Coffin Texts
The geography of "Duat" is similar in outline to the world the Egyptians knew. There are realistic features like rivers, islands, fields, lakes, mounds and caverns, but there were also fantastic lakes of fire, walls of iron and trees of turquoise. In the "Book of Two Ways", one of the Coffin Texts, there is even a map-like image of the "Duat". The "Book of the Dead" and Coffin Texts were intended to guide people who had recently died through the "Duat"s dangerous landscape and to a life as an "ꜣḫ". Emphasized in some of these texts are mounds and caverns, inhabited by gods, demons or supernatural animals, which threatened the deceased along their journey. The purpose of the books is not to lay out a geography, but to describe a succession of rites of passage which the dead would have to pass to reach eternal life.