The Solar Cycle — Day-Barque & Night Journey
Every night the sun sails through the land of the dead and fights a serpent to be reborn.
Also: solar journey · night journey of the sun · Amduat · Book of Gates · barque of Ra · Apophis · Apep
Egyptians understood the sun's daily course as a cosmic drama of renewal. By day Ra sailed across the sky in his boat; at sunset he entered the underworld (the Duat), passing through its hours, defeating the chaos-serpent Apophis, and uniting with Osiris before being reborn at dawn. New Kingdom 'Netherworld Books' on royal tomb walls mapped this nightly journey hour by hour.
In short
The daily circuit of the sun god across the sky in his barque and through the underworld at night, understood as the perpetual regeneration of the cosmos and a model for rebirth.
Where it’s found
Pyramid Texts; New Kingdom Netherworld Books (Amduat, Book of Gates)
Read it in the Egyptian texts
The passages in our corpus where this idea is discussed — each opens in our reader with the Egyptian transliteration and the English translation side by side.
How the idea developed across Egypt
Solar-circuit ideas appear in the Pyramid Texts; the detailed hour-by-hour underworld journey is a New Kingdom elaboration in the Amduat, the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns, and related compositions, first in royal tombs and later more widely.