Duat

The Duat is written with a five-pointed star inside a circle. It is the other world through which the sun travels after setting; its location is variously conceived — beneath the earth, beyond the horizon, inside the body of the sky goddess Nut — but its geography is concrete: a river runs through it, along which the solar barque sails past sandbanks, lakes of fire, flame-spitting serpents, and knife-wielding gatekeepers, the whole divided into twelve regions matching the twelve hours of night, each entered through a gate whose name must be spoken aloud.

The fullest maps of it are the netherworld books painted in New Kingdom royal tombs. The Amduat, 'the book of what is in the netherworld,' first appears complete in the tomb of Thutmose III (c. 1425 BCE) and charts the sun god's voyage hour by hour: in the seventh hour Apep ambushes the barque and is bound and carved apart; in the depths the ba of Ra unites with the corpse of Osiris and draws the power of renewal; in the twelfth hour the gods haul the barque through the body of a great serpent, emerging from its mouth into dawn. The slightly later Book of Gates organizes the same journey around twelve guarded portals.

For the ordinary dead the Duat was both an ordeal and a destination. The Book of the Dead served as its guidebook: how to name the doorkeepers, evade the nets that trawl for souls, and pass the weighing of the heart in the Hall of Two Truths. The justified reach the Field of Reeds, a perfected replica of the Nile valley with heavy-laden fields and mild winds, where the dead plough, harvest, and dwell forever.