A name and a job. Nothing else survives — and that is the finding, not a gap in our work. Arrives with the Book of the Dead.
Ari-su-tchesef
doorkeeper of the ninth pylon
Part of the Gate Deities of the Underworld.
Overview
Ari-su-tchesef keeps the ninth pylon — one of ten gateways in the house of Osiris, passed after the seven Arits.
Attestation history
Book of the Dead, chapter CXLVI, in the Papyrus of Ani [budge-1895].
The gate's own description is lost to footnote debris in the scan at this pylon — flagged requires_verification in data/arits.json. Every other pylon opens with one, addressed to the gate rather than to its keeper.
What the texts say
The gate outranks its keeper. Every pylon in this chapter is introduced by a description of the gateway itself — and the gateway is female, addressed as a lady with attributes, powers and, at the ninth, a measurement. The doorkeeper's name arrives at the end of the sentence, unelaborated.
That is the reverse of the seven Arits, where the three officers are named first and the hall is barely described. Something changes between chapters CXLVII and CXLVI: the architecture stops being scenery and becomes the thing addressed.
What this entry cannot tell you. No cult, no epithet, no speech of his own, no appearance outside this chapter. He is a name at the end of a formula. The comparative material is on the group page.
Cult and practice
None.
The record
Every claim above traces to a row here. Source, exact place in that source, and what it actually supports.
| Source | Locus | Attests |
|---|---|---|
[budge-1895] | Book of the Dead ch. CXLVI, Papyrus of Ani | Ari-su-tchesef as doorkeeper of the ninth pylon |
[budge-1895] | same chapter, vignette | the guardian as a lion-headed figure |
Sources
[budge-1895]— Budge, The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani (1895), ch. CXLVI. Public domain, archived insources-texts/. Budge caveat applies (04-BIBLIOGRAPHY.md).[naville]— Naville, Das aegyptische Todtenbuch der XVIII. bis XX. Dynastie (1886). Public domain. The Einleitung — the introduction volume, in German — is archived asnaville-1886-todtenbuch-einleitung-de.txt; the variant spellings are in the plate volumes, which are not. Checked 2026-07-30: the archived volume contains none of these names. Corrected 2026-07-30: the earlier wording declared the whole work absent, which was wrong about the book and right about the gap (C390).
Open questions
- Establish whether Ari-su-tchesef appears outside chapter CXLVI. A second occurrence would raise this grade.
- Are the ten pylons and the seven Arits two stages of one journey, or two versions of one idea? Budge prints them consecutively without comment; the vignettes put the Arits in the upper register and the pylons in the lower.
- Identify the gates. Each is described as a lady with attributes. Whether these are named goddesses elsewhere in the corpus is not established.
- Recover what the scan lost here (gate) — flagged in
data/arits.json.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ○name-only — A name and a function in a spell list. That is all that survives.
"Ari-su-tchesef", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded name-only, retrieved 2026-08-10.