Pyramid Texts

Traditions

Egyptian religion and magic

Role in the tradition

Primary source Written from inside the tradition: scripture, revelation, a grimoire, a manifesto or a practical treatise.

Public attention

Landmark Wikipedia has an article about it in 42 languages.

• Mercer's translation ↗ sacred-texts.com checked against the Internet Archive's copy of June 21, 2025, because the site refuses scripts · archived copy

The Pyramid Texts are the oldest ancient Egyptian funerary texts, dating to the late Old Kingdom. They are the earliest known corpus of ancient Egyptian religious texts. Written in Old Egyptian, the Pyramid Texts were carved onto the subterranean walls and sarcophagi of pyramids at Saqqara from the end of the Fifth Dynasty, and throughout the Sixth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, and into the Eighth Dynasty of the First Intermediate Period. The oldest of the texts have been dated to c. 2400–2300 BCE.

From the Wikipedia article Pyramid Texts, revision 1369704891, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikidata Q645882: “corpus of ancient Egyptian religious texts dating to the Old Kingdom in Old Egyptian, carved onto the subterranean walls and sarcophagi of pyramids at Saqqara”.