The false door of the ancient Egyptians:
The ancient Egyptians in their early times believed that the cemetery was the lower world in which the deceased would spend the life of immortality, and the cemetery contained only two elements of human beings: the mummified body and the ka or the soul. The ka, which means the soul, was a permanent non-material element. The movement sometimes resides in the burial chamber and at other times ascends to the shrine chambers built above the ground.
The Egyptians allocated part of the walls of the offering room to be in the form of a closed-door that was very close to the well leading to the burial chamber, where the ka lived with the corpse, believing that this imaginary door was the outlet for the spirit “ka” into and out of the cemetery so that you could receive the offerings. Which is stacked by relatives, family and friends on a stone table above the ground in front of this door is called the offering table, and the history of these fake doors dates back to the era of the First Dynasty.
And the sides of the royal cemetery built of mud bricks were formed in the form of fake doors that were fixed in front of them in the ground, heads made of clay representing the animals that they presented as offerings and the idea developed, so the fake door became represented on the walls of the wooden or stone coffin in the following families. We see it as the most important part of the offering room since The middle of the Fourth Dynasty, and it was made of the best types of limestone. Sometimes it was made of wood, and its place is in the western wall of the main offering room, which was usually adjacent to the southern part of the eastern side of the mastaba.
The Egyptians in the old state used to fill the sides of the imaginary door, which consists of an upper lintel. A panel that looks as if it represents a window above the door, then a lower lintel, then from the door’s shutters, topped by a horizontal cylinder representing a mat or a wrapped curtain. It looks like a cylinder under the lower lintel.
Then it consists of the cheeks of the door for that outside and inside. They used to fill all these spaces with a large number of images that represent the owner of the cemetery, sometimes sitting in front of him the offering table and surrounded by the list of offerings, and sometimes standing surrounded by his wife and children and writing his various titles before his name and then writing the formula of funeral supplication that each must A visitor may utter it to sympathize with the king and the gods of the second world in increasing the blessings that the owner of the cemetery enjoys in his second world and thus guaranteeing his eternal provisions.
The imaginary door was one of the most important elements of the cemetery in the old state. Still, its importance began to diminish because of the spread of the Osiris doctrine, which transferred the place of the second world from the cemetery to the underworld. Sides of its entrance.
In the modern state era, the imaginary door was painted in a few tombs, but it appeared again and returned to its ancient importance in the era of the twenty-sixth dynasty (600 BC). It is not surprising that the kings of this family wanted to return to everything related to the manifestations of Egyptian civilization in its ancient era. For this reason, we call this era (the era of the old revival), and the most important formula inscribed on the imaginary door was the formula “Hetep_de_Nsu” meaning “offerings that the king gives” or a gift offered by the king and known as the formula of offerings.