Movement and Exclusion: Opening the Door on Threshold Spaces in the Pyramid Texts

Abstract

Across cultures, doors and threshold spaces are symbolically linked to ideas of transition, transgression, and liminality. In the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom, references to these types of spaces come predominantly from administrative and mortuary literature and, in particular, from the Pyramid Texts of the 5th and 6th Dynasties. The present study originated from the ongoing debate in the field of Pyramid Text studies that focuses on how the corpus should be “read” and how such readings influence our understanding of the ontological transformation of the deceased king or queen in the afterlife. A significant aspect of this “reading” concerns the purpose of threshold spaces within Pyramid Text spells, how we interpret them, and how we assess their relationship with the surrounding tomb architecture. Through the theoretical lens of liminality, this study analyses key threshold terms extant in the Pyramid Text corpus, and explores their relationship to ancient Egyptian royal and elite ideologies of purity, the endurance of cult, and broader notions of spatial and social control. This study fundamentally questions the adaptive scholarly interpretation of certain texts within the corpus, and how the threshold spaces within have been used to justify textual-spatial correlations, demonstrating that such “readings” are untenable. This thesis consists of two thematic parts. The first, “Movement”, explores the terminology used within the corpus to express a doorway or threshold space. Utilising archaeological records and extant administrative and mortuary data, the chapters in this section re-examine each of these terms individually, situating them within the wider context of Old Kingdom social and religious use. The second part of this study, “Exclusion,” examines terminology associated with spatial restriction. Through a close analysis of contemporary threat-formulae and elite ideologies of social and religious purity and control, the chapters in this section explore how we interpret liminal exclusion, and what the “Othering” of certain socio-cultural groups reveals about elite Egyptian conceptions of this world and the next.