A name and a job. Nothing else survives — and that is the finding, not a gap in our work. In the record from the very beginning.
Kherty
the power the sun-god took the king away from
Overview
He appears in one sentence in this archive, and the sentence is doing something interesting.
Breasted is arguing that the Solar and Osirian views of the afterlife were in open competition — that the priesthood of the sun resisted the dead king being handed over to Osiris at all. Among his evidence:
Likewise it is said of the Sun-god: "He has freed king Teti from Kherti, he has not given him to Osiris." [breasted-1912]
Read the parallelism. Freed from Kherti / not given to Osiris. The two clauses say the same thing twice, which makes Kherti a power on the same side as Osiris — something the dead king has to be got away from, and the sun-god is the one who does the getting.
That is the whole of the attested record here: a name, and a position in an argument.
The company the sentence keeps
The surrounding passage is worth having, because it establishes that this is not an isolated hostility. Breasted cites exorcisms "intended to restrain Osiris and his kin from entering the pyramid, a Solar tomb, with evil intent," and a text addressing the dead king as a star: "Thou lookest down upon Osiris commanding the Glorious (= the dead). There thou standest, being far from him, for thou art not of them, thou belongest not among them" [breasted-1912].
And then the accommodation: Horus, Osiris' own son, is made into the god "who puts not this Pepi over the dead, he puts him among the gods, he being divine."
The prehistoric Osiris faith, Breasted concludes, "involved a forbidding hereafter which was dreaded." Kherty belongs to that dreaded version — the one the solar theology spent centuries negotiating with.
The record
Every claim above traces to a row here. Source, exact place in that source, and what it actually supports.
| Source | Locus | Attests |
|---|---|---|
[breasted-1912] | *Development of Religion and Thought*, ch. on the Osirianization of the hereafter, p. 142 | "He has freed king **Teti** from **Kherti**, he has not given him to Osiris," quoted from the Pyramid Texts |
Sources
[breasted-1912]— Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt. Public domain, archived. He quotes the Pyramid Texts in translation with paragraph numbers, and the numbers immediately around this line (§§1266–7, §251) belong to the neighbouring quotations; the citation for the Kherti sentence itself is not cleanly recoverable from the scan.
Open questions
- Get the paragraph number. Breasted footnotes the sentence and the OCR loses which note belongs to it. Sethe's edition or Faulkner's translation would place it exactly, and the corpus already has Maspero's Inscriptions des pyramides de Saqqarah archived — the pyramid of Teti is in it.
- Who is Kherty? One sentence gives a side and no attributes. The standard identification — a ram-god of Letopolis, a ferryman and earth-power — is entirely absent from this archive and is recorded as unconfirmed rather than repeated.
- Is this the same element as Khenti-? Almost certainly not: Khenti is "foremost" and forms dozens of compounds here. But the two are one letter apart and the corpus has been burned by exactly that distance (C336). Test against a lexicon before connecting them.
- The dreaded hereafter. Breasted's thesis — that the Osirian afterlife was feared and the solar one preferred — is a strong claim on which this entry's only sentence depends for its sense. Worth testing against the Am-Tuat, where the corpus has found the opposite emphasis (C267).
Cite this entry
Research grade: ○name-only — A name and a function in a spell list. That is all that survives.
"Kherty", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded name-only, retrieved 2026-08-10.