Kherty

Kherty is attested from early dynastic inscriptions (early 2nd Dynasty, appearing on stone bowls of kings such as Sneferka) and becomes prominent in mythic and funerary literature of the Old Kingdom (notably the Pyramid Texts). In those texts he is portrayed functionally as an underworld escort or ferryman for the deceased king and is integrated into solar-barque and funerary traditions involving Ra and Osiris. He is absent from the Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts, where a ferryman role is carried by Aker in those corpuses, and later reappears in Book of the Dead contexts as a guide or guard linked with Ra and Osiris.

Kherty is normally depicted in Egyptian sources as a recumbent, often mummified ram or as a ram-headed man; some later or rare representations describe him as a lion or bull. The ram-form is the primary attested iconography in the cited sources, with occasional variant portrayals recorded in later sources.

Pyramid Text passages portray Kherty primarily as an escort or ferryman who brings the deceased king safely to the afterlife and as a guide of the solar bark in certain funeral contexts. Those same texts also depict him ambivalently as a personification of death who 'lives on the heart of men' and who attacks the physical heart (khatjw), causing the cessation of its beating. Kherty is described as protecting the deceased against hostile beings (named in the sources as inmetjw) in some passages; he is linked mythologically with Ra (who brings the king to his destination) and with Osiris in later funerary literature.