3. Pyramid of Userkaf at
Saqqara
(1st
king, Dyn. 5)
Original height est.
161 ft. Original height est.
203 ft.
Khufu 481 ft.
Khafra 448 ft.
Menkaura 215 ft.
Sneferu (red) 341 ft.
Sneferu (bent) 332 ft.
Sneferu (step) 307 ft.
DYN. 6 = 100
cubits or
172 ft.
Djoser (Dyn. 3)
4. ?
KHUFU
Ankhaf
(vizier under Khafra, buried
at Giza)
Hetepheres I
HUNI
SNEFERU
Nefermaat
(vizier under Sneferu,
buried at Meidum)
Rahotep
(buried at Meidum)
Hetepheres A
Hemiunu
(vizier under Khufu,
buried at Giza)
KHAFRA
(buried at Giza)
DJEDEFRA
(RADJEDEF)
Meritites
Hetepheres II
MENAUKRA
SHEPSESKAF
?
6. Radjedef/Djedefra’s
pyramid was not next to his
father Khufu’s Great
Pyramid at Giza, but
slightly north at Abu Roash
Abu Roash
Abu Ghurab
Saqqara
Abusir
Dashur
Heliopolis
sun temple
“Iunu”
Giz
a
M
EM
PHIS
7. Radjedef/Djedefra’s
pyramid was not next to
his father Khufu’s Great
Pyramid at Giza, but
slightly north at Abu
Roash
Abu
Roash
Giza
Zawiyet
el-Aryan
Abu Ghurab
A
Saqqara
Abusir
Dashur
Heliopolis
sun temple
“Iunu”
Giza
MEMPHIS
RA DJED EF
RA
KHA
EF
13. Pyramid and temple of king
Sahura at Abusir (early Dyn. 5)
Valley
temple
Temple:Pyramid
size ratio increasing
14. Pyramid and temple, king
Menkaura, Dyn. 4
215 ft.
high
150-175 ft.
high
Sneferu, early Dyn. 4
(317 ft. high)
Pyramid and
temple, king
Sahura, early
Dyn. 5
15. Pyramid and
temple of king
Sahura early
Dyn. 5
100 cubits
(172 ft.)
150 cubits
(258 ft.)
250 cubits
(430.5 ft.)
16. Pyramid of king Unas
(last king Dyn. 5)
burial chamber with
earliest known Pyramid
Texts
17. Pyramid Texts (late Dyn. 5- Dyn. 6)
Hail, King X! Take heed of the lake!
The messengers of your ka have come for you,
the messengers of your father have come for you,
the messengers of Ra have come for you.
Follow behind your sun, that you may purify yourself.
Your bones are the divine falcons and the uraeus
serpents which are in the sky.
You will abide at the side of the god, you will entrust
your house to your son whom you have begotten. As for
anyone who speaks evil against the name of King X when
you go out, Geb [god of the earth] will degrade him to
the lowest place in his city. He will retreat and be weary,
but you will purify yourself in the celestial waters.
18. Pyramid Texts (late Dyn. 5- Dyn. 6)
The ferries of heaven have been launched by the day-barque for Ra…so that
King X may go forth on them to Horakhty on the horizon. King X will go forth
on the east side of heaven where the gods are born, and King X will be born as
Horus…The mother of King X has become pregnant with him who is in the
lower heaven. This King X has been begotten by his father Atum [king of the
gods]…This King X has escaped his day of submission to death…King X is a
star which knows not destruction…And this King X shall live even as he who
sets in the west [the sun-god Ra] lives when he rises in the east of the sky.
19. Pyramid Texts (late Dyn. 5- Dyn. 6)
All mankind shall acclaim you, for the stars which know
not destruction have exalted you. Get yourself up to the
place where your father abides, to the place where Geb
abides and he will give you the uraeus which is on the
brown of Horus. Through it you will become an akh,
through it you will become mighty, through it you will be
preeminent among the Westerners…This King X has
come as an akh who knows not destruction… O Ra-
Atum, your son has come to you. Cause him to ascend to
you…for he is your son, the son of your body unto
eternity…Hail Osiris King X! Stand up now! Horus has
come to install you among the gods. O flesh of King X,
do not rot, do not putrefy, do not small foul.
20. The king and his ka
embrace Osiris
The ka: life force or personality of living
person that leaves the body upon death;
requires offerings at the tomb
21. The ba: the “soul” bridges the 2 worlds,
travelling between the tomb/body and the
afterlife; for it to exist, the body must be
preserved.
22. The akh: effectiveness in life and
transfiguration in the afterlife, requires spells
to be rendered effective; “spirit”; the
transformation to a glorified being in the
afterlife
The reunion of the ba with
the ka is effected by the
burial ritual, creating the
final transformation of the
deceased as an akh.
Editor's Notes
This lecture section discusses the pivotal importance of the sun god Ra to the religious and political world of the Old Kingdom and, in particular, to the ideology of kingship, royal funerary monuments (ie., pyramids) and private religious ideology concerning the eternity of the soul (or “ka”) and its effective transition to the afterlife.
Just to review, the Old Kingdom is divided into 4 Dynasties.
Dynasty 3 is marked by the creation of the first ”Step” pyramid and pyramid complex at the site of Saqqara, just outside the national capital of Memphis, at the very beginning of the Dynasty under the reign of king Djoser.
Dynasty 4 is marked by the advances in building technology that allowed the Egyptian kings to express their religious ideas more effectively through a “true” pyramid rather than a step pyramid. The concept of a true pyramid went hand in hand with the rise of the cult of the sun god Ra since the true pyramid shape (or “ben-ben”) was imagined to symbolize the rays of the sun shining down, and creating life on, the primordial “mound of creation” in the Egyptian cosmological myths.
The later Old Kingdom, Dynasties 5 and 6, saw a dramatic decrease in the size of the actual royal pyramids, but this was combined with a distinct rise in size and elaboration of the temples that were part of the pyramid complex and the addition of so-called temples (1 for each king in the 5th Dynasty only) apart from the pyramid complexes, at the site of Abu Ghurab.
The 6th Dynasty is also marked by the addition of Pyramid Texts – the first writing to appear inside the pyramids (rather than in the temples of the pyramid complexes). These were prayers and magical spells written on the walls of the pyramids’ burial chambers that were designed to guarantee the safe and effective transmission of the king’s soul to the afterlife.
Obviously huge changes in the concept of pyramids and pyramid building had taken place between the height of Dynasty 4 at Giza and the beginning of Dynasty 5. Khufu’s Great Pyramid of Dynasty 4 measured an estimated 481 feet high, while his successor, Khafra’s, was slightly smaller in size at 448 feet but located on an elevated rise that made it appear as though it were actually taller. But the situation at the beginning of Dynasty 5 was very different indeed. The The local Arabic name for Userkaf’s pyramid (he was the 1st king of Dynasty 5) translates to “Heap of Stone.” While the 4th Dynasty Giza pyramids were build of solid stone inside and out, all later pyramids would essentially have a solid stone block exterior that hid an interior rubble core. Just the fact that the Userkaf pyramid was a rubble-cored structure is a significant retraction. The Giza pyramids were constituted of millions of multi-ton monolithic quarried rectangular blocks. Userkaf used only an outer shell of dressed stone and left the interior made out of irregularly-shaped rubble stones – the discount version of a pyramid. And while some of the Dynasty 5 pyramids where were located at Abusir (many are very very badly preserved) were a little grander than Userkaf’s – the highest one belonging to Neferirkara was 239 feet) – they were insignificant in size compared to the great structures of Giza in Dynasty 4. By Dynasty 6, all pyramids were standardized to exactly the same size –100 Egytian cubits (the length of a man’s arm from elbow to the tip of the fingers or approximately 1.5 modern English feet) in height.
Select members of the royal family of Dynasty 4 (plus king Huni of Dynasty 3). Dotted green lines separate generations: 1) Huni as final king of the 3rd Dynasty; 2) Sneferu and his official Queen Hetepheres; 3) a selection of six of Sneferu’s children including the son by his official wife who became king Khufu; 4) a selection of four of Sneferu’s grandchildren including the two grandsons who became king after their father Khufu; 5) Khufu’s son Menkaura; 6) Menkaura’s heir and possible son Shepseskaf.
King’s names are in CAPITALS. Female names are colored blue. Vertical lines denote offspring; those indicated royal children born to the king’s official Queen (and thus in direct line for the throne) are in blue. Horizontal line denotes marriage. Note the brother-sister marriages (often half-siblings).
This slide is provided for those of you who like to keep family relationships straight, but is otherwise not vital information. I use this slide to illustrate 1 important factor about kingship, the royal family and inheriting the throne. Egyptian pharaohs practiced polygamy and kept large harems. They might have many children by this large number of wives. Ramesses II the Great is credited – and reasonably so since he actually built a tomb to them – with at least 50 sons and supposedly had an equal number of daughters. However, a king’s important wives and official queens were most often those from his own royal family. Kings often married sisters or half-sisters. It is frequently these women we see installed as official wife(s) or queen(s). The sons of these wives/queens had precedence as heirs to the throne. For instance: Khufu became king after his father Sneferu despite the fact that Khufu was far younger than brothers who were given important government jobs (the royal prince Nefermaat served as his father Sneferu’s vizier) but not looked at to become king, presumably because their mothers ranked lower in the harem and may have come from outside the immediate royal family. Also note that Ankhaf, yet another of Sneferu’s sons and Khufu’s brothers may have been quite a bit younger than his kingly brother. He lived to serve as his nephew Khafra’s vizier and had the single largest mastaba tomb at Giza. Clearly an important royal prince, he married a half-sister Hetepheres A, one of the most prestigious of the royal princesses as she, like Khufu was born to Sneferu’s official queen.
Incestuous brother-sister (even if only half-siblings) marriages certainly may have caused genetic abnormalities. But since we have no surviving pharaohs bodies from the Old Kingdom and nearly no queens, and the princesses and princesses in the mastaba fields of Giza and elsewhere around the Memphite capital have never been carefully examined, we have no evidence to support this.
Less well-known kings (Djedefra and Shepseskaf) may have not been the offspring of the kings by their official queens. Evidence for them is generally lacking, not allowing us to rely on the usual inscriptions discussing the king’s parentage. And their monuments are universally poorly preserved. In at least some, if not all, cases, the lack of preservation of their monuments may be due to their less prestigious parentage. As the Egyptian king and queen were seen as embodiments of gods on earth, a king born to a non-royal queen may have been seen as less divine and their monuments less worthy of upkeep and preservation.
Khufu’s heir, his son Djedefra (also called Radjedef) was not located near his father’s at Giza. Instead he built a pyramid at Abu Roash, slightly to the north of Giza. Largely destroyed, we have a hard time getting good evidence from the pyramid of Djedefra, the elder son and successor of Khufu. In fact, the remains of the pyramid are so poor, that was suspected by Egyptologists that either the pyramid was unfinished (presumably due to the king dying early and not having enough time to complete it) or destroyed at or soon after his death (presumably due to extreme unpopularity). However, he seems to have ruled at least 10 and perhaps as much as 14 or even 21 years, and archaeologists now not only believe that the pyramid was indeed finished during the king’s lifetime but that most of its dismantling took place much later in the Roman period, although it may have suffered some destruction shortly after his death as well. Moreover, some scholars speculate that it was actually larger in height (if not in actual size) than his father Khufu’s Great Pyramid because of the high elevation it sat on. Whatever it’s originally planned and executed dimensions, it was a much more imposing structure than it looks now and would have compared well with the spectacular monuments at Giza.
By the way, the confusion about how to read this king’s name – whether it should be Radjedef or Djedefra is due to a combination of things. The order in which the hieroglyphs are written say RA – DJED – EF. However, “RA” is the name of the sun-god Ra. So it may have been required to be technically written first in order to honor the god, but actually have been pronounced last. We know this is true of the later 4th (such Khafra and Menkaura) and 5th and 6th Dynasty kings with “Ra” in their names when the cult of the sun-god and its most preeminent city (Heliopolis) where incredibly important in Egypt. We aren’t sure if that reading should be extended as early as this king for a variety of complicated linguistic reasons that I wont bother to get into here. But he is the first to adopt the “son of Ra” name (see Bard pages 123-4 for a discussion of the 5 different royal names taken by a king when he inherited the throne), so while obviously showing the growing importance of the god Ra at this point, it may be too early to assume that the paradigm of writing the god’s name first even when pronounced last was imposed this early even though his two successors – brother Khafra and his son Menkaura almost certain did this. No one tries to call them Rakaef or Ramenkau!!!
And actually, it is both this king’s name (the first to include the name of the sun-god Ra) and his decision not to set his pyramid in the area of his father’s Great Pyramid at Giza that may give us clues as to what was going on in Dynasty 4. The first king of Dynasty 4 (Sneferu) and the early kings of Dynasty 3 focused on areas to the south (Saqqara, Dahshur, and Meidum even further to the south off this map) near the capital city of Memphis. Khufu moved a little north to Giza and his 2nd son Khafra and grandson Menkaura added to his chosen pyramid location with their own monuments. Khufu’s first son, Radjedef/Djedefra selected Abu Roash, even a little further to the north. Now, Radjedef was the first king to use “Ra” in his name, as well as the first to use the “son of Ra” title in his kingly names. It seems logical to assume his reign saw an even greater increase in devotion to the god Ra. He may have wanted to place his pyramid in a place that was even more connected (by line-of-sight) to the city of Heliopolis across the river on the east bank of the Nile. Heliopolis was the most important center of the worship of the sun-god Ra in all Egypt and held his greatest temple and cult center. Khufu had already moved his burial site north so that his pyramid would be in clear line of site with the sun-temple to Ra that sat across the river in Heliopolis. The connection between the sun and the Heliopolis sun-temple and the true pyramidal shape is already fairly clear in Egyptian ideology by this point. Radjedef may have been worried about his father’s great pyramid obscuring the view of his own pyramid towards Heliopolis. Perhaps he was concerned about where to place his temple in regards to the plans for the great mastaba fields of Giza. (There is actually quite limited space on the Giza plateau for the placement of large structures.) Regardless of the actual reasons, it didn’t bother Radjedef’s little brother Khafra to move back next to their father’s Great Pyramid at Giza when it was his turn.
But at the end of the 4th Dynasty, after the deaths of Khafra and his son Menkaura who built the 2nd and 3rd pyramids at Giza, a much more substantial revolution took place. The interruption of royal pyramid building at Giza by Radjedef was short-lived since his brother and nephew returned there and clearly invested extensive energies onto not only their pyramids but the entire Giza necropolis as a religious center. But at the end of Dynasty 4 Menkaura’s successor and completely changed the tone of royal mortuary building projects and the funerary cult of the king. Again, this is the event that caused historians such as Manetho to place the Dynasty 4/Dynasty 5 dividing line here. Shepseskaf, this last king listed for Dynasty 4, not only abandoned Giza and placed his tomb at the old Dynasty 1-3 burial grounds at Saqqara, he abandoned the pyramid and pyramid complex altogether. This was a short-lived change since Shepseskaf’s Dynasty 5 successors would immediately turn back to the pyramid. But Giza would never again be the place of royal burial. (Although we must keep in mind the arguments about the lack of space on the Giza plateau for more pyramids).
Shepseskaf was clearly making a statement. By returning to the Early Dynastic and very early Old Kingdom royal burial site of Saqqara, AND by returning to the mastaba-style burial that had been abandoned for royal burials by Djoser’s reign, he was trying to connect his reign to much older (perhaps from before the extreme prominence of the sun god Ra?) styles and beliefs. Even his royal name, Shepseskaf, omits reference to Ra, something that his 3 immediate predecessors emphasized in their own royal names.
Shepseskaf’s revolutionary turn away from Giza, away from using “Ra” in his name and away from the pyramid suggests a rejection of the sun-cult that appears to have been becoming more and more powerful over the course of Dynasty 4. It’s a rejection that would not last long. His successor, Userkaf, the first king of Dynasty 5 kept Saqqara as his burial place (out of line-of-sight with Heliopolis and its sun-temple) but immediately returned to the pyramid structure. However, it is pretty clear by his actions that the abrupt move back to Saqqara at the end of Dynasty 4 was due to an underlying difficulty in the Egyptian state and royal family. A struggle for prominence with the ever-increasingly powerful priesthood of Ra is possible as is a royal fight to reject the movement towards the Ra-cult dominance. This social/political/religious upset clearly lead Shepseskaf and Userkaf to cling to the “old” power center of Egypt – Saqqara. First Shespeskaf rejects the pyramid and returns to Saqqara. Then, Userkaf takes a middle ground. Unwilling to break from the pyramid-concept, he returns to it, but makes it absolutely clear in the positioning of his pyramid that he wants to harness the old ideological power and prestige of the ancient kings of Egypt. He places his pyramid right up against the great Dynasty 3 Djoser step-pyramid complex. Just as Peribsen and Khasekhemwy at the end of Dynasty 2 had returned to the ancestral power-center of Abydos for symbolic reasons, so too may we assume that this Dynasty 4/Dynasty 5 transitional phase returned to Saqqara and right next door to old king Djoser for much the same reasons.
The bulk of Dynasty 5 kings will be buried at Abusir, a feature we will go into in further depth elsewhere. But immediately before and immediately after the move of the royal pyramid fields to Abusir in Dynasty 5, there was a shift of focus back to the old Early Dynastic and Dynasty 3 cemetery center of Saqqara. After the greatness of the Giza pyramid complexes, Shepseskaf, the last king of Dynasty 4 moved his tomb to Saqqara and, abandoning the pyramid altogether, built himself a mastaba. The next king, Userkaf the first king of Dynasty 5, went back to the pyramid for his tomb but clearly wanted an even stronger association with the old Early Dynastic and Dynasty 3 monuments and built his pyramid as close to the Djoser complex as possible. While his Dynasty 5 successors moved their pyramids to Abusir, late in that Dynasty the Egyptian kings moved permanently back to Saqqara for the rest of the Old Kingdom. Again, one of the earliest kings to return to Saqqara at the end of Dynasty 5 (Unas) also slapped his pyramid down right at the edge of the Djoser complex. So it is logical to conclude that, at both of these “returns to Saqqara” there was a need to reconnect with the past history of earlier kings.
Whatever crisis or revolutionary conflict of power or ideology occurred at the juncture of Dynasty 4/5 (and again at the juncture of Dynasty 5/6), the bulk of Dynasty 5 was stable and prosperous. There’s one thing Dyn. 5 makes clear to us – the Ra sun-god cult won the conflict. Dynasty 5 kings use “Ra” in their names extensively and, even more significantly, each built great sun-temples at Abu Ghurob in addition to their pyramid complexes at Abusir or Saqqara. Again, the need to move north away from Saqqara and somewhere within line-of-sight of the sun-temple across the river in Heliopolis is clear. Userkaf left his pyramid in Saqqara, but most of the rest of Dynasty 5 kings placed their pyramids at Abusir. Plus, he and his successors started a new trend – sun-temples built at Abu Ghurab, close by the Abusir pyramid fields. The Abu Ghurab sun temples were always in direct line-of-sight with the Heliopolis temple of Ra across the river, even if the royal pyramids at Abusir could not be (probably due to lack of enough suitable flat land for building pyramids in/around/near Giza or elsewhere on the west bank of the Nile in visual sight of Heliopolis).
These 5th Dynasty sun temples at Abu Ghurab had many elements in common with the funerary temples that made up part of the king’s pyramid complexes. There was a small temple at the Nile River valley which is connected to the sun temple itself by a causeway. The sun temple was constructed on a raised, stepped platform and was primarily a walled, open enclosure with a columned entrance hall and columned porticos along the sides. At the rear of the enclosure was the tall obelisk with the triangular ben-ben or pyramidion stone on top – made to resemble the similar example of the Iunu at the temple of Ra at Helipolis. Ben-ben was the name for the primodrial mound of creation in Egyptian creation myth and the pyramidal shape to the stone mounted on the top of a pyramid or obelisk was meant to symbolize the exact location on which the sun’s rays originally fell onto the mound in order to create life. The benben stone at the Heliopolis was thought to be THE actual spot of original creation and other benbens (including pyramids, sun temples and other obelisks) were intended to copy or symbolize the primary stone.
The bulk of Dynasty 5 kings will be buried at Abusir, a feature we will go into in further depth elsewhere. But immediately before and immediately after the move of the royal pyramid fields to Abusir in Dynasty 5, there was a shift of focus back to the old Early Dynastic and Dynasty 3 cemetery center of Saqqara. After the greatness of the Giza pyramid complexes, Shepseskaf, the last king of Dynasty 4 moved his tomb to Saqqara and, abandoning the pyramid altogether, built himself a mastaba. The next king, Userkaf the first king of Dynasty 5, went back to the pyramid for his tomb but clearly wanted an even stronger association with the old Early Dynastic and Dynasty 3 monuments and built his pyramid as close to the Djoser complex as possible. While his Dynasty 5 successors moved their pyramids to Abusir, late in that Dynasty the Egyptian kings moved permanently back to Saqqara for the rest of the Old Kingdom. Again, one of the earliest kings to return to Saqqara at the end of Dynasty 5 (Unas) also slapped his pyramid down right at the edge of the Djoser complex. So it is logical to conclude that, at both of these “returns to Saqqara” there was a need to reconnect with the past history of earlier kings.
As already discussed, Dynasty 5-6 pyramids become standardized in size. You can see the largest Dyn. 5 pyramid of Neferirkara here at top right, but the standard 100 cubit height quickly becomes the norm, making these pyramids about 1/3rd the size of Khufu’s Great Pyramid at Giza. Which is the more crucial question: Why did the later pyramids decline so radically in size? OR Why were the Dynasty 4 pyramids so exceptionally large?
While we cant answer that question definitively, we can obviously show that the royal mortuary building projects as a whole did not reduce nearly as obviously if we look at the whole rather than just focus our attention on the size of just the pyramids themselves. Remember, the pyramid and valley temples expanded substantially over the Old Kingdom. These smaller pyramids receive very large temples, suggesting a shift of emphasis away from the king’s royal pyramid of accession to the sun and towards the expansion of the on-going worship of the king’s mortuary cult. Plus, don’t forget that the pyramid complexes of Abusir are only half of the picture. The Dynasty 5 kings also built great sun-temples just up the desert at Abu Ghurab.
Egyptian religion (in terms of the worship of the dead king) seemed to be compartmentalizing itself more as the Old Kingdom progressed. Instead of one great, massive complex, the many subtly unique areas of royal funerary cult seemed to come to require their own discrete areas. A pyramid, pyramid and valley temples, and sun temple.
Valley temples are often impossible to get good information from. Due to the rising level of floodwaters and spreading agricultural land due to the Aswan dam and Lake Nasser or the spread of modern habitation near the banks of the Nile, valley temples are often destroyed or even completely lost. From what evidence we can determine, they seem to be one of the last, or the very last, elements built during the pyramid complex construction. Often they were left unfinished at the time of the king’s death. Also, since they were set on the banks of the Nile for boat processions to land at, they had to be built to adapt to the landscape since they incorporated landing platforms for river traffic. In fact, the site of the valley temple may well have been the site at which construction materials for the pyramid landed and were transported up the causeway to the pyramid building site, thus explaining why they had to be the last part of the complex built. Plus, sitting right by the river, valley temples were frequently subject to flooding during years of particularly high innndation and so were often damaged, even beyond the point of repair, in antiquity.
The pyramid temple, however, settled into a somewhat standard form over the course of the Old Kingdom. The causeway leading up from the valley temple opened into a long narrow hallway which, in turn, opened into a columned open courtyard. Going directly through the maze of storage magazines off to the sides, a visitor would proceed past a 5-niched statue chapel containing statues of the king (see the seated statue of Menkaura from the MFA in the previous slide) and then into the offering chapel. Off to the south side of the main temple complex could be a subsidiary or satellite pyramid dedicated, not as a burial site, but to the cult of the dead king. The temple would basically get its own pyramid.
This represents a huge change and greatly enlarged complex when compared to Sneferu’s tiny little offering chapel at the beginning of Dynasty 4. While the pyramid size dropped dramatically in Dynasties 5 and 6 as compared to the rapid rise in their size from Djoser’s Step Pyramid through the 4th Dynasty Giza pyramids, the temples associated with them – and the separately built sun temples at Abu Ghurab – more than made up for that lack in size. The tiny shrine chapels of Djoser’s Step Pyramid or Sneferu’s early 4th Dynasty pyramid are replaced by larger structures – such as in Menkaura’s later 4th Dynasty pyramid see here. The temples of Dyn. 5-6 (such as Sahura’s also seen here) take upeven more square footage on the ground than do their associated pyramids.
If you look at the plans for the pyramid temples of Old Kingdom kings starting with early 3rd Dynasty Djoser, then moving to early 4th Dynasty Sneferu and onwards through the 4th and into the 5th and 6th Dynasties, you can see a clearly growing emphasis on them. Even while pyramids themselves shrink in size after Khufu’s Great Pyramid and his son Khufu’s [nearly as large] pyramid at Giza, the pyramid temples grow substantially. While Sahura’s pyramid is very badly deteriorated, you can tell that the temple complex takes up virtually as much square footage on the ground as the pyramid itself.
A note on pyramid size, in the 5th Dynasty there was a short-lived trend to try for slightly larger pyramids again, but for the most part, Dynasty 5-6 pyramids became totally standardized in size and dimension: they were designed, like the pyramid of Khafra, on the 3:4:5 Pythagorean right triangle module and were 150 “cubits” [an ancient Egyptian length of measure approximating the length of the forearm of a man from elbow to tip of middle finger] long on each side at the base and 100 cubits high. In modern feet: 172 feet high and 258 feet on each side at the base.
In Dynasty 6 (already beginning at the very end of Dynasty 5, actually) the burial chamber of the king’s pyramids were covered – for the first time – in religious texts, aptly called “Pyramid Texts.” These are found only in pyramids during the Old Kingdom, and thus reserved for kings. These Texts are prayers and magical spells designed to ensure the safe transmission of the soul in to the afterlife.
These texts fixate on royal ideology – the king as a divine being who, upon the dead of his human form, with become fully divine and merge with his godly representative (Horus/Ra/Osiris) in the heavens and afterlife. These magical spells are meant to protect the soul (ka) on its journey to the afterlife.
The solar boat imagery is strong in the Pyramid texts where the king (equated as Ra or Ra-Horakhty – which means Horus on the horizon) sails in his boat from east to west along the sun’s path where he – as the sun god - ensures the continual cycle of eternal life.
The journey of the soul to the afterlife is extremely complex. First of all, the soul is not a singular thing, but conceived of in 3 distinct parts – the ka, the ba and the akh.
The ka is part of the soul represented in human form, and was thought of as the life force or energy of the individual and essentially a physical double of the person. Here (on the left) is king Tutankhamon painted on the walls of his tomb embracing the god Osiris (to the far left in the picture). Behind king Tutankhamon ishis own ka (labeled with the hieroglyphic symbol of upraised arms representing the ka). It is the part of the soul that occupies the tomb and requires food offerings in order to survive.
The ba is the part of the soul depicted as a bird with a human head. It flies between the land of the living and the afterlife. If the ka is the representation of the living person, and created at the time of the individual’s birth, the ba is a manifestation of the persons’ self after death. The ba needed to return to the tomb and the mummy of the deceased after its travels into the sunlit world of the living and so needed an identifiable mummy to return to – the mummy needed the features and name of the deceased to be recognizable.
The purpose of the burial ritual and funeral rites is the reunion of the ka and ba aspects of the soul, creating the final transformation of the deceased as a “akh” or an effective spirit in the afterlife. This is why the spells and religious texts in pyramids and tombs are crucial. Without these, the transformation of the soul into an akh cannot take place.
