The Coffin Texts belong to a long Egyptian tradition of using written and spoken words to protect the dead. They drew on the Pyramid Texts, known from royal pyramids of the late Old Kingdom, while also preserving compositions with different histories and purposes. Their use developed around the end of the Old Kingdom and the First Intermediate Period and became especially prominent during the Middle Kingdom. Rather than a single book issued by a central authority, they formed a changing repertoire that scribes adapted for particular owners and local traditions.

Their name describes their best-known setting: wooden coffins painted with hieroglyphic texts. Important examples come from cemeteries including Deir el-Bersha, Asyut, Meir and Beni Hasan. Texts could surround the body with prayers, instructions and divine speech, turning the coffin into more than a protective container. Its decoration placed the deceased within a sacred world, where words and images were believed to help sustain life beyond the tomb. Different coffins carried different selections, not a complete and identical collection.

Adriaan de Buck's standard modern edition numbered 1,185 spells across seven volumes. That total is an editorial framework for studying many surviving witnesses, not the contents of every ancient coffin. Some compositions share passages, appear in different arrangements or survive only in damaged copies. These variations matter: they show scribes selecting, copying and reshaping religious knowledge rather than mechanically repeating a fixed scripture.

The concerns of the spells are both cosmic and practical. They seek food, breath, movement and protection, defend the deceased against hostile beings and destruction, and provide knowledge needed to pass through the next world. Transformation spells allow the dead to assume powerful forms, while other passages connect them with divine beings. Osiris, the murdered and restored lord of the dead, offers a model of renewed life; Ra, the sun god, provides another through the daily cycle of disappearance and return. The Duat is therefore not simply a place of punishment, but a complex otherworld whose dangers must be understood and overcome.

Among the most remarkable compositions is the Book of Two Ways, preserved particularly on coffins from Deir el-Bersha. Its diagrams and accompanying texts set out routes through a dangerous sacred landscape, with waterways, land routes, gates and fiery obstacles. Knowing the route and the names of its guardians was part of the deceased's protection. The Book of Two Ways belongs within the broader Coffin Texts tradition; it is not an alternative name for the entire corpus. Its maps make visible an Egyptian conviction that knowledge could help turn an uncertain journey into a passage that could be negotiated.

The spread of these texts was once frequently described as a democratisation of the afterlife: royal privileges supposedly became available to everyone after the Old Kingdom collapsed. That explanation is too simple. Non-royal Egyptians had already expected continued existence after death, and the elaborate coffins that preserve these spells largely belonged to people with resources and status. A wider surviving distribution of particular texts does not prove that earlier generations believed only kings could live again. Nor did possession of a coffin require its owner personally to read every inscription; specialist knowledge and ritual practice were also involved.

The tradition did not disappear in a single political catastrophe. Many compositions were adapted and transmitted into the Book of the Dead, known to Egyptians through its chapters for coming forth by day. Other material continued to circulate in different forms. The Coffin Texts should not be credited with inventing every feature familiar from later funerary manuscripts, and the numbering of their spells must not be confused with the separate chapter numbers of the Book of the Dead. Their importance lies in the extensive evidence they preserve for how Egyptians imagined, prepared for and sought to secure life after death.