The Cannibalism Hymn of Pharaoh Unas: Ancient Egypt's most disturbing inscription

At the close of Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty, King Unas ruled a kingdom that still largely maintained its centralised authority, although signs of weakness had begun to appear.

He reigned during a time when royal tomb construction continued to follow Old Kingdom traditions, but his own tomb introduced a major change in religious expression.

His pyramid was constructed at Saqqara near the older Step Pyramid of Djoser, and lacked the size and overall design quality of earlier monuments, since it stood approximately 43 metres high, but it displayed a new religious feature that would become standard for generations. 

Inside the burial chamber, Unas ordered the first wider use of funerary inscriptions that were carved directly into the interior walls.

Known today as the Pyramid Texts, these utterances consisted of ritual spells intended to protect the king in the afterlife and guide his soul past dangers, so that he could ascend into the sky as a divine being.

Their language and structure differed from any earlier inscriptions, and so did their religious purpose, which showed a clear development in Egyptian mortuary belief.

Unas's pyramid contains 228 utterances in total, arranged in vertical columns, and many of these draw from ritual speech once recited during earlier mortuary rites. 

According to later records, Unas apparently died without a male heir who outlived him, which ended the Fifth Dynasty.

After his death, the Sixth Dynasty began under King Teti, who followed his predecessor’s example by placing Pyramid Texts in his own tomb.

Although Unas’s reign produced few major political changes, the inscriptions in his pyramid ensured his lasting importance.

Among them was a very disturbing text now identified as the Cannibal Hymn, which raised questions about the nature of sacred kingship in Egypt’s earliest religious traditions.

In 1881, Gaston Maspero descended into the partly collapsed pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, where he noticed faint vertical columns of hieroglyphs on the limestone walls.

Maspero later became director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, and he understood how important these inscriptions were and published the first translations in the following years.

At first glance, the texts appeared unusual, with their very old-fashioned script and lack of illustrations that went with the words.

Once the texts had been translated, readers could see that they formed the oldest surviving collection of religious funerary texts in Egypt, far older than the Coffin Texts or the Book of the Dead. 

Eventually, Egyptologists realised that these texts were collectively known as the Pyramid Texts and seemed to form a carefully organised religious guide that was intended for the pharaoh alone.

The texts consisted of hundreds of short utterances, and the overall purpose of the collection was to transform the dead king into a god.

They contained spells for avoiding dangers in the afterlife and securing offerings, so that the king could ascend to the sky where the gods dwelled.

Some drew on solar theology or on Osirian myth, and many echoed ritual formulae from oral traditions no longer known from other sources. 

Later, as scholars translated additional Pyramid Texts from the tombs of Teti, Pepi I, Merenre, and Pepi II, they found religious material that remained consistent, with some variation in structure and focus.

However, one passage within Unas’s tomb immediately set itself apart. Known as Utterances 273 and 274, the Cannibal Hymn described the king as a supernatural hunter who stalked and killed the gods, then consumed them to claim their power.

No similar passage appeared in any of the other pyramids, which showed that the hymn expressed a distinct theological position that did not continue after Unas’s reign. 

Soon after its discovery, the Cannibal Hymn became the subject of close academic study.

Some scholars argued that it kept an early mythological tradition, while others believed it showed a moment in royal theology when spiritual power over the gods took precedence over harmony among the gods.

James P. Allen was among others who argued that it showed the king’s conquest of chaos as an explanation for his place in the universe.

Whatever its exact origin, the hymn shocked modern readers with its plain, direct tone and vivid images of the destruction of the gods.

The Cannibal Hymn begins with the pharaoh described as “the Bull of Heaven,” a predator in the sky who feeds on sacred organs.

As the text unfolds, it presents a violent feast in which the gods are hunted and butchered, then cooked to fuel the king’s ascension.

The hymn claims that Unas eats their hearts to gain their wisdom and drinks their blood to acquire their strength, as their bones burn in fire to complete his transformation.

One of the most quoted lines reads: 

"Unas eats their magic, swallows their spirits. Their great ones are for his morning meal, their middle ones for his evening meal, their little ones for his night meal." 

Another line includes the phrase, "Unas is he who lives on the gods, who feeds on their entrails."

The term for "magic" used here is heka, which referred to a vital force that allowed gods and kings to perform supernatural acts. 

In simple terms, the hymn presents a view of kingship that depends on conquest, since the king gains his godly status because he overpowers the order of the heavens itself instead of asking the gods for favour or obeying cosmic law.

After he has consumed the gods, Unas takes his place among the stars, where he rules with absolute authority and inspires fear even among heavenly beings. 

Importantly, the text includes no clear sign of metaphor, no moral questioning, and no restraint.

It does not present the act of eating the gods as symbolic, nor does it suggest that the gods agreed to their deaths.

The hymn offers a picture of spiritual control based on violent absorption. It makes no apology for the brutality it describes, and its confidence in the king’s supremacy suggests that the scribes who carved it did not see it as wrong. 

Unas appears as both executioner and victor, and his body and soul change as he literally devours his predecessors in the world of the gods.

The hymn’s language, stripped of later theological polish, offers a direct statement of royal power that leaves little room for ethical or emotional subtlety.

Since its discovery, the Cannibal Hymn has prompted debate about its meaning and purpose.

Few modern scholars argue that it describes an actual ritual. Egyptian religious practice focused on the need to keep the body whole, both for the living and for the dead, and no archaeological evidence supports cannibalistic rites in elite mortuary settings.

Mummification and statue offerings, together with the design of tomb architecture, suggest a system that valued preservation, not destruction. 

As a result, most interpretations present the hymn as a symbolic description of royal transformation.

The act of devouring the gods may have shown the king’s absorption of sacred qualities, which allowed him to cross the boundary between mortal and immortal.

When he had taken in their power, he reached the highest position in the afterlife, where he would rule as a new godlike force. 

Some scholars, however, argued that the hymn kept parts of a mythological cycle that had existed before the formal solar theology of Heliopolis.

In this view, the hymn recalled an older way of seeing the universe in which sacred power passed from one generation of gods to the next through violence.

The pharaoh created continuity between earthly rule and cosmic renewal when he placed himself inside that story.

Scholars have also compared the hymn with mythologies from other regions of Africa and the Near East.

In Sumerian myth, for instance, gods often met violent ends in the transfer of power, while in some West African traditions, sacred consumption accompanied royal investiture.

Although no direct cultural borrowing has been proven, such comparisons suggest that early ideas about the gods may often have involved physical conquest and consumption rather than cooperation or obedience. 

The Cannibal Hymn did not survive for long in Egyptian religious practice, and later funerary texts removed references to violence against the gods and gave greater attention to peaceful unity with them.

This change in belief may have come from new views of kingship, concerns about ritual purity, or the greater influence of Osirian doctrine.

Even so, the hymn stayed in Unas’s tomb, where it was still carved in stone long after its specific religious moment had passed.

Although no later king repeated the Cannibal Hymn in their tomb, its main idea was that the pharaoh held sacred power so great that even the gods could not resist him, and it did not disappear.

Over time, royal inscriptions continued to present the king as an otherworldly figure who stood above ordinary mortals.

In temple reliefs from the New Kingdom, rulers such as Amenhotep III and Ramses II showed themselves with the attributes of gods, surrounded by heavenly beings who offered them blessings. 

Over the centuries, the violent pictures of victory over the gods gave way to more symbolic scenes.

The king no longer consumed the gods, but he absorbed their power through royal birthright and ritual, within a carefully ordered cosmos.

The Cannibal Hymn had a direct and unsettling tone and showed an earlier phase of royal belief in which domination provided the pathway to eternal life.

Later religious texts preferred stories of harmony and resurrection, especially those that centred on the myth of Osiris.

In that myth, kingship passed from a murdered god to his son, Horus, through sacred succession rather than conquest.

The Egyptian afterlife came to show values of justice and balance anchored in a carefully maintained cosmic order rather than violent transformation. 

Even so, the Cannibal Hymn is still vital to any understanding of early Egyptian religion, and it strongly suggests that Old Kingdom royal theology began with force and fear instead of peace and balance.