Watchers, Slaughterers and Messengers. On Some Extra-Human Beings from the Pyramid Texts

The (under)world of Pyramid Texts is populated by particular deities, animals and creatures; and yet there are some beings who can hardly be labelled: doorkeepers, gatekeepers, god-messengers or more generic guardians, whose description is given solely by ambiguous lexemes or periphrasis used to define them. They have no proper names, rather a more or less defined function in different contexts, often equally unintelligible. wrS.w, xAty.w, wpwty.w are just some of the terms we can read and that can be possibly found in later sources. While the PT are in fact capable of giving us an idea of the realm of death just through the content of texts themselves, other evidence, such as the Book of the Dead or the Amduat, provide a more precise iconographic shape of the entities inhabiting the underworld. The aim of this paper, therefore, is double: primarily, to investigate some of the PT’s extra-human beings, contextualising them as deeply as the related spells permit and collecting details about their semantic and action fields. Secondly, to suggest potential correlations between these entities and those recurring in later funerary literature. Such an analysis can be pursued by combining the informations we held from two types of data: - the content data, concerning the subject of PT formulas in which the entities occur. - the visual data, concerning the formal aspect of the lexemes as it is conveyed by the iconic nature of the signs, and mainly of determinatives (that is particularly true in the Old Kingdom writing system).