Book of Caverns

Definition

The Book of Caverns is one of the New Kingdom "Books of the Netherworld" — funerary texts, painted in royal tombs, that follow the sun god through the underworld at night. Unlike the older Amduat and the Book of Gates, it is not divided into the twelve hours of the night. Instead, two large images of the ram-headed sun god split it into two halves of three sections each, six in all. Its modern name comes from the way it divides the underworld into "caverns" (qereret in Egyptian), pits that hold the dead.

In Tradition

Egyptologists see the Book of Caverns as the underworld book that leans hardest toward Osiris, the god of the dead. Its driving moment is the sun god Re meeting the body of Osiris laid out in its "coffer," after which the god begins to renew himself; Re and Osiris are treated here as two sides of one being. The long battle against Apophis, the chaos-serpent, fades into the background, and reward and punishment of the dead come forward.

In Practice

Picture this book as a set of stacked caverns rather than a march of hours. The beings in each cavern are drawn inside ovals that read as sarcophagi (stone coffins) holding the bodies of gods. Re enters the primeval darkness meaning to care for Osiris and slaughter his enemies; in the third section the ram's head and eye of Re lie in coffins ringed by an ouroboros (a serpent biting its own tail), a sign that Re and Osiris are one. The body of Osiris rests beneath Aker, the earth god shown as a double sphinx. From there the renewed sun gathers strength: the sky goddess Nut lifts the ram-headed sun and the sun disk on her open palms, while the lowest registers (horizontal bands) hold the damned and their punishment in the Place of Annihilation. At the close, twelve gods tow the sun's boat into the eastern mountain at dawn.

Historical Origin

The Book of Caverns is a New Kingdom royal composition. Its earliest nearly complete copy was placed in the Osireion (the cenotaph of Sethos I) at Abydos under Merneptah, on the corridor wall opposite the Book of Gates; an almost complete copy occurs in the tomb of Ramesses VI. Henri Frankfort attempted a first translation in 1933, Alexandre Piankoff edited it in the 1940s-1950s, and Erik Hornung made the first German translation in 1972. The study followed here is Hornung (1999).

Further Reading

• Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife