Netjer - Tumblr Posts
I checked your FAQ and did some layman-level googling, but I couldn't find the information I was hoping for. In light of the new Book of the Dead unveiling, I was wondering - was that text exclusively for the dead on their journey though the afterlife? Or would it be something less-exalted personages not directly involved in the maintenance of heka would be aware of?
Those are technically two very separate questions. Yes, the Book of the Dead, or Book of Coming Forth by Day, is exclusively for the dead. It's their personal guide (because each copy is unique to its owner) to getting themselves through the duat and into the hall of judgement, with sections and utterances written in depending on what they thought they'd personally face.
I don't entirely know what you mean by 'something less exalted personages...would be aware of'. Everyone, if they had means, was able to commission a scribe to make their own personal book of the dead and plenty of people would have known what one was. It was a text scroll that was locked inside the tomb with the deceased, so it was for no one's usage, after burial, except for the dead.
One thing I'm extremely not normal about is this serekh of king Djet, dating to the First Dynasty. A serekh is the rectangular structure in the stela you see here, and it's a depiction of a palace façade and interior enclosure. It usually depicts the Horus falcon stood atop it, indicating the name enclosed within was that of the king. In this case, Djet's name is simply rendered by hieroglyph I10, the cobra in repose, ḏ (dj).
Now I'm not normal about this one because they've taken so much compositional care with it. And no, that shouldn't surprise you because the Egyptians loved their symmetry-even-in-asymmetry, but with a stela that's as old and as relatively subdued as this one it just always hit me different. The way the falcon is centred rather than the serekh, his tail tip being almost the same distance away from the right outer edge as the left end of the serekh is from the left one, to still ground it within the frame like that? The way the detail in the facade part of the serekh is rendered, how the snout of the snake reaches to the top left corner of the enclosure part and the tip of its snake touches the lower right corner... ugh.