Daily Temple Ritual of Amun

The Daily Temple Ritual is the service a priest performed each morning before the image of Amun-Ra in the sanctuary of his temple at Thebes. The priest lit the censer and burned incense, broke the seal on the shrine, uncovered the face of the god and prostrated himself before it, then purified the image with water and natron, clothed it in colored cloth, anointed it with oils and eye-paint, and set out offerings of food. On leaving he bolted the shrine and declared that no demon would enter the temple. The main text survives in a hieratic papyrus of the Twenty-second Dynasty (Papyrus Berlin 3055), and the closing chapters come from the temple of Seti I at Abydos. The English text is based on Wallis Budge's 1909 translation, with archaic language lightly modernized.