The Amduat's first complete exemplars line the burial chambers of Thutmose III and his vizier's king-list generation in the Valley of the Kings, drawn in the spare linear style of a papyrus unrolled on stone, and fragments in the tomb of Thutmose I may push the composition earlier still; its intellectual origins likely reach back before the New Kingdom. For two centuries it remained an almost exclusively royal text, the knowledge it conferred, the book insists, being useful on earth and in the beyond, and its placement turned each royal tomb into the netherworld itself, the sarcophagus lying at the point of the sun's midnight union.
Amenhotep II, Thutmose IV, Amenhotep III and, after the Amarna interruption, the kings through the Ramesside age carried versions complete or abridged; the tomb of Tutankhamun holds its first hour, and a long version covers the sarcophagus hall of Seti I. From the Third Intermediate Period the priesthood of Amun at Thebes took the book to themselves, copying hours onto coffins and funerary papyri, and by the Late Period excerpts appear on sarcophagi of officials, the old royal monopoly fully dissolved. Egyptology's modern editions and studies, above all those of Erik Hornung, established the Amduat as the first book of its genre and the model for the Book of Gates and its successors, and its imagery of the sun's nightly death and renewal remains the most complete statement of Egyptian regeneration theology.