Unas

Unas followed Djedkare Isesi, perhaps his father, though this is not proven. His two queens, Nebet and Khenut, were buried in a large double tomb beside his pyramid, and at least five daughters are known. One of them may have been Iput, the wife of his successor Teti. Manetho ends the Fifth Dynasty with Unas, perhaps because he left no living son, but officials served without interruption under both pharaohs, so the change of dynasty was probably peaceful.

Unas built his pyramid at Saqqara, close to the south-west corner of the enclosure of Djoser. With a base of about 57.7 metres and a height of about 43 metres, it was the smallest royal pyramid completed in the Old Kingdom. Like the other pyramids of the period it had a core of rough stone, and today it looks like a heap of rubble. Beside it stood a mortuary temple and a small cult pyramid, and a causeway led down to a valley temple on the shore of a lake.

Until Unas the burial chambers of the pyramids were bare. He was the first to have the walls of his burial chamber and antechamber covered with columns of hieroglyphs, cut into the stone and filled with blue paint. These Pyramid Texts are more than two hundred spells to protect the pharaoh, to provide him with food and to help him rise to the sky and join the sun god Ra and the god Osiris. They are the oldest large collection of religious texts in the world. The pharaohs of the Sixth Dynasty and some of their queens copied and expanded them in their own pyramids.

The causeway linking the valley temple with the pyramid was about 750 metres long, as long as Khufu's. It was roofed, with a slit in the ceiling to let in light, and its walls were covered with painted reliefs. They show craftsmen at work, people bringing offerings from the provinces, ships returning from the Levant with foreigners on board, and barges carrying granite columns from Elephantine to Saqqara. An inscription of the time boasts that such columns were brought in only a few days.

One of the most famous reliefs of the causeway shows people so thin that their ribs can be counted, some collapsing from hunger. It was long seen as proof of a great famine at the end of the Fifth Dynasty. Since a similar scene was found on the causeway of Sahure, most Egyptologists see it differently: the starving people are probably desert nomads, and the scene belongs to a standard theme showing the pharaoh as the one who brings food and order, in contrast to the chaos outside Egypt.

The cult of Unas at his pyramid lasted to the end of the Old Kingdom and beyond. Later he was worshipped as a local god of Saqqara, and scarabs with his name were made from the New Kingdom down to the Late Period. Yet the pharaohs of the early Twelfth Dynasty took blocks from his temples for their own pyramids. In the 13th century BCE, Prince Khaemwaset, a son of Ramesses II, restored the pyramid and had an inscription carved on its south face recording the name of Unas. It can still be seen today.

Unas closed the Fifth Dynasty with the smallest of the royal pyramids, but inside it he left the oldest large body of religious texts known in the world. The Pyramid Texts first carved for him shaped Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife for centuries and grew into the Coffin Texts and later the Book of the Dead.