The Fourth Division

Source section: the Fourth Division of the Tuat, called Ankhet-kheperu, in the Book of Am-Tuat Related: the Tenth Division · the Sixth Division · the Fifth Division · sokar · osiris · anubis · neith · ra · metes · the First Division · the Second Division · the Third Division · the Seventh Division · the Eighth Division · the Ninth Division · the Eleventh Division · the Twelfth Division

Overview

For three hours the sun has travelled down the middle of each division on a river. In the fourth hour the river stops.

Budge is direct about the break: this is "a region which is entirely different from anything seen previously." The three-section layout holds, but the path of the boat does not. Instead of running along the middle, the god "is obliged to pass over the region of the kingdom of Seker" [budge-1905].

The name of the division is Ankhet-kheperu. It reports no gate, no city and no hour-goddess — a fourth pattern, after the Twelfth and Seventh (gate, city, hour), the First (Field and guardian) and the Second (neither).

Re-stau — a corridor, not a channel

What replaces the river is a corridor called Re-stau, and it does not run straight. It cuts diagonally from the top of the upper section down across the divisions, bends sharply, crosses again, and ends at the bottom [budge-1905].

Three doors punctuate it:

Of the first stretch the text says something worth stopping on:

the road of the secret things of Re-stau; the god doth not pass through the leaves of the door, but they hear his voice. [budge-1905]

He does not open the doors. He is not carried through them. The doors hear him — and that is sufficient. Set beside the Seventh Division, where the boat advances on Isis' recitation, and the Eighth, which records what each sealed Circle sounds like: the Am-Tuat keeps solving problems of passage acoustically.

The second slant carries the corridor's purpose:

the road by which entereth the body of Seker, who is on his sand, the image which is hidden, and is neither seen nor perceived. [budge-1905]

The dead have their own road

The single most useful sentence in the division is Budge's description of the corridor: "The course which was usually passed over by the dead."

That resolves the tension C281 opened. The First Division states that the dead "remain in this Court" and do not continue with the god. It had looked as though the dead simply stopped. They do not — they stop travelling with Ra. Re-stau is their route, and it runs diagonally across the sun's, through Seker's country.

The gods stationed along it are described as "the guardians of the way of the holy land for those who enter into the hidden place of the Tuat" [budge-1905]. There is traffic on this road, and staff to manage it.

The dead and the sun take different roads through the same hour. That is a better reading than "the dead go nowhere," and it is the Fourth Division that supplies it. Recorded as C298.

What is in the region

Where the water was, there is now sand, and the population changes with the terrain:

• Serpents that walk. One with a human head and **two pairs of human feet and

legs**; three more moving side by side "upon their bellies" [budge-1905].

• Em-ankhti, a form of Osiris, in front of those towing the boat.
• The crook of Osiris, listed as an object among the gods — a second case of

the fabrication category after the Third's Ur-hekau (C230, C280).

• A goddess in the Crown of the North, "apparently a form of Neith."
• Anubis, who tows: the guardians "keep ward over Anpu in his forms as he

tows them along, when he entereth in by them in the holy land."

Note the terrain doing the work. A river needs a boat; sand needs a rope. The moment the water stops, the division fills with things that crawl and things that haul.

The C267 test — consistent, not a test

The Fourth carries no punitive vocabulary at all — no hacking, no shades, no knives, no destruction. It does carry the integration formula, and in a striking form: those in the picture are there "in their forms of their bodies" [budge-1905].

But as with the First (C279), there is no punitive register here to supply the contrasting half. A case that cannot refute a claim is not evidence for it.

Recorded as consistent. C267 remains at three confirmations (Second, Seventh, Twelfth), one proposal (Third), two consistent-but-not-tests (First, Fourth).

The C295 hypothesis — REFUTED

C295 proposed that reversed-head posture clusters in divisions where a boat is under tow or a birth is in progress, on the evidence that it appears in the First, Third and Twelfth and is absent from the Second and Seventh — both of which lack towing.

The Fourth Division has towing and does not have the posture. The text names "those who tow the boat of Ra" and describes Anubis towing, and a search of the whole division returns no reversed heads.

So the hypothesis is wrong. Towing does not predict the posture. The distribution stands at present in First, Third, Twelfth; absent in Second, Seventh, Fourth — and there is now no available explanation for it. Better to hold an unexplained distribution than a refuted rule; the question stays open with three divisions left to read.

The C294 test — silent

No "whosoever knoweth" clause in the Fourth, and nothing about the living. The expectation that the Sokar approach would carry one was wrong. Recorded as a silence.

Metes is a door, not a god

The metes entry is graded ○ name-only on a single line in Budge's index (i. 200), with a note that its index neighbours — Metes-mauat, Metes-neheh, Metes-sen — "suggest Metes belongs to that class, but suggestion is not attestation."

Two of those neighbours are doors in this division. Metes-mau-at and Metes-en-neheh are the second and third doors of the Re-stau corridor, and the first door, Mates-sma-ta, is the same element under a vowel variant [budge-1905].

That does not close C251 — Budge i. 200 is still unread and may hold something else. But it establishes that the Metes- element is a door-name formula in the Am-Tuat, which makes "Metes" as a standalone deity considerably less likely. It is the epithet trap (C290) in a new form: not a title crossed with a roster of gods, but a compound name whose first element has been indexed as if it were a name in its own right. The entry has been updated.

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Primary attestations

Sources

• [budge-1905] — Budge, The Book of Am-Tuat (1905), vol. I, pp. 63–71. Public domain, archived in sources-texts/. OCR. Budge notes one passage where "the words over which a line is printed are repeated inadvertently by the scribe" — a scribal dittography visible in the original, not a scan artefact.

Open threads

• Where does Re-stau lead? It is the dead's road and it crosses this division diagonally. Establish whether it continues into the Fifth, or ends at Metes-en-neheh.
• The doors hear his voice. Is this formula used elsewhere, or only here?
• Seker "on his sand" — the Third Division has a dog-headed ape called Her-sha-f, "He who is on his sand." Same epithet, two very different figures. Establish whether the phrase is a fixed formula for something.
• A serpent with two pairs of human legs. Find a parallel or a plate.
• Read Budge, Gods of the Egyptians i. 200 and finish C251.
• The crook of Osiris, listed among gods — add to the fabrication dossier with Ur-hekau (C230/C280).
• The C295 distribution now has no explanation. Three divisions remain.

Art notes

• Historical plate: the diagonal corridor of Re-stau with its three doors, cutting across all three registers. It is the most structurally unusual page in the book and reproduces as a diagram rather than a scene.
• New art: the serpent with two pairs of human legs, walking on sand. Draw it plainly; the image does not need help.