Hi MJ,

MJ: "Excuse my ignorance but would an antechamber proper normally have been used to represent the Duat or Akhet?"


The idea of the sarcophagus chamber representing the Duat and the antechamber the Akhet, comes from Allen's interpretation of the PTs in relation to the architecture.


"Although they are first attested in the pyramid of Unis, most of the Pyramid Texts are undoubtedly older. With few exceptions, their grammar is that of a stage of the language that disappeared from secular inscriptions at least fifty years earlier, and the architecture of the pyramid chambers that they reflect came into use at the end of the Fourth Dynasty, more than a hundred years before Unis's time. Some of the texts reflect burial practices that are even older, in earthen graves beneath tombs built of mudbrick. Newer spells that first appear in the later pyramids, however, incorporate features of the contemporary language." (Allen 2005)


According to Allen, the PTs reflect the architecture of the pyramid from the end of Dyn 4.

Khufu's pyramid has no antechamber connected to the sarcophagus chamber, but the name of his pyramid was 'Akhet Khufu' which means the whole superstructure of his pyramid may have been his Akhet, and he had the small enigmatic shafts leaving the sarcophagus chamber - model passageways through the superstructure. If the sarcophagus chamber corresponded to the Duat already in Khufu's time, then he left the Duat and ascended through the Akhet by way of the shafts.

CT