Duat

Summary

The Duat is, in ancient Egyptian religion, the world the sun goes to after it sets and where the dead live; Egyptian writes it dwꜣ.t. The Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom already name it, and in the pyramid of Unas Osiris is addressed as "you who are in the Duat". These texts sometimes place it in the sky, its people living as stars in the night sky, and sometimes beneath the earth; the Egyptians saw no contradiction in this, only two descriptions of one thing.

Its fullest story is Ra's night journey as the Amduat draws it; the Egyptian title, jmj.t-dwꜣ.t, means "what is in the Duat". The oldest copy is in the tomb of Thutmose I, and later copies are in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. At sunset Ra enters with a ram's head, the image of the ba, the soul that moves, and rides his boat on a river running through the middle of the earth as the Nile runs through Egypt, with the people of the Duat on both banks; the book names them and gives the measurements of the place and its frightening noises. The night has twelve hours. In some of them the boat reaches the sandy realm of Sokar and has to be hauled across the sand; in the sixth hour, the deepest point of the Duat, Ra unites with the body of Osiris as the soul unites with the body. In the seventh hour Apophis tries to strand the boat on a sandbank and is overcome. In the eleventh hour Osiris waits for the weary Ra, and Ra's enemies are thrown into six pits of fire. In the twelfth, "the cavern at the end of the primeval darkness", Ra comes out as the scarab Khepri, the morning sun; Shu lifts him above the horizon, and Nut gives birth to the sun child. The book says that whoever knows these secret images becomes a well-equipped akh, a shining spirit able to enter the Duat and leave it.

The Book of Gates divides the same night by gates: between each hour and the next stands a gate guarded by serpents and a warder, and the boat passes only with the password. In the fifth hour Osiris sits as Judge of the Dead on a dais of nine steps, the heart is weighed against an ostrich feather, and those who did not worship Ra are punished in the Lake of Fire and in boiling pools. In the tenth hour Apophis is bound with cords and chains, and a giant hand grips the chain; in the twelfth Nun lifts the sun's boat out of the water, and Isis and Nephthys hold the scarab. The complete copy is on the sarcophagus of Sety I, about 1279 BCE.

In the Duat is the hall where the dead are judged, wsḫ.t-n.t-mꜣꜥ.tj, the Hall of the Two Maats. In chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead the dead person enters it after naming every part of its door; his heart is weighed against the feather of Maat, Ammit waits beside the balance, and then he is announced to Osiris, "whose roof is of fire, whose walls are living cobras, and the floor of whose house is in the flood". The trial is told under Judgment of the Dead. Egyptian dictionary, Hall of the Two Maats, Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature II, p. 131.

The idea the stories of the Duat turn on is that the night is a road with hours, gates and names, travelled by the sun and by the dead with it, and whoever knows its names gets through. Renewal happens at its deepest point: in the sixth hour the sun meets the body of Osiris, and from the last hour the morning comes out. That is why kings carved these books on the walls of their tombs, and why later people wrote only the last hours, the hours of rebirth, on their coffins and papyri.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Egyptian writes it dwꜣ.t: d, then w, then an Egyptian consonant written ꜣ, then the feminine t, which is the Arabic feminine -at. The project's Egyptian essay reads it from Arabic dawā and gives it the sense of being lost and of darkness. Lane: al-daww and al-dawwiyya are a waterless desert, a wide level land whose ends are far apart; it is said to be called dawwiyya because of the dawiyy, the humming sound heard in it, or because it makes away with those who are in it; and al-Daww was a tract on the road from Basra to Mecca, crossed by the stars, where travellers feared losing their way. Dawiyy is a continued sound, like the wind, bees or distant thunder. On this reading the Duat is al-dawwiyya: a land with far-off ends crossed at night by the stars, with sand over which the boat is hauled and frightening noises, which makes away with whoever enters it unless he knows its way, and that is what the Amduat draws.

Linguistic Root

The Egyptian dictionary records the word in the senses underworld, necropolis, burial chamber, cave and abyss. In the Arabic reading d is d, w is w, and t is the feminine ending, as in dawwiyya. The Egyptian sign ꜣ stands where daww and dawwiyya have their second w or y, and this is the open point in the reading.

The Egyptian dictionary places the personified Duat in one root with sdwꜣ, to spend the morning or rise early, dwꜣ, to be up early and to praise, and dwꜣ.w, early morning. For the Egyptians the Duat belongs to the root of the dawn: the region where the morning is made, which is what happens in the twelfth hour. Arabic daww lacks this sense; the two meet in the picture, a night road crossed by the stars until dawn breaks.

The essay has a second reading, dāt meaning low, beneath. Lane records no dāt in that sense; Arabic says taḥt for beneath. The essay also sets the Duat beside Hebrew šəʾôl, the abode of the dead, a comparison of meaning, not of sound.

Key Mythic Narratives

The Duat of the stars in the Pyramid Texts

The Pyramid Texts insist that the hereafter is in the sky and urge the dead to climb to it by a ladder, a whirlwind, or as a bird or a locust, and they make the people of the Duat stars. In the pyramid of Unas, Utterance 262 addresses Osiris: "you who are in the Duat, do not be ignorant of Unas, for you know him and he knows you".

Maps on coffins

From the Middle Kingdom, knowledge of the Duat reached people other than kings through the Coffin Texts and then the Book of the Dead, and some coffin owners had complete maps of the underworld drawn on the floorboards of their coffins.

The Duat as mother

In later texts the Duat itself becomes a deity, a mother who brings the revived dead back into being.

Symbolic Reading

The project's Egyptian essay reads Ra's journey as a description of the sky: his entry into the underworld is sunset, when the sun sinks below the horizon; Apophis is the darkness that tries to swallow the sun every night; his coming out in the east is sunrise. It reads the twelve hours in the Duat as the twelve hours of the night and counts them as the first night clock in history, and it reads the saying that Ra passes over the bodies of the dead and revives them as knowledge that the sun passes beneath the earth, where the dead are buried.

The books support this reading. In the Amduat the sun enters from the west and comes out in the east, the night is divided into counted hours, and the scarab of the last hour is the morning sun. The place the books draw is Egypt itself moved under the earth: a river running through the middle like the Nile, its people on both banks, a sandy land at its edge like the desert that begins where the field ends, and a boat hauled over the sand. The judgment scene and the hours of rebirth are what ordinary people chose from these books for their coffins: what they wanted from the Duat was to be justified and to come out with the sun.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Ra's entry into the Duat every evening is the most often repeated of the stories in Descent to the Underworld: he goes down every night and comes out every morning. His fight with Apophis in the seventh hour is one of the witnesses to the combat with chaos, and Nun lifting his boat out of the water at the end of the night repeats the picture of creation from the primordial waters. Its Hall of the Two Maats is the place of the judgment of the dead.

At Ugarit the sun Shapsh goes to the land of the dead every evening and comes back every morning, so she alone knows the road in both directions.

In Mesopotamia Utu returns at sunset to his dwelling beneath the earth, and the spirits of the dead enter the netherworld through a passage on the horizon, which in some traditions is the very entrance of his dwelling.

In Iran the soul crosses the Chinvat Bridge to the other world, and the dead are judged at its head as they are judged in the Hall of the Two Maats, but the bridge is a road the dead person walks alone, and the sun does not travel it.