Everyone Becomes Osiris

Egyptian sources put the oldest afterlife texts inside royal pyramids, then on the coffins of officials, then on papyri buried with whoever could commission one, and the dead come to be addressed as 'the Osiris' followed by their own name. That sequence was long read as a democratization: a royal privilege slowly opening to everybody. Recent scholarship has taken the reading apart, because Old Kingdom private tombs already carry offering formulae and plain expectations of an afterlife — non-royal Egyptians were not queuing outside. What the evidence shows moving is the writing: where it was cut, what it was cut into, and who could pay for a copy.