Coffin Texts

Coffin Texts — Breasted 1912 selected English quotations and context — sourcepage 302

280 RELIGION AND THOUGHT IN ANCIENT EGYPT While the destiny, everywhere so evidently royal in the Pyramid Texts, has thus become the portion of any one, the simpler life of the humbler citizen which he longed to see continued in the hereafter is quite discernible, also in these Coffin Texts. As he lay in his coffin he could read a chapter which concerned "Building a house for a man in the Nether World, digging a pool and planting fruit-trees." 1 Once supplied with a house, surrounded by a garden with its pool and its shade-trees, the dead man must be assured that he shall be able to occupy it, and hence a " chapter of a man's being in his house." 2 The lonely sojourn there without the companionship of family and friends was an intolerable thought, and hence a further chapter entitled "Sealing of a Decree concern ing the Household, to give the Household [to a man] in the Nether World." In the text the details of the decree are five times specified in different forms. "Geb, heredi tary prince of the gods, has decreed that there be given to me my household, my children, my brothers, my father, my mother, my slaves, and all my establishment." Lest they should be withheld by any malign influence the sec ond paragraph asserts that "Geb, hereditary prince of the gods, has said to release for me my household, ^my^ children, my brothers and sisters, my father, my mother, all my slaves, all my establishment at once, rescued from every god, from every goddess, from every death (or dead person)." s To assure the fulfilment of this decree there was another chapter entitled "Uniting of the Household of a Man with Him in the Nether World," which effected the "union of the household, father, mother, children, friends, 'connections1, wives, concubines, slaves, servants, 1 LACAU, LXVII, Rec. 31, 24/. 2 LACAU, XXXIV, Rec. 30, 186/. 8 LACAU, LXXII, Rec. 31, 26-29.