Coffin Texts

They are partially derived from the earlier Pyramid Texts, reserved for royal use only, but contain substantial new material related to everyday desires, indicating a new target audience of common people.

[1] Ordinary Egyptians who could afford a coffin had access to these funerary spells and the pharaoh no longer had exclusive rights to an afterlife.

Due to the limited writing surfaces of some of these objects, the spells were often abbreviated, giving rise to long and short versions, some of which were later copied in the Book of the Dead.

The texts address common fears of the living, such as having to do manual labor, with spells to allow the deceased to avoid these unpleasant tasks.

They combine ritual actions intended as protection, expressions of aspiration for a blessed existence after death and of the transformations and transmigrations of the ba and akh and so on.

Coffin text 1031 is spoken by the deceased, who replies: I shall sail rightly in my bark, I am lord of eternity in the crossing of the sky.

A few coffins from the Middle Egyptian necropolis of el-Bersheh (Deir El Bersha) contain unique graphical representations of the realm of the afterlife, along with spells related to the journey of the deceased through the Duat.