Book of Gates

Definition

The Book of Gates is one of the New Kingdom "Books of the Netherworld" — funerary texts that follow the sun god through the twelve hours of the night, painted in royal tombs. Like the older Amduat, it traces the sun's passage hour by hour. What sets it apart is a gate at the end of each hour: a guarded doorway, called a sebekhet, that the sun's boat must pass to reach the next stage. The text most likely began in the Amarna Period, the brief reign of the king Akhenaten.

In Tradition

Egyptologists treat the gates as the defining signature of this book. Like the Amduat it sets each hour in three horizontal bands, called registers, with the sun's boat (its "barque") in the middle — but in no other underworld text do the gateways of the hereafter appear so prominently. It is also turned more toward the king himself than the Amduat is, and it folds in a great courtroom scene, the Judgment of the Dead.

In Practice

With the Book of Gates, the gates themselves are the thing to picture. Each of the twelve hours ends in a sebekhet (gate): a doorway watched by a guardian serpent and two keepers armed with fire-spitting uraei (rearing cobras, the royal protective serpent). The boat is wrapped each hour by the protective Mehen-serpent and accompanied by only two gods, Sia (perception) and Heka (magic), while four figures of the dead tow it forward. Set into the fifth gateway, just before the sun unites with his corpse in the sixth hour, is the Judgment Hall of Osiris, god of the dead — the weighing of the dead before the lord of the afterlife, written here in a deliberately cryptic script. So the book keeps the Amduat's twelve-hour night-journey but adds the drama of passing each guarded gate, and a moral reckoning at its heart.

Historical Origin

The Book of Gates is a New Kingdom royal funerary composition, most likely originating in the Amarna Period (later 14th century BCE). The French name Livre des Portes was coined by the Egyptologist Gaston Maspero. Its sebekhet gates relate to those named in Book of the Dead spell 145 (twenty-one gates) and the areret portals of spell 144 (seven gates). The modern study followed here is Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (translated by David Lorton, 1999).

Further Reading

• Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife