Qerti qrtj

The dead person walks into the hall and finds forty-two gods sitting there.

You go along the row. To each one you deny a specific sin — I have not stolen, I have not lied, I have not held back water when it should have flowed. Forty-two gods, forty-two offences, one at a time. It is the closest thing Egyptian religion has to an itemised moral code, and most of the forty-two are otherwise unknown: a name, a home town, a sin, and nothing else anywhere.

The eleventh is different, and the difference is in his name.

It is not a person's name. It is a dual.

Declaration eleven runs:

Hail, Qerti, who come forth from Amentet, I have not uttered evil words.

And in the middle of that line the translator inserts a parenthesis — (i.e., the two sources of the Nile).

That gloss is the most informative thing in the sentence, and for a while the working notes for this reference quoted the line without it, which made the assessor look anonymous when the source had actually said what it was. Getting it back was worth more than most of the research done that week.

The word underneath

Qerert is not a divine name. It is ordinary vocabulary.

The underworld books use four different words for a division of the other world: Field, City, Hall — and Circle, qerert. It means something like a cavern, an enclosed space, a place that is closed round. Horus is called the lord of Qerert, meaning the lord of the underworld. The eleventh division of the night carries the word inside its name.

Qerti reads as the dual of that word. Not a cavern. The two caverns.

Why two caverns matters

Egypt was made by the Nile and had no idea where the Nile came from.

This is easy to forget, because we have satellite photographs and they had a river that arrived from the south every year, rose, flooded, deposited the silt the entire country ate off, and receded. The rise and fall were, in the phrase of the source, a genuine mystery to them. Nobody had been to the source. Nobody could go.

What they had instead was a location: the water came out from between two caverns near Elephantine, at the southern border, where the granite comes down to the river.

So if Qerti is that pair of caverns, then the arrangement in the judgment hall is this: the one place in Egypt that nobody could locate, the unfindable origin of everything the country depended on, has been given a seat among the forty-two and assigned a sin to hear.

And of all the sins, it hears I have not uttered evil words.

How much of this is solid

Less than I would like, and the entry says so.

The identification rests on the translator's parenthesis, offered without argument, with the Egyptian not reproduced at that point. The dual form is real and the qerert etymology is real, and together they make the reading plausible. They do not make it established.

There is also a spelling wrinkle of the kind that plagues this material: the same assessor appears in another translation of another papyrus as Qererti, in the same position in the sequence, immediately after the assessor who comes forth from Memphis. Two books by the same translator, two spellings, one god.

The caverns had a chapter of their own

One more thing, because it is the sort of discovery that justifies reading primary texts instead of summaries.

There is a whole chapter of the Book of the Dead — chapter 168 — titled The Books of Offerings to the Gods of the Qerti. Sixty-three vignettes. Petitions addressed cavern by cavern to the gods who live in them, each one answered with an offering, and the offering is the same every single time: one vase of water.

Sixty-three requests, and the price never changes.