The Door of the Hall of Two Truths

Source section: Book of the Dead, Chapter CXXV, the closing address — after the forty-two denials Related: maat · osiris · anubis · neb-pehti · sobek · shu · nephthys · renenutet · the Assessors of Maat

Overview

Everyone knows the first half of Chapter CXXV: the dead person stands before forty-two gods and denies one sin to each. It is the most quoted passage in Egyptian religion.

Almost nobody reads the second half, and the second half is stranger.

Having satisfied the forty-two, the deceased still cannot leave. The door will not let him out, and neither will the floor, and neither will the doorkeeper — and each of them demands, in the first person, to be told its own name.

The dialogue

"I will not let thee enter in over me," saith the bolt of the door, "unless thou tell my name." "Weight of the place of right and truth" is thy name. [budge-1895]

And it does not stop:

Twelve interrogations, conducted by a doorway.

And two more names belong to the same door, given in the vignette rather than the dialogue: the two leaves are Neb-Maat-heri-tep-retui-f (right) and Neb-pehti-thesu-menmenet (left) [budge-1895], while the lintel is Khersek-Shu and Anubis guards the entrance [budge-1904].

The floor asks about his feet

The exchange with the floor is the one that repays rereading.

The floor says thou shalt not tread upon me unless thou tell my name, and is answered "I am silent, I am pure" — which is not a name so much as a promise about conduct.

Then it asks again:

"I know not [the names of] thy two feet with which thou wouldst walk upon me; tell them unto me." [budge-1895]

The floor wants the feet identified separately, and they have names — one "before Amsu," the other "Grief of Nephthys." Only then: "Tread thou upon me, for thou knowest me."

A man is being asked to account for his own body, part by part, by the ground he is standing on. The same logic runs through the spell that identifies each limb of the dead with a different god — his face is Wepwawet's, his nose is Thoth's — and here it is turned into a challenge.

Why any of this matters to the corpus

This is where the census got a goddess who is a door.

neb-pehti was carried in the aggregate list as "a goddess." She is the left leaf, and her full name is Neb-pehti-thesu-menmenet. The first two elements were scraped and promoted. That is the seventh form of the epithet trap — a named object read as a deity — and it was found by reading this passage (C394). All seven are set out on the Epithet Trap.

So the obvious next question is: how many more? This page is the answer to a deliberate check, and the answer is reassuring.

Only two parts of this door carry transliterated Egyptian names — the two leaves, in the vignette description. Every other name in the dialogue is given in English translation: Weight of the place of right and truth, Ox of Seb, Flesh of his mother. A scraper harvesting proper nouns from this chapter would find the two leaves and nothing else.

The exposure is bounded, and it was worth one search to establish that (C380). One of the two leaked; the other, Neb-Maat-heri-tep-retui-f, did not.

What the names are actually doing

Read the list again and a pattern shows. Almost every one is a judicial or weighing term.

The bolt is a weight. The right post is a weigher. The left post is a judge. The warder is a discerner of hearts, searcher of reins. The threshold is an ox — the animal that treads the threshing floor.

The door is the balance, expressed as carpentry. The dead man has just been weighed against a feather in front of forty-two judges; he now has to walk out through an assembly of scales and assessors made of wood and stone, and satisfy every one of them by name.

The room does not stop judging him when the judges are finished.

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Primary attestations

Sources

• [budge-1895] — Budge, The Book of the Dead: Papyrus of Ani. Public domain, archived. The dialogue survives the OCR well; the line numbers in the running text are Budge's.
• [budge-1904] — Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. I. Public domain, archived.

Open threads

• "The utchat of Sebek, the Lord of Bakhan, liveth." Bakhan is almost certainly Bakhau, the Mountain of the Sunrise — the same place buchis is named after. A lock on a door in the judgment hall is named for the eastern horizon. Establish whether the two are the same word.
• "Judge of wine (?)" — Budge queries his own reading. Check it.
• "Serpent children of Rennut." Renenutet is the harvest-snake goddess. Why are the door-posts her children? This is the only genealogical claim in the passage.
• Get the transliterations. Every name here except the two leaves is given in English. The Egyptian forms would settle how much of this is name and how much is description — and would tell us whether any others could have leaked into an aggregate list.
• Does the same dialogue appear in other papyri with different names? The assessors vary between copies; the door may too.
• "Ox of Seb" for the threshold. Seb is the earth; a threshold is where you meet the ground. Worth a line if the pun holds in Egyptian.

Art notes

• Historical plate: the Ani vignette of the Hall — two doors, forty-two judges in two rows, the seated god on the roof. It is one of the most reproduced images in Egyptian art and a scan should be findable. Shared with the Assessors of Maat.
• New art: the door itself, labelled. Bolt, socket, lock, posts, threshold, lintel, each with its name beside it — an exploded diagram of a doorway that talks. Nothing needs inventing; every part and every name is in the passage. Do not personify them. The whole point is that they are joinery.