Education: Pharaoh’s Journey

For more than 5,000 years, the great pyramids at Giza (eight miles southwest of Cairo) have been among the wonders of the world; but to modern Egyptologists they are really secondary. Far more important at present are five smaller pyramids at Sakkara near by, which lay buried under the desert sands until 1880. That year, two French archaeologists discovered them and found their inner walls covered with inscriptions. Scholars now regard those inscriptions as the world’s oldest large body of religious texts.

Last week, for the first time, the hieroglyphics of Sakkara appeared in full English translation in a four-volume work published by Longmans, Green & Co., under the sponsorship of the Zion Research Foundation of Brookline, Mass. The work is the climax of 72 years of scholarship, during which time the texts had been transcribed, and about a third of them translated into German by the late Kurt Sethe. Six years ago the Rev. Samuel A. B. Mercer of Worcester, Mass., a retired Episcopal minister, took on the job of completing the work in English. Buttressed by careful commentaries, the Pyramid Texts ($30.50 a set) present the fullest description known of the religion and philosophy, beliefs and superstitions of Ancient Egypt.

Speed the Journey. Born the very year that the pyramids were discovered, soft-spoken Samuel Mercer has spent a lifetime studying ancient languages. He has specialized in cuneiform and hieroglyphics, has compiled grammars in Assyrian, Ethiopic and Egyptian, written a definitive study of the tablets of Tell el-Amarna, been professor of Semitic languages and Egyptology at the University of Toronto. Since 1946 he has devoted his full time and energies to working on the pyramid texts.

Carved between 2350 and 2175 B.C., the texts describe some events going back beyond the year 3000. By that time the culture of Egypt had matured, and to a large extent it was centered in the person of the Pharaoh. When a Pharaoh died, he was supposed to go to heaven to take his place among the gods. The texts, usually inscribed on the eastern walls of his tomb where he might conveniently see them, served no other purpose than to speed him on his journey.

The Earth Trembles. In doing so, the texts painted a complete picture of the Egyptian universe. The sky was heaven, personified as the goddess Nut, who was sometimes pictured as arched over the earth. But heaven was also a mirror of the earth, had islands, rivers, marshes and palaces, and was peopled by gods who showed themselves as stars. Each mortal, the Egyptians believed, had his double in heaven, and after death his spirit went forth to join the heavenly double. But the journey upwards was apparently a precarious one, and the burial texts attempted to take every precaution.

Sometimes the texts invoked charms and magic, sometimes mumbo-jumbo (“Mti, Mti, Mti, Mti . . .”), sometimes sheer bravado (“Heaven thunders, the earth trembles before [the king] . . .”). But they also pleaded good works on behalf of the Pharaoh (“I gave bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, I ferried him who had no boat”).

To be resurrected, however, the Pharaoh had to be purified, just as the sun was purified each day by rising in the east. The Pharaoh’s eyes, nose, ears and mouth were opened by the priests so that his senses could be restored. Then he began his journey. Sometimes he went by ladder, sometimes on a cloud of incense and sometimes on the buffetings of a hailstorm. But however he went, the Pharaoh was apparently certain to reach the stars. “This is King Pepi,” says one inscription. “He is not dead; he lives, he lives, he lives!”