This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
For most of the Old Kingdom, a favorable afterlife came with a price tag no ordinary Egyptian could pay: it required a pyramid, and a pyramid required a king. The Pyramid Texts carved into the walls of Old Kingdom royal tombs were a strictly royal privilege, spells that assumed the deceased was Pharaoh and addressed him accordingly. What changed by the Middle Kingdom was not the underlying religious promise but who could reach for it.
The Coffin Texts are what that widening access looked like in practice. Non-royal officials and other wealthy Egyptians, still a narrow slice of the population but a far larger one than the royal family alone, began commissioning coffins inscribed with spells drawn directly from the older royal corpus, adapted from a king's afterlife to an official's. Scholars have long described this shift as a "democratization" of Egyptian afterlife religion, though the word deserves its scare quotes: access still ran entirely through wealth, an inscribed coffin was expensive to produce, and the vast majority of Egyptians who died in this period had no such text accompanying them at all.
The pattern did not stop with the Coffin Texts either. By the New Kingdom, spells from this very corpus were themselves being copied and adapted again, this time onto papyrus scrolls that could be produced still more cheaply than an inscribed coffin, becoming the core of what is now known as the Book of the Dead. Each stage extended the same basic promise to a slightly wider circle than the one before it, without ever actually reaching everyone, a slow widening of a privilege rather than its abolition.