It is a commonplace in Egyptological literature to mention the existence of a ‘democratization of the afterlife’. This is a historical model based on the fact of exclusive ownership of Pyramid Texts by royalty in the Old Kingdom, through which it is supposed that in the earliest times the Egyptians believed that a beatified afterlife was accessible exclusively to them, and only in the Middle Kingdom to non-royal persons. But recent research has challenged the model. H.O. Willems has approached it from the Middle Kingdom side, above all in showing how the distribution of texts then was not at all universal. On the Old Kingdom side, B. Mathieu, K. Nordh, and D.P. Silverman have advanced multiple dimensions of data to assert a commonality of post-mortem aspiration between the king and members of his court.

Much more can be said against the theory. Above all, it mistakes the physical distribution of Pyramid Texts for metaphysical access to a place beyond the tomb. But according to Old Kingdom statements, such access was specifically dependent on knowledge and ritual, and not the possession of physical copies of texts. Indeed, expressions of knowledge by non-royal persons in the Old Kingdom are abundant, as are pictorial and list-based representations of mortuary rites. The latter are telling, since they are of precisely the same order as mortuary rites shown performed for kings and, what is more, are attested long before the inscribed appearance of the Pyramid Texts. The paper thus detailed the two means of access, knowledge and ritual, thereby demonstrating a fundamental commonality in belief and practice between non-royal persons and the king already in the Old Kingdom.