Twelve Hours of the Duat

Definition

The twelve hours of the Duat are the twelve divisions of the night through which the sun god Ra journeys in the underworld before rising again at dawn (the Duat is the Egyptian underworld, both below the earth and up in the night sky). Egyptian thinkers split the night into twelve hours, and imagined Ra travelling through one region of the underworld per hour — each hour its own zone with its own gods, demons, and gates. This hour-by-hour structure is the backbone of the great New Kingdom "underworld books" painted on royal tomb walls.

In Tradition

Egyptologists read the twelve hours as the way Egyptians turned the night sky and the underworld into a single, navigable journey. The night was already split into twelve hours for timekeeping, by watching the decans (the 36 star groups whose risings marked the hours); the funerary cosmology, a related development rather than the same scheme, also divides Ra's underground passage into twelve regions. Crossing all twelve safely and rising again at dawn is the drama on which the dead person's resurrection is modelled.

In Practice

The twelve hours give the structure of the New Kingdom underworld books — the Amduat (literally "that which is in the underworld"), the Book of Gates, and the Book of Day and Night. Each lays out Ra's night-journey one hour at a time, in matched text and pictures, with the god changing form as he goes; the Book of Gates marks each hour-boundary with a guarded gate the boat must pass. These books were painted across the burial chambers of pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings, so that the king, joining Ra in the Night Bark, would travel the full twelve and rise renewed. The same scheme appears in smaller funerary art — ceilings and coffins showing twelve disks along the body of the sky-goddess Nut, one per hour, each holding the sun god in a different shape from child to old man. So an Egyptian afterlife scene laid out in twelve parts is tracking the twelve hours of the night.

Historical Origin

The twelve-hour underworld books are attested from the New Kingdom (about 1500 BCE) and survive on the tomb walls of the Valley of the Kings. The Amduat, Book of Gates, and Book of Day and Night are the central examples; the twelve-disk solar-shape ceilings (the Nag Hamad B ceiling and the coffin of Khaef) carry the same hourly scheme. Modern study: Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, and the von Lieven essay in David Brown (ed.), The Interactions of Ancient Astral Science.

Further Reading

• Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife
• David Brown (ed.), The Interactions of Ancient Astral Science
• Thomas George Allen (trans.), The Egyptian Book of the Dead (Oriental Institute Publications LXXXII)