Monumental Ritual Texts in Ancient Egyptian Pyramids

Attend a lecture on Monumental Ritual Texts in Ancient Egyptian Pyramids, led by Christelle Alvarez, Assistant Professor of Egyptology, Brown University

The earliest large-scale records of ancient Egyptian religious literature come from Saqqara, an important royal cemetery from Egypt’s Old Kingdom period. For nearly two centuries, the subterranean chambers beneath some of Saqqara’s pyramids were inscribed with hundreds of ritual texts carved in hieroglyphs. In this lecture, Christelle Alvarez will discuss the final Old Kingdom pyramid to bear such inscriptions: the tomb of King Qakare Ibi. Smaller than its predecessors, badly damaged, and marked by architectural and textual idiosyncrasies, this monument has often been dismissed as marginal to the main Pyramid Text tradition. Alvarez argues that Qakare Ibi’s pyramid actually provides a rare glimpse into the process of monumentalizing ritual texts, revealing how this tradition was composed, transmitted, and continually reshaped over time.

This event is Presented by the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Fragment photo by Christelle Alvarez.