The Gods of the Qererts

Source section: Book of the Dead, Chapter CLXVIII — "The Books of Offerings to the Gods of the Qerti," with sixty-three vignettes Related: osiris · maat · mehen · anubis · amun · qerti · the Twelve Hours

Overview

A qerert is a cavern. Budge lists the word as one of four the underworld books use for a division of the Tuat — "Field," "City," "Hall," or "Circle," qerert [budge-1904]. Chapter CLXVIII of the Book of the Dead is a set of offerings addressed to the gods who live in them, cavern by cavern, and it is organised the way a ledger is.

Each numbered item has three parts:

1. Text (1) — a petition. "May the gods who dwell in their shrines, the princes of Nu, grant that Osiris … shall drink water." 2. A vignette — described, not drawn, in Budge's edition. 3. Text (2) — the price. "And there shall be made unto them an offering of a libation of one vase upon earth."

One vase, every time. Sixty-three petitions, and the tariff never changes.

Which caverns

The chapter is divided into sections, each a roster for one numbered qerert. The headings that survive the OCR read:

Budge's index confirms the numbering independently: "Qerert, the Xth, 559; the XIth, 562; the XIIth, 569."

Two manuscripts. The vignette-only version is from the Papyrus of Mut-hetep (BM 10,010, sheet 2); the full chapter is from BM 10,478, sheets 2–7. Budge notes of the latter that the spaces for the deceased's name "are painted in yellow but left blank throughout the papyrus" — an unsold funerary text, with the customer's name never filled in. The name Mut recurs after the blanks, so he infers the intended owner was an official of that goddess.

Who lives there

The chapter names roughly twenty beings, and Budge glosses many of them himself in parentheses — which is unusual and worth having:

Plus Amemet, Tesert, Mehenit, Osiris-Anubis, and two named by description alone: He-who-liveth-in-darkness and He whose limbs are hidden.

And named collectives: the Smiters · the Nine Watchers · the Nine Mourners · the Chiefs of the secret things · the beings of warlike face · the souls who come forth · those who dwell in the folds of mehen · those whose hands hide · those who build up · they who carry the burden above them to heaven.

The vignettes are the best thing here

Budge describes what each petition is illustrated with, and the descriptions are concrete in a way the petitions are not:

• A god carrying a child upon his shoulders.
• A woman holding in her upraised hand a hatchet dripping with blood.
• A god within the folds of a serpent.
• A woman-headed serpent on a pylon.
• A cow on a standard, and a uraeus.
• Two women lying face downwards.
• Two male figures, each carrying a human being on his head.
• A god bowing to the ground, and a star.
• A goddess standing upright, hiding something with her hands.
• A man-headed lion; a man-headed sphinx on a bier.

Several carry a number beside the figure — four, eight, nine, fourteen — which appears to count the beings the single figure stands for. The Nine Watchers and Nine Mourners are drawn as one body with a nine written next to them.

What this expansion did and did not do

It closed no stubs. Of the roughly twenty named beings, only mehen and maat are in the census at all, and both were already ● full.

That is the finding. The census — an aggregate list — did not contain Aha, Sheta, Setek, Sherem, Sta, Senk, Amemet, Ageh, Agen, Tesert, Mehenit, Anenit, or the Nine Watchers. A whole chapter of named underworld gods is simply absent from it. The corpus now records them because a primary text was read, which is what the corpus is for.

They are recorded here as a roster, not promoted to entries (companies rule, C246): the chapter names each being and says nothing about it beyond the petition it answers. A god who appears once, in a list, granting one favour, does not support a page of his own.

Are the Qererts the Am-Tuat's divisions?

Both texts number their underworld twelve, and the Qerert numbers that survive (Eighth, Tenth, Eleventh, Twelfth) are division numbers too. The rosters do not match.

The Eighth Division of the Am-Tuat is ten sealed Circles with doors, holding Tem, Khepera, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis and Horus, and it records what each Circle sounds like. The Eighth Qerert holds "the gods who dwell in their shrines, the princes of Nu" and a set of otherwise unattested names. No figure appears in both.

Same for the Twelfth: the Twelfth Division is Ankh-neteru, the serpent-passage, with twenty-four named towers. The Twelfth Qereret opens with Maat and "the gods who dwell with Mehen." One shared name — Mehen — and he is ubiquitous.

So: no. Two texts, two independent twelve-part underworlds, using the same number and a different vocabulary (qerert vs sekhet/nut/arret) and different populations. They are parallel schemes, not one scheme twice. That is a real answer and it was cheap to get, because both texts were on disk.

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Primary attestations

Sources

• [budge-1901v3] — Budge, The Book of the Dead: An English Translation, vol. III (1901), ch. CLXVIII, pp. 547–572. Public domain, archived 2026-07-30 as budge-1901-book-of-the-dead-vol3-english.txt. OCR breaks lines mid-sentence, so headings must be searched with whitespace normalised; two section headings are partly lost to the scan.
• [budge-1904] — Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vol. I. Public domain, archived.

Open threads

• Recover Section IV's heading, lost to the scan. Its clxviii. § 4 markers survive, so the section is present and only the title is missing.
• Sections I and IV have no surviving qerert number. If the chapter covered more than four caverns, the others are unrecovered.
• Is Amemet the same as ammit? Adjacent spellings, and Ammit is the devourer at the balance. Not assumed here.
• Get the vignettes as images. Budge describes sixty-three and reproduces them; the plates would be a strong plate- target if the scan can be found.
• Anenit, "Widows (?)" — Budge queries his own reading. Check it.
• Establish whether qerert numbering runs 1–12 in any surviving manuscript, or whether only these four caverns were ever addressed.
• The name-spaces "painted in yellow but left blank" — how common is an unfinished funerary papyrus? It bears on whether these texts were made to order or in advance.

Art notes

• Historical plate: the vignettes of ch. CLXVIII, if a scan of the plates can be found. Sixty-three small scenes in a row is a strong page image.
• New art: the woman with a hatchet dripping blood, or the god inside the folds of the serpent. Both are fully described in one clause and need no invention. Do not draw the collectives — a "nine" written beside one figure is the source's own solution and should be reproduced, not resolved.