text — not the general idea of dividing the night into hours, but the composition that maps those hours one by one. The sun god enters the first hour as a ram-headed ba (the ba is the part of a person that can travel, often shown as a bird). He passes through a watery region of abundance in the early hours, where he grants land to the blessed dead; the goddess Maat, who embodies cosmic order, rides before his boat to show that order rules even here. In the sixth hour the sun unites with his own corpse, the turning point; in the seventh he overcomes Apophis, the serpent of chaos who threatens to stop him. By the twelfth hour he is reborn as a scarab beetle at dawn. Painted in the burial chambers of pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings, the Amduat let the dead king travel the full night beside Ra and rise with him.

Historical Origin

The Amduat is a New Kingdom royal-tomb composition (from roughly the 16th century BCE onward), surviving on tomb walls in the Valley of the Kings. Its ancient title was the Book of the Hidden Chamber. The modern study followed here is Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (translated by David Lorton, Cornell University Press, 1999), explained here in plain terms rather than quoted.

Further Reading

• Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife