Sacred Texts: Ancient Egypt

The Book of Gates: The Book of Gates: Chapter VIII. The Gate Of Set-em-maat-f. The Sixth Division Of The Tuat--continued.

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This is a scholarly Egyptological text — likely an excerpt from a late 19th or early 20th century academic work on Egyptian funerary literature — documenting and translating the imagery and inscriptions of the Sixth Division of the Tuat (the Egyptian underworld) as found on the sarcophagus of Seti I and in the tomb of Rameses VI. The author describes three registers of scenes: a middle register showing Ra being towed through the underworld past jackal-headed standards with bound enemies condemned to slaughter; an upper register of gods bearing loaves of bread and feathers of Maat, who are rewarded for righteous earthly lives with eternal bread, drink, and cool water; and a lower register depicting figures tending enormous grain fields and reapers harvesting with scythes, overseen by the grain-god Nepra. A recurring theological concern throughout is divine judgment — enemies of Ra are explicitly bound, condemned, and doomed by decree, while the righteous dead receive sustenance and peace. The author draws on multiple fragmentary sources, cross-referencing the damaged sarcophagus of Seti I with the fuller texts of Rameses VI as published by the French Archaeological Mission in Cairo, and notes acquiring one sarcophagus fragment personally from a dealer in Luxor. The work is primarily descriptive and translational in method, with no overarching argument beyond reconstructing the complete iconographic and textual program of this underworld passage.

The Book of Gates: The Book of Gates: Chapter VIII. The Gate Of Set-em-maat-f. The Sixth Division Of The Tuat--continued.

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