Episode 4: Divine Judgment

Photo Credit for Louvre Osiris Statue: Rama

The History and Contents of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 4: Divine Judgment. In this program we will explore the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Although the Book of the Dead sounds like the Necronomicon that figures into some of our most beloved horror movies – an evil tome, bound in human flesh that summons demons – the actual Egyptian Book of the Dead was something else, so, with respect to my fellow horror movie fans, “Clatu, Verata, Nictu,” oh yeah, let’s start by learning, at a basic level, what the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead actually was, and how it worked.

The Basics of the Book of the Dead

The Book of the Dead is a large collection of funerary spells and incantations, written on papyrus, and less often linen or vellum. Around 1500 BCE, ancient Egyptians began burying their deceased with these spells and incantations, and for the final thousand and a half years of ancient Egyptian civilization, the canon of mortuary texts that make up the Book of the Dead became very common in tombs up and down the lands of the Nile. Around 200 separate sections of the Book of the Dead have been identified, making it quite a long text by the standards of the Bronze Age. These sections, called “chapters” by Egyptologists, were placed in tombs according to what the family of the deceased could afford. If you were wealthy, and could pay your local scribes to copy and illustrate many chapters of the Book of the Dead, you might be buried with a dozen, or even a few dozen. If you just wanted the bare essentials, you’d be buried with one or two. For a text called the Book of the Dead, it’s more of a canon than a “book;” in other words, a broad set of textual traditions that varied according to the income bracket and specific requests of the deceased, rather than a codex that was identical from place to place and century to century.

While the Book of the Dead varied according to who was being entombed with some of it, and while archaeologists often only find a few spells in any given grave, there are also some absolutely enormous manuscripts of the text out there. The most famous copy of the Book of the Dead is called the Papyrus of Ani. Set down in roughly the 1200s BCE, the Papyrus of Ani is a stunning 78 feet, or 24 meters in length, running about 13 inches, or 33 centimeters, from bottom to top, and it’s lavishly illustrated, as well. On display in the British Museum, and a gem of their Egyptology collection, the Papyrus of Ani is one of the most awe-inspiring human creations to have made it down to us from the Bronze Age. Other, even longer manuscripts of the Book of the Dead have been found, as well.¹ All told, the Book of the Dead survives in enough fragments and lengthier manuscripts to give us an idea of how the collection was used, how it was likely a big moneymaker for Egypt’s scribal class, and how evolved over time, too.

The Book of the Dead is a big subject. The text itself, in the modern Penguin edition broken into more than 190 chapters, spans upwards of 700 pages. The English translations on these pages have been drawn from numerous different ancient manuscripts. Each chapter is dense, cryptic, and typically filled with a mixture of instructions for recitation, the words of various deities, prayers, and praises of gods. Illustrations have often helped Egyptologists get a sense of what’s going on in each chapter’s incantation, but some of it is still puzzling, even after all these years.

Some of the incantations are very familiar. Others are pretty strange. On the familiar side, in the book’s most famous spell, a chapter called “The Weighing of the Heart,” a supplicant hopes that his deeds will be judged as in accordance with universal order, and that he will secure a blessed afterlife after his heart is weighed by the gods. We’ll look at that very famous chapter a little later in detail. In other chapters, though, the Book of the Dead is amusingly bizarre. The 189th incantation is intended to be recited so that the speaker will not eat poop in the afterlife. The words to be recited include the following: “What I abominate. . .is [feces], and I will not eat thereof [in the place of] the [funerary] cakes. . .Let [me] not be thrown down upon it, let it not light upon my body.”² The incantation here is understandable. I think most of us would prefer to steer clear of eating human waste in the afterlife as well as while still here on earth. But the main point is that in the gigantic span of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, there is in an array of content that ranges from hauntingly familiar on one side, to really strange on the other side, and from end to end, the Book of the Dead is rooted in an immense theological history that even workaday Egyptians themselves may not have understood. The book is not a continuous narrative, nor are its chapters stories. They are instead ceremonial utterances designed to safeguard the deceased and ensure their wellbeing in the afterlife.

Ancient Egyptians called the Book of the Dead “The Spells of Coming Forth by Day,” which is frankly a better description of the body of writings. The goal of the incantations, after all, in the words of Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson, “was to enable the eternal soul of the deceased to leave the tomb and enjoy a free-spirited afterlife.”³ Thus, to put it very simply, the aim of the Book of the Dead is ultimately the salvation of the believer. Ancient Egyptians had a lot of gods. They conceived of human beings not just as bodies and souls, but as having many different parts, as we’ll explore a little later. But as faraway and exotic as the Book of the Dead sounds at first, and as much as it sounds like some kind of foreboding Necronomicon, the whole thing was largely about making sure that those who died were saved, and not doomed.

By the end of this program, then, I hope to have offered you an introduction to the basics of the Book of the Dead – what’s in it, what it’s most famous for, and what it can teach us about ancient Egypt more generally. Before we take a look at this ancient, strange text, though, let’s get a very basic sense of where the Book of the Dead showed up in the long timeline of ancient Egyptian history. [music]

Before the Book of the Dead: The Old Kingdom and the Pyramid Texts

The most important things to know about ancient Egypt, if you know nothing about it at all, are that it endured for three millennia between about 3000 BCE and year one or so, and that it its heartland was the Nile and the Nile Delta. Like Mesopotamia to its east, it was a riparian, or river civilization, and over the vast breadth of the Bronze and Iron ages, ancient Egypt had a lot of different phases of evolution, absorbed a lot of migrants from all over the ancient world, and was altogether one of the most impressive and durable human civilizations earth has ever known.

Ancient Egyptians called their heartland Kemet, or the “black land.” The name came from a phenomenon that happened nearly every year. During seasonal floods, the water of the Nile rose and washed over low-lying crop fields, depositing fertile, silty soil during the late summer and early autumn, just in time for planting. The so-called “black land” thus had its own natural fertilizer, and no fields needed to lay fallow. While three-field crop rotation didn’t start in Europe until the medieval period, ancient Egyptians never needed it at all. The Nile rose and dumped fresh minerals in the fields, softening them for planting, and agriculture was thus unusually easy there.

As we learned in earlier episodes, the situation was the same in the Tigris-Euphrates floodplain up in Mesopotamia. Much later in history, Arabic speakers, during the early caliphates, would nickname the wetlands of what is today southern Iraq the Sawad, or the “blackness” for the same reasons. Floodplains adjacent to rivers in the ancient near east were fated to be home to some of humanity’s earliest civilizations. Agriculture there was a breeze, and fresh water was a given. As populations grew, canal networks helped facilitate them, and at the same time, spurred collective labor projects that benefited everyone. With surplus agricultural goods and cooperative work on irrigation, villages grew into towns, specialized labor blossomed, and subsistence evolved into urban civilization. These processes were at play during the 4000s BCE and 3000s BCE in modern-day Iraq and Egypt, and right around 3000 we begin to have writing from both places in the archaeological record.

In about 2950 BCE, Upper and Lower Egypt were unified for the first time. The arid climate and lack of natural resources in the periphery of the Nile meant that the river civilization that dwelt there had, for the first millennium of its existence, few sizable neighbors that threatened them. It also had what we can think of as a transportation system. The Nile was a life force, but also a superhighway. One of the things we often forget is that water was often a faster, safer way to travel throughout much of history, and so Egypt’s connectivity to the Mediterranean and the Red Sea heightened its prosperity all the more. The unification of the Nile in the early 2000s BCE soon led to a series of successful monarchical dynasties.

What we call the Old Kingdom flourished from about 2650 until 2100 BCE. This period, surprisingly early in Egypt’s history, produced the marvels at the Giza necropolis near present day Cairo – the colossal pyramids of Khufu and his successors Khafre and Menkaure, and the Sphinx. Let’s pause here a minute, because I think that if we picture the pyramid of Khufu, which was the tallest manmade structure in the world for 4,400 years, until the Eiffel Tower was complete in 1889, we can start to understand the basics of ancient Egyptian religion. It’s impossible not to gawk at some of the statistics related to the Great Pyramid of Khufu. It probably took 10,000 people to build. It covers 13 acres, and rises to 481 feet. It’s almost perfectly oriented to true north. Khufu’s pyramid has shafts running all the way through it – not for ventilation, as we once believed, but because these shafts face Sirius in the Orion constellation, and other northern stars, significant to Egyptians because, like eternal things, they never set.

We now know that a system of conscripted seasonal laborers and slaves, together with marvelous feats of engineering, produced the pyramid. But what sort of a belief system lay behind its construction? This is where we can begin with the history of Ancient Egypt’s religion. Now, the Book of the Dead first began to show up around 1500 BCE, and thus it emerged during roughly the halfway point of ancient Egypt’s history. Our goal over the next few minutes will be to discuss what we know about ancient Egyptian religion during its first 1500 years of existence, from roughly 3000-1500 BCE, and how it seems to have developed leading up to the production of the Book of the Dead beginning in 1500 BCE. So let’s go back in time to the very early history of ancient Egypt, again the Old Kingdom, which thrived between 2650 and 2100 BCE.

Before even the Old Kingdom, what Egyptologists call “retainer sacrifice” was a common practice. Djerr, a king during the First Dynasty around 2900, was found with 318 followers, all murdered so that they could continue to serve their king after he passed away. This practice, fortunately for humanity, died out quickly, ending during the subsequent century. As the dynasties of the Old Kingdom proceeded afterward, the Giza pyramids rose up, monuments to a singular idiosyncrasy of ancient Egypt. All ancient civilizations had tombs. All ancient civilizations had monarchs. All of them had slavery and conscripted labor. But in one respect, ancient Egypt was very distinct among its sister civilizations. Mesopotamian ziggurats were built for the living. Egyptian pyramids were built for the dead. Mesopotamians raised their steppe-pyramids as temples and meeting places. From the Cylinders of Gudea around 2100 BCE forward, we can get a sense of the many parts of ancient Sumerian temples served social and civic purposes. A ziggurat was a meeting place, a regional employer, a house of worship, and a nice spot where visitors could take in the sights. Egyptian pyramids, by contrast, were mausoleums. Their scale should remind us that by the 2500s BCE, ancient Egyptians of means spent a lot of what they had in an attempt to pave their way toward eternal life.

Between 2500 and 2000 BCE, in both Sumer and Egypt, we begin to have our first texts of any significant length. These are called the “Pyramid Texts,” and they’re dated to the 2300s BCE. The Pyramid Texts are so named because they were discovered carved into walls and sarcophagi at the pyramids of Saqqara, about fifteen miles south of Cairo on the west bank of the Nile. The Pyramid Texts consist of spells and incantations designed to safeguard the remains of several pharaohs from the later Old Kingdom, and make sure that these pharaohs are resurrected in order to join the gods.

Let’s hear some lines from an Old Kingdom Pyramid Text. These aren’t quite the oldest surviving theological texts on earth – the Kesh temple hymn from Sumer is several centuries older. Nonetheless, again, from a vintage of the 2300s BCE, the Pyramid Texts are very ancient. Here’s an excerpt from one in the Vincent Tobin translation, published by Yale University Press in 2003.

Hail, [Pharaoh]! Take heed of the lake!
Follow behind your sun, that you may purify yourself.
Your bones are the divine falcons and the [cobra] which are in the sky.
You will abide at the side of the god,
You will entrust your house to your son whom you have begotten.
As for anyone who speaks evil against the name of [you] when you go out,
[The god] Geb will degrade him to the lowest place in his city. . .
[Y]ou will purify yourself in the celestial waters.
You shall come down upon the bands of bronze on the arms of Horus. . .
(All) mankind shall acclaim you,
For the stars which know not destruction have exalted you.⁴

There’s a lot we can learn from that incantation. This very ancient mortuary text prays for the posthumous wellbeing of the deceased pharaoh, using metaphors and figurative language that were already fairly sophisticated by the 2300s BCE. There are multiple gods mentioned. Geb, the primal earth god of ancient Egypt, joined with the goddess of the sky, Nut. Horus, mentioned at the end of that quote you just heard, was a falcon-headed deity, and the son of Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the dead and rebirth. The Pyramid Texts, though they’re 900 years older than the earliest papyrus manuscripts of the Book of the Dead, still basically sound like the Book of the Dead. They pray for the wellbeing of the deceased. Their language is resonant and powerful. They harness traditions, theology, and folklore already extant in the lands of the Nile into optimistic prayers. They offer well-wishing for pharaohs that is simultaneously theology and propaganda. If you want to legitimize your dynasty, after all, gigantic tombs filled with expensive inscriptions about how you’re going to ascend to the level of gods are a pretty prominent and public way to do so.

For a while, Egyptologists often assumed that during the Old Kingdom, Egyptians believed that only the pharaoh could ascend to the hereafter. This assumption sounds strange, but it had some evidence. The labor and resources expended on pharaonic tombs are hard to even imagine. Archaeologists couldn’t find similar incantations on non-pharaonic tombs from the period of the Pyramid Texts. And so, the theory once went, from the retainer sacrifices of the 2900s down to the collapse of the Old Kingdom in 2100, Egyptians believed that the pharaoh had exclusive keys to the kingdom of the great beyond, and only after this period was there a democratization of the afterlife. Now, however, following the work of modern Egyptologists like Harold Hays and Mark Smith, the understanding is more commonly that access to the afterlife may have always been understood as available to everyone.

The Coffin Texts and Evolutions in Ancient Egyptian Theology

Regardless of precisely what Egyptians of the Old Kingdom thought about life after death, during the First Intermediate Period, or 2180-2055 BCE, a new practice emerged in Egypt’s burial customs. During and after this period, Egyptians began having texts written within and outside of their coffins. These texts, beginning in about 2100, are today called “Coffin Texts.” All told, more than a thousand Coffin Texts survive today. If you have been to a museum with an Egyptology section, you’ve likely seen a coffin text – tightly packed hieroglyphs in neat panels alongside strapwork, filigrees, and illustrations of Egypt’s deities inked on rather small caskets. The Coffin Texts are, unsurprisingly, religious in nature, and like the Pyramid Texts before them, and the Book of the Dead, they are spells designed to honor the gods and safeguard the deceased’s path to the afterlife. Let’s hear an example of a Coffin Text, an example which will acquaint us with a few figures from the Ennead, nine great gods of ancient Egypt sometimes compared to Greece’s Olympian deities. Here’s an excerpt from a Coffin Text, translated by Edward Wente and published by Yale University Press in 2003:

A thunderbolt claps. The gods become afraid. Isis awakes pregnant with the seed of her brother Osiris. The woman gets up in a hurry, her heart joyful over the seed of her brother Osiris. She says,

“O you gods, I am Isis, Osiris’s sister, who wept for the father of the gods, Osiris. . .His seed is in my womb. It is as son of the foremost of the Ennead who will rule this land, become heir to [the earth god] Geb, speak on his father’s behalf, and slay [the evil] Set. . .the adversary of his father Osiris, that a god’s form has congealed in the egg. Come, you gods, and make his protection within my womb. Know in your hearts that he is your lord, this god [Horus] who is in his egg, blue in aspect, the lord of the gods.”⁵

There are names of ancient Egyptian gods in that Coffin Text that may be familiar to you. We already heard the name of Horus, the falcon-headed deity who was associated with kingship, and the sun and sky, with the Egyptian pharaoh believed to be a living manifestation of the god Horus. While Horus was a major deity, his parents were equally heavyweights in ancient Egypt. Isis, the mother of Horus, was a goddess associated with motherhood and healing, and eventually, she was worshipped not only in Egypt, but as a cult deity throughout the Mediterranean well into the Roman imperial period. And Isis’ brother and husband, Osiris, deserves a bit longer introduction.

Osiris: An Introduction

Osiris, like all ancient Egyptian gods, had a lot of different properties, and they changed over time. Osiris was both a deity of agricultural fecundity as well as death and rebirth. The ancient world had numerous gods who died and came back to life, and their deaths and resurrections were associated with the changing seasons. The Sumerian deity Dumuzi, the Egyptian Osiris, and later, the Greek Persephone were all gods who went down to the underworld only to rise again, and there were others besides these. In the case of Osiris, ancient Egypt’s god of death and resurrection was also a god of vegetation and fertility. This combination of attributes is a little bit strange to us – we picture the underworld as a dismal place of permanent confinement, not the throne room of a jolly green giant. But for ancient civilizations rooted in agriculture, each year’s crop cycle represented a temporary internment of seeds before they sprang anew in the spring. Over in Sumer, lofty priest-kings called ens were depicted wearing crowns blooming with grain stalks or palm fronds, emphasizing the monarchs’ power as the arbiters of seasonal abundance, because the Sumer, like Egypt to its west, lived and died by agriculture.⁶ Thus, in Egypt, verdant-skinned Osiris, who held a threshing flail in one of his hands and a shepherd’s crook in the other, was both the overlord of the deceased as well as their passport to resurrection. After all, Osiris himself had died and come back.

There was a myth cycle in the ancient near east that took on a Mesopotamian version, and an ancient Egyptian version. In the Mesopotamian version, the goddess Inanna loses her husband Dumuzi. She takes a harrowing journey down to the underworld to recover him, and eventually an arrangement is worked out whereby Dumuzi will spend half a year aboveground with her, and half a year in the underworld. The myth of Inanna and Dumuzi, and later Ishtar and Tammuz, was an origin story for the cycle of the seasons for speakers of Sumerian and Akkadian. Dumuzi was, as scholar Thorkild Jacobsen writes, “a young god representing seasonal abundance of one kind or another, who dies when the season and its bounties are over.”⁷ In ancient agricultural societies, festivals honoring the autumn planting and spring harvests were ubiquitous, and so naturally, stirring story cycles about the seasons arose to personify autumnal fading and spring renewal. In ancient Greece, Persephone was the female version of Dumuzi, a goddess who spent half the year belowground and the other half above, honored by Greeks every year at the Eleusinian Mysteries. But more enduring than either Dumuzi or Persephone, was ancient Egypt’s Osiris.

Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris

Osiris’ story in ancient Egypt likely had many variants, but today, we have just two extant versions of it. The Osiris myth, first of all, has basic structural similarities to the story of Mesopotamian Dumuzi and Greek Persephone. Osiris dies. Isis has to find him and bring him back. Because Isis and Osiris were so central to ancient Egyptian ideology, we would think that somewhere, a huge, operatic version of the Osiris myth would survive in the Middle Egyptian or Late Egyptian language that we could read for ourselves. The closest thing we have, however, is a long narrative from the Roman author Plutarch, who lived from roughly 46-120 CE – a book called On Isis and Osiris. Here’s the story Plutarch tells about Isis and Osiris.

Once upon a time, in the early days of creation, a number of ancient Egyptian deities were born. Isis and Osiris, a brother and sister, were destined to be husband and wife, as well, and they actually conceived a child while they were still in the womb together, such that Isis gave birth before she was born. Over a sequence of five days, first Osiris was born, then Osiris’ son Horus, then Osiris’ brother Set, then Osiris’ wife and sister Isis, and then Osiris’ other sister, Nepthys. The story that unfolds in Plutarch’s book is a drama between this quintet. An incidental occurrence in the story is that Osiris had sex with his sister Nepthys, resulting in the birth of the jackal-headed deity Anubis. But the main plot of the Osiris myth as Plutarch tells it concerns the death of Osiris, and his recovery by his sister Isis.

Osiris’ brother Set, or sometimes Seth, is the antagonist of the Osiris myth. The ancient Egyptian god of chaos and storms, Set married his sister Nepthys. Set became jealous of his brother Osiris, dismembered him, sealed some of him in a casket, and then let the casket float out into the Mediterranean. Isis, then, shipped off to find her husband and brother Osiris. She found the casket, first, in the city of Byblos in modern-day Lebanon, and then she journeyed to a total of fourteen places to find the fourteen parts of her husband. Then, Isis brought Osiris back to life. Osiris, alive once more, trained his burly son Horus in the art of war. The falcon-headed Horus locked into combat with the nefarious Set, and Set was eventually defeated.

And that’s the story of Osiris as it survives in the Roman writer Plutarch, from again roughly 100 CE. Its main character is Isis, who, by Plutarch’s time, was one of the most widely-worshipped deities in the Mediterranean. Isis is an appealing character in the story, wise and temperate in spite of her strange origins, setting sail to bring her brother and husband back into the world. As a source text for what ancient Egyptians during the Bronze Age believed about Osiris, Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris is questionable. Plutarch is great, and by the standards of antiquity he was a historian doing his best with the tools and traditions that surrounded him. But being a Roman book written around 100 CE about deities that had been worshipped for thousands of years, Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris is an imperfect narrative if we want to learn about the main deity of ancient Egypt’s Book of the Dead.

Osiris From Our Other Surviving Sources

There is another text, however, that was written much closer to the time of the Book of the Dead, that can help bring us a little bit closer to Osiris. This other text is an ancient Egyptian story called “The Contendings of Horus and Set,” and it was set down some time between 1500 and 1000 BCE. “The Contendings of Horus and Set” is about a contest between Osiris’ son Horus, and Osiris’ brother Set. The aim of the contest is to decide who will inherit Osiris’ throne. In ancient Egyptian ideology, as we heard in Plutarch a moment ago, Set is often the bad guy, as he was, again, the god of storms and chaos. And in the story “The Contendings of Horus and Set,” Horus, with the help from his mother Isis, manages to outwit his volatile uncle and secure his father Osiris’ throne for himself. The story is bonkers, by the way – it involves multiple dismemberments, incest, masturbation, male-on-male sexual assault, and, at its crescendo, a courtroom trial scene resolved by means of a hat made of semen. But as much as I’d like to tell you the full story of “The Contendings of Horus and Set,” our subject in this program is ancient Egypt’s Book of the Dead, so let’s zoom out, review what we’ve learned about Osiris, and then move onto the Book of the Dead.

In the two longest stories that survive about him, Osiris is actually on the back burner. He’s an impressive figure, and a driver of action, but he’s also barely even a character. In Plutarch’s summary of the Isis myth, poor Osiris is the promising eldest son of the primordial gods, but he spends most of the narrative as a dismembered corpse. Likewise, in the wacky Bronze Age Egyptian story “The Contendings of Horus and Set,” Osiris is mainly important in that the green-skinned god of the underworld is handing his scepter to a new generation. From the meager narrative literature that survives about him, though, we can still gather some important information about Osiris. Osiris was at once a formidable and tragic figure. He was powerful, and his power elicited envy, and then betrayal. The stories told about him show a figure who is at once fraught, vulnerable, enduring, and mighty, and in just this fashion, perhaps he was an emblem for the ancient Egyptians who worshipped him. Human beings live within the cycle of the seasons, we have our moments of triumph and our moments of fragility, and many of us hope for something beyond the years allotted to us on earth.

In physical copies of the Book of the Dead, illustrations of Osiris capture this duality. The god of the dead sits or stands, a flail in one hand and a crook in the other, both a farm worker and a magistrate, and from the waist down in ancient Egyptian art, he is wrapped in linen bandages, as mummies were. As such, these images of Osiris are hauntingly beautiful – he appears eternally green and alive, and simultaneously dying with each breath. Osiris, having suffered the indignities of death, was thus, over the long course of ancient Egyptian history, increasingly understood as a fit judge of the dead. [music]

The Uniqueness of Ancient Egyptian Religion in the Middle Bronze Age

So far in this program, we’ve learned a lot of the basics necessary for understanding the Book of the Dead. We’ve learned, first of all, that it’s not really a book, but instead a variable compendium of spells – spells designed to secure the deceased’s passage into the afterlife. We’ve learned that in the Old Kingdom of 2650-2100 BCE, when the pyramids were built, there were already traditions of carving incantations on tomb walls, and that just after this period in the archaeological record, spells and short narratives started being recorded on the exteriors and interiors of coffins. Then, we slowed down to get to know Osiris. We learned that although we don’t have any surviving Egyptian language epics about the god of the dead, we do have a couple of short narratives that explain who Osiris basically was, and how he came to rule over the underworld.

Within ancient Egypt’s thousand-plus surviving coffin texts, as the 2100s gave way to the 2000s, and 1900s, and 1800s BCE, Osiris begins appearing in narratives with increasing frequency. And additionally, the way that Egyptians imagined the afterlife seems to have slowly evolved during these same centuries. The older pyramid texts often envision the afterlife as celestial. An Old Kingdom pharaoh is promised in one of the Pyramid Texts, “You will travel the firmament, united in the darkness, / And you will rise on the horizon, in the place where you are radiant.”⁸ Another Old Kingdom pharaoh is promised, “You shall approach the sky like Orion. . .You shall hold fast to the hands of the stars which know not destruction.”⁹ But in contrast to the celestial afterlife envisioned in Old Kingdom funerary texts, during the Middle Kingdom, or roughly 2050-1650 BCE, the later coffin texts begin describing a subterranean place called the Duat, Egypt’s equivalent of Sumerian Irkalla, Hebrew Sheol, and Greek Hades.

There are, when we study antiquity, myth cycles that seem to have shared roots, or that just seem to naturally arise when humans get together. In polytheistic systems, there are always multiple generations of gods, often with primeval early gods giving way to later, more anthropomorphized deities. Generally, deities of thunder, skies, and the sun are the figureheads of pantheons. As we learned a moment ago, the myth of a deity who died and was born anew for the benefaction of humanity pervaded the ancient near east and Mediterranean from the middle Bronze Age onward. Additionally, the notion of a gloomy underworld, where everyone went after death was a fixture in the Fertile Crescent by the time of the Iron Age – we can still see this idea in Biblical books like Job and Ecclesiastes, and in Homer’s Odyssey, just as we can in Sumerian writings about Gilgamesh two thousand years earlier.

Thus, whether because humans just tend to come up with similar explanatory or imaginative stories, regardless of when and where a culture develops, or because of the surprising connectivity between even very ancient civilizations, there are oodles of parallels between the stories that have come down to us from the Bronze Age in west Eurasia, even if those stories were produced thousands of miles apart.

However, sometimes, there is a story that is a little bit different. Sometimes, for reasons we don’t understand, a culture generates a narrative that’s more distinct. And during the Middle Bronze Age, the age of Hammurabi and Minoan Crete, an idea first consistently appears in the ancient Egyptian language that would have a long and important history in subsequent civilizations. This idea is that there is a universal order that governs the cosmos, and that humans who act in accordance with that order will receive special rewards in the afterlife.

We’ve already read some Bronze Age myth cycles in Literature and History. Mesopotamian deities like Enki, Enlil, Inanna, Tiamat, Apsu, Marduk, and many more are magnetic figures. They stomp through ancient story cycles with pomp and might, often being more like supersized humans with deific strength and libidos more than wise agents of goodness and order. It’s always important to remember that in antiquity, polytheistic societies used gods as readymade and entertaining characters in songs and tales. In a short scene midway through Homer’s Odyssey, a bard sings a story about Aphrodite and Ares having an affair, and Aphrodite’s husband Hephaestus catching them in the act. The point of this Greek story is not inculcating piety, but to titillate and elicit laughter. To archaic period Greeks, and before them, Egyptians, Babylonians, Akkadians, and more before them, the gods were impressive, but they were also lecherous, erratic, and sometimes even absurd, and so stories about their escapades took on all forms, from pietistic to pornographic to farcical. From ancient Sumer’s mini-epic called “Enki and Ninhursaga” all the way down to Virgil’s Aeneid, before the Common Era, gods were any given culture’s equivalent of a Marvel Cinematic Universe – a prefabricated box full of action figures who could be deployed and instantly get people’s attention.

But again, between 2000 and 1500 BCE, ancient Egypt seems to have developed a distinctive way of thinking about gods and the afterlife. In the turbulent period between 2125 and 1795, and then throughout the Middle Kingdom, which endured until 1630, in Egyptian texts and artwork, we begin to encounter the notion that all people had immortal souls, and that upon death, a person’s ab, or heart, would be judged by the gods. If that person had worked on behalf of chaos and done ill deeds, he would be eaten, and annihilated for all time, by a terrible monster called Am-met. If he’d worked on behalf of order and goodness, he’d go to beautiful, fertile fields filled with flowing water and the presence of gods, and be given a homestead there. And while these ideas begin to become evident during the first few centuries of the coffin texts, the place where they appear concertedly for the first time is the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. [music]

Judgment in the Book of the Dead: An Introduction

The Papyrus of Ani, again today in the British Museum and one of the most famous copies of the Book of the Dead, a few feet from its lefthand side, shows falcon-headed Horus leading a Theban scribe up to the throne of tranquil and green-skinned Osiris, where the mortal will be judged for his deeds. The mortal is judged in the following manner. His heart is placed on one side of a set of scales. On the other side, there is a feather. The feather symbolizes something that ancient Egyptians called ma’at. Ma’at meant, in a word, order. Ancient Egyptians believed that a natural order governed the universe –one that set the rhythms of the seasonal floods, turned the motor of births and deaths, and put everything in its rightful place, from pharaohs to grains of sand. Later, we’ll get into more detail about what exactly caused one’s heart to balance with the feather of ma’at. For now, though, that image is a good one to keep in your head as we move forward – a hopeful mortal, in the underworld, their soul being weighed in the scales against the feather of ma’at, or universal order as the gods look on, a much earlier version of the Christian being judged at the gates of heaven, and the Muslim having their kitab al-amal, or Book of Deeds read by the angels of janna. We’ll hear a lot of quotes from the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead as we move forward from here, but the quintessence of the whole thing is that scene, and that moment of divine judgment.

Just a few more things before we begin looking at this book. I’ll be quoting from the E.A. Wallis Budge translation – Budge was a very famous Egyptologist, not universally loved, but very important in the history of the discipline. And the second thing is a simple fact about the structure of the book itself. Most of the Book of the Dead’s chapters have what we call “rubrics.” A “rubric” explains how a chapter is supposed to be used. For instance, the rubric to Chapter 1 tells the reader that if a person knows the text of Chapter 1 while she is alive, and if Chapter 1 is emblazoned on her coffin, she will be able to make her way through the underworld, and successfully find her habitation in heaven and enjoy all the rewards there. Rubrics are often very specific, explaining exactly how spells are to be recited to correctly ward off evil, and corruption, and decay.

Finally, and I promise this will be the last time I’ll say this, the Book of the Dead is not a book, but instead a nonstandard compendium of funeral spells designed to pave the deceased’s road into a blessed afterlife. The order of the prayers and incantations is different depending on which manuscript we’re looking at. The spells have significant variances with one another. For simplicity’s sake, and because the aforementioned Budge translation stays pretty close to it, I’m going to often be referencing the Papyrus of Ani, that 24-meter-long swathe of papyrus currently on display in the British Museum. It’s neither the only, nor the longest version of the Book of the Dead. But as the most well-known manuscript today, it will be a good starting point for learning about the text. The Papyrus of Ani was done around 1250 BCE, and E.A. Wallis Budge himself, our translator for this episode, got a hold of it in Luxor in 1888 and smuggled it out of Egypt to get to it to the British Museum.

So, now you know what the Book of the Dead is, how it arose in the long history of ancient Egyptian religion, and how Osiris, divine judgment, and universal order are some of its most important anchors. Now that we’ve been acquainted with the basics of the Book of the Dead, let’s open it up, and see what’s inside. [music]

The Book of the Dead’s Opening Prayer and Judgment Scene

The Book of the Dead opens with a hymn to the sun god Ra. The hymn says, “thou risest, and thou comest forth from the god [of the sky]. . .Thou dost renew thy youth and thou dost set thyself in the place where thou wast yesterday. O divine youth who hast created thyself, I am not able [to describe] thee. Thou hast come forth with thy [crowns], and thou hast made heaven and earth bright with thy rays of pure emerald light.”¹⁰ Ra upholds the universal order of ma’at. A subsequent hymn tells us, “Ra [lives] by Maāt the beautiful” (16). The sun god, the opening of the Book of the Dead promises, enriches the earth with the marvelous and extraordinary journey that he takes every day, his cycle through the skies a crowning symbol of the natural cadences that govern the cosmos.

The opening hymn depicts the earth and heavens above it as a place of order, superintended by a god of order, with light itself being a part of the peaceful lawfulness of the way that things should be. This alone is an interesting opening to dwell on. Ancient Egyptians wrote stories about their gods as wild, lascivious, and madcap, as we heard earlier. They also, however, by the time of the Book of the Dead, were imagining an order at work that animated all of physical and spiritual reality.

A hymn to Osiris follows the opening hymns to Ra, in which a supplicant prays that he’ll be able to descend to the underworld and then come forth, made new with the blessings of the great deity. Osiris is described in this early hymn as “Eldest son of the womb of [the sky goddess] Nut. . .lord of the crowns of the North and South, lord of the lofty white crown, as prince of gods and of men [Osiris has] received the crook, and the [flail], and the dignity of his divine fathers. . .Through [you] the world [waxes] green in triumph” (18). Here, we meet one of the most important gods that ever existed, the green, tranquil “lord of everlastingness, who [passes] through millions of years” (18). Copies of the Book of the Dead usually feature illustrations, and sometimes elaborate full color illustrations, and of course images of Osiris adorn many of the extant papyri from beginning to end.

In the Papyrus of Ani, again that very famous and well-preserved version of the Book of the Dead in the British Museum, what follows the opening hymns to Ra and Osiris is the great sequence that translator E.A. Wallis Budge calls “The Judgment.” As Budge explains in regards to how ancient Egyptian judgment worked in general:

Where and when the judgment took place is unknown, but the original idea seems to have been that the broad heavens, or a certain portion of them, formed the Judgment Hall, and that the judgment took place in the presence of the three Companies of the gods; as the head of the [funeral] Company Osiris occupied a very prominent position, and he eventually became the sole judge of the dead. The judgment of each individual seems to have taken place soon after death, and annihilation or everlasting life and bliss to have been decreed at once for the souls of the dead; there are no sufficient grounds for assuming that the Egyptians believed either in a general resurrection, or in protracted punishment.¹¹

That was again translator E.A. Wallis Budge, explaining the general circumstances of ancient Egyptian judgments. So in the judgment scene of the Papyrus of Ani, a humble scribe prays for a just judgment. In the Papyrus of Ani version of the Book of the Dead, an illustration features the scribe Ani being brought into an awe-inspiring company of gods gathered in a special hall reserved for the judgment of mortals. Hathor, Horus, Isis, Nephthys, Nut, Thoth, Anubis, and other beings all turn their heads to regard the breathless mortal Ani. His fingers trembling, he studies the frightening figure of Anubis, whose hands are on the scale that will weigh the mortal’s heart. The jackal head of the deity symbolized his power to decide whose body would suffer decay and scavengers, and whose would be preserved for all time.

Behind Anubis is Thoth, frequently called “The Great God” by Egyptians. Thoth has the head of an ibis, along with a great headdress symbolizing his preparation to judge anything – even the very length of the seasons. But still, it’s not Thoth that causes the poor mortal’s fingers to quake. Because while jackal-headed Anubis, and ibis-headed Thoth are formidable figures, twice as large as the mortal supplicant Ani, in the most famous illustration of the most famous copy of the Book of the Dead, behind Thoth, in the darkness at the rear of the chamber, is a being that likely inspired terror into many generations of ancient Egyptians. This monster is the Am-met, a creature that Egyptians called “The Eater of the Dead.” With the head of a crocodile, and the body of a lion and hippopotamus, Am-Met smacks his chops and looks expectantly up at Thoth when the mortal enters the room, preparing to eat the poor scribe if the outcome of his judgment is unfavorable.

Jackal-headed Anubis weighs the man’s heart. Ibis-headed Thoth considers it for a long time, and the Am-met waits in the darkness. Finally, once the mortal scribe’s heart has been weighed, Thoth speaks. Thoth proclaims, “Osiris, the scribe Ani [is] victorious. . .holy and righteous. He [has] not sinned, neither [has] he done evil against us. It shall not be allowed to the devourer [Am-met] to prevail over him. Meat-offerings and entrance into the presence of the god Osiris shall be granted unto [the mortal scribe Ani], together with a homestead forever in [the field of reeds]” (25). And with that, the mortal’s fate is sealed. He will not be annihilated by the monster Am-met. He will join the gods in a joyous afterlife. [music]

Following the Judgment Scene in the Papyrus of Ani

Variants of this scene exist everywhere various copies of ancient Egypt’s Book of the Dead. The many aspirants who were buried with sections of the book hoped for admittance into Aaru, a place also called the “Field of Reeds.” While the pharaohs of the Old Kingdom pictured the afterlife as a high place, filled with radiant stars, increasingly over the Middle and New Kingdoms, Egyptians began picturing a much more earthly scene when they thought of heaven. In Aaru, there would be lakes, harvests, plowing, lovemaking, the planting of seeds, feasting, fine clothing, bathing in clean water, and, of course, the god Osiris.

In the Papyrus of Ani version of the Book of the Dead, as we continue to read from left to right, we learn that the scribe Ani will, following his judgment, join with the god Osiris in his temple, and then emerge again in peace. And if you are looking at the Papyrus of Ani in the British museum, all of this happens within the first few meters of the long papyrus – again it’s about 24 meters in length. The question arises, then, that if the scribe Ani who commissioned this particular copy of the Book of the Dead is straightaway proclaimed good enough for the blessings of Osiris and the field of reeds, then isn’t that it? Isn’t the everyman guy whose family could evidently afford a really nice Book of the Dead saved? Why is there another 70 square feet of hieroglyphics and meticulous illustrations afterward, stretching out to the right?

There are two fairly simple answers to this question. The first is spiritual and religious in nature, and the next is commercial. Let’s start with a spiritual explanation for the vast girth of the Book of the Dead. The spells, hymns, and other material that follow the opening judgment scene in the Papyrus of Ani serve a wide variety of purposes. The mortal scribe Ani has a journey ahead of him in the afterlife, with a number of junctures that are nearly as consequential as the weighing of his heart. Additionally, in the remainder of the Papyrus of Ani, there are recitations intended to be performed by the family of the deceased for specific purposes, and various other praises that engage with the many deities of ancient Egypt. Polytheism is generally baggy and spongy, rather than rigid and doctrinal. Because of the vast array of gods and semidivine beings in ancient Egyptian culture, and because different versions of the Book of the Dead were set down for different people in different times and places, the array of divine beings in any given Book of the Dead varies greatly between different versions, but always, seemingly, there are too many for any book to name and pay homage to.

So, one reason why the Book of the Dead is so expansive is that it was the creation of a polytheistic society with truckloads of deities, major and minor. And another reason is what we might call ancient Egypt’s funeral industry. Religion, in addition to being a genuine and profound part of human life during antiquity, was also a major moneymaker and employer. Temples and shrines needed people to build them. Tombs needed people to construct them, and artisans to create all the fine objects with which the dead were interred. The Egyptian Book of the Dead was a sacred text designed to safeguard an individual’s passage into the afterlife. It was also an industry that kept food on the table for a whole division of the scribal class, and perhaps a status symbol for those of a certain economic echelon. Funerary rites and grave goods, though it’s strange for us to think of today, could be a way for wealthy Egyptians to showboat, and the many manuscripts of the Book of the Dead, with their need for papyrus harvesting and manufacturing, ink, writing implements, illustrators and scribes would have been a modest but vital part of the economy of Egypt from the period of the New Kingdom onward.

Thus, though some parts of any given Book of the Dead are redundant, that redundancy was both a means of bolstering the deceased’s chances of being saved, as well as a marker of conspicuous consumption that certain social echelons found intrinsically gratifying. Let’s now look at some different sections of the Book of the Dead that typify the various things that the collection does as a whole. [music]

The Oldest Chapter and Rubric of the Book of the Dead

Chapter 64 of The Book of the Dead is often thought of as being one of the oldest chapters of the collection, perhaps dating back to the very first dynasty. Chapter 64 shows a speaker supplicating himself to the sun god Ra, and in the chapter’s devoutness and the beauty of its composition it sounds like one of the Psalms. I’ll quote it at length, and again this is a prayer to the sun god Ra from Chapter 64.

Make thou thy roads glad for me, and make broad for me thy paths when I shall set out from earth for the life in the celestial regions. Send forth thy light upon me, O Soul unknown, for I am [one] of those who are about to enter in, and the divine speech is in [my] ears in the . . .underworld. . .let me be delivered and let me be safe. . .Let me journey in peace; let me pass over the sky; let me adore the radiance of the splendour [which is in] they sight; let me soar like a bird to see the companies (?) of the Spirits in the presence of Ra day by day, who [vivify] every human being that walk[s] upon the regions which are upon the earth. . . (211-12)

It’s a moving prayer, expressing the hope and humbleness of a speaker who knows he’s a small node in a gigantic cosmos. This perhaps 4,000-year-old petition to Ra was accompanied with a rubric that explained how to use it. Because rubrics accompany almost every chapter, let’s consider the rubric that accompanies the prayer you just heard. I’ll quote Chapter 64’s accompanying rubric at length, too, to give you an idea of what these rubrics sound like.

[If this chapter be known] by a man he will come forth by day, and he will not be repulsed at any gate of the [underworld], either in going in or in coming out. He will perform [all] the transformations which his heart desires, and he will not die; behold, the soul of [this] man will flourish. And moreover, if [he] knows this chapter he will be victorious upon earth and in the underworld, and he will perform every act of a living human being. It is a great protection which [he has been given] by the god. . . This chapter must be recited by a man who is ceremonially clean and pure, who has not eaten the flesh of animals or fish, and who has not had intercourse with women. (214)

So, that’s the rubric. You can see that the rubric makes the value of the chapter pretty clear. Rubrics like this one are all over the Book of the Dead, and they get much more specific, offering instructions for objects to put in the tomb, what to burn, concoctions to mix, times of day of prayers, and that kind of thing. At the sacred moment of death, the deceased must only be close to the ritually clean who, like priests and believers in the Book of Leviticus, had abstained from sex and animal foods for a sufficient period of time.

The rubric you just heard might sound a little odd, especially if you’re new to antiquity. It says that if you’re reciting a sacred prayer for Ra on behalf of the deceased, if you’ve eaten fish, or had sex recently, then your prayer might not produce the desired results. The notion that a sun god takes interest in whether or not we’ve recently eaten fish sounds a little wonky to our modern ears. Nonetheless, the rules for cleanliness and chastity that we find in the sacred writings of many different ancient religions were a way of imposing order and protocol at moments of tragedy and uncertainty. Ritual often brings humans together, even when it’s not, strictly speaking, terribly important. If you’d lost a family member in ancient Egypt, then maybe, the careful protocol the rubrics of the Book of the Dead outlined would have given you a starting point to move forward with the grieving process. Fasting, practicing abstinence for a little while, mixing concoctions and voicing inspiring prayers to familiar gods – these were all things designed to offer comfort during tough times, because they each gave participants something concrete to do during their periods of mourning.

So far, you’ve seen the essential structure of ancient Egypt’s notions of divine judgment, and you’ve heard a prayer and seen the rubric specifying how this prayer was to be delivered. And while the chapter we just looked at is often thought of as the oldest, and we’ve already considered the very famous weighing of the heart scene, there’s another particularly celebrated chapter in the Book of the Dead. This is Chapter 125, a chapter that Egyptologists have nicknamed the “Negative Confession.” It’s a beautifully written text that, helpfully, outlines ancient Egypt’s ethical system a bit more specifically than what we’ve seen so far, and it probably came about around the reigns of Thutmose II and his widow Hatshepsut in the mid-1400s BCE. So let’s take a look at the “Negative Confession” of the Book of the Dead, one of the most important texts in Egyptology. [music]

The Negative Confession in the Book of the Dead

The Book of the Dead’s “Negative Confession” chapter, Chapter 125, has three parts. In the first, the supplicant who is seeking salvation describes his arrival in the underworld. He says,

I came and I drew into [the place where] the acacia tree [doesn’t grow]. . .where the tree thick with leaves [doesn’t exist], and where the ground [yields] neither herbs nor grass. Then I entered into the hidden place. . .I have been in the water of the stream, and I have made offerings of incense. . .I have entered into the Temple of Osiris, and I have arrayed myself in the apparel of him that is therein. . .I have seen the hidden things which are therein. (357-8)

This, though, is only the beginning of the speaker’s journey. What follows next is the “negative confession” for which the chapter, Chapter 125, is nicknamed. The speaker enters a hall called the “hall of double ma’at,” and confesses not his sins, but tells an assembly of forty-two different gods all of the things that he did not do. The confessions are essentially an index of ancient Egyptian morality – the believer must promise that he hasn’t killed anyone or tipped the scales during a trade transaction, or lied, stolen temple artifacts, stolen food, killed sacred animals, slandered someone, become unduly angry, committed adultery, threatened someone, ignored righteous counsel, fomented strife, made another person cry, “committed acts of impurity, neither have I lain with men” (369) – that he hasn’t been loud and egotistical, that he hasn’t judged overhastily, or polluted water. And after confessing that he has not done any of the aforementioned things, the speaker concludes with a final desperate plea. He says,

Let me not fall under your knives of slaughter. . . O grant ye that I may come to you, for I have not committed faults, I have not sinned, I have not done evil, I have not borne false witness, therefore let nothing [evil] be done unto me. I lived upon right and truth, and I feed upon right and truth. I have performed the commandments of men [as well as] the things whereat are gratified the gods, I have made the god to be at peace [with me by doing] that which is his will. . .I have given bread to the hungry man, and water to the thirsty man, and apparel to the naked man, and a boat to the [shipwrecked] mariner. (371-2).

That’s the supplicant’s plea after he makes his actual negative confession. Once his confessions have been made, the scene continues, and the gods deliberate. The man’s heart is weighed, and the gods decide that indeed he will be allowed to join the company of Osiris and enjoy a blessed afterlife.

Chapter 125, or the “negative confession” chapter, has especially detailed instructions. It was supposed to be spoken by a person on his deathbed. Once he was cleansed and purified, and carefully clothed, and once white leather sandals had been put on his feet and his eyes had been painted, and once sacrifices had been made, and a tile had been moved, and the text of Chapter 125 placed onto that tile, then the man’s descendants would flourish, and he would be regaled with delicious foods and drinks in the company of the gods.

Aaru or the Field of Reeds in the Book of the Dead

Let’s look at another portion of the Book of the Dead. The “negative confession” scene we just read, along with the “weighing of the heart” scene that we looked at earlier, both seem to show ancient Egyptians seeking salvation. They’re trying to avoid being eaten by the Am-met, and they’re trying to get into the realm called Aaru, or the Field of Reeds. At a very simple level, this dichotomy looks like an early version of heaven and hell. It’s just that when we look at the way that the afterlife is physically described in the Book of the Dead, it’s not just a happy bunch of fields full of people holding hands and basking in the sunny glow of Ra. On the contrary, Chapter 149 depicts the afterlife as divisible into thirteen different physical sections. Some of these sections do sound rather heavenly. Others sound quite terrible. And most are in between.

Sometimes, again, the afterlife sounds paradisal. The second region of Aaru, for instance, is described as a place that is deep green where there are grain rows five cubits, or eight feet in height, where threshers harvest giant stalks of wheat and barley. In this second region, there are lakes rich with waterfowl, and, the speaker of the section says, “I know the two sycamore trees of turquoise, from between which the god Ra doth emerge when he setteth out on his journey” (487). This is pretty celestial imagery – we have bright sunshine, plentiful food and water, and an endless, collective harvest.

However, a different section of the afterlife, the seventh, to be specific, is “remote from sight, and the fire [of it] is in flame. There is a serpent within. . .the length of his backbone is seven cubits, and he live[s] on [souls], and he [annihilates] their glorious strength” (490). This section of Aaru, or the Field of Reeds, does not sound very heavenly. As the text continues, we learn that the ninth region of Aaru, colored yellow, rather than green, is home to a city that only Ra can enter. As the text tells us, “The opening [into the city] is of fire, and the winds thereof destroy both nostrils and mouths, and the god hath made it. . .so that he may dwell therein at will, and none can enter therein except on the day of great transformations” (491-2). The thirteenth section of the Field of Reeds is equally perilous. In it are waters made of fire, and neither immortal souls, nor gods can drink from these waters. Only Osiris can do so.

The ancient Egyptian afterlife, as you can see there, was imagined as a complex place. We expect the Book of the Dead to describe Aaru, the field of reeds, as joyous and abidingly pleasant. Instead, as we just heard, it is a honeycombed place, where one section is blissful, the next perilous, the one after that inaccessible, and then the next joyous once again. To consider the Book of the Dead as a whole, other than reverence to Osiris and the earnest desire of the believer for posthumous exaltation, is quite a miscellaneous text, encompassing as it does thousands of years of variable beliefs into one text. And just as the Book of the Dead can’t quite come down squarely on what, exactly heaven is, the collection also depicts humanity itself in a lot of different ways. [music]

Ancient Egyptian Doctrines of Selfhood in the Book of the Dead

Throughout recorded history, different generations have proposed different theories of selfhood. Most commonly, there has been a horizontal division between the body and the soul – the body is lower, and often said to be motivated by baser impulses, whereas the soul is loftier, and motivated by higher ideals and goals. Love it or hate it, whether Platonic, Christian or Cartesian, Gnostic or Manichaean, dualism has been hugely influential in religion and philosophy. Ancient Egyptians, back during the Bronze Age, had a much more complicated idea of selfhood than the notion that we are beings of spirit and flesh, or soul and body. To ancient Egyptians, each person was a composite of many different parts, and these parts had different fates upon the moment of death.

There was the khat, or physical body, which could be preserved by mummification. Somewhere between body and soul was the ka, a sort of extracted individuality of a person, which still needed to eat and drink. A person’s ba, neither body nor soul, but a bit of both, transported food and drink into their tomb. The ab, or heart, was a person’s moral conscience, weighed in the scales of Anubis and Thoth. There was also the khaibit, or shadow, the khu, or the ethereal component of a person entirely apart from the body described as being up in the heavenly chambers of Aaru in the chapter of the Book of the Dead that we just looked at. There was also the sekhem, a person’s life force, and the ren, a person’s name, which had to be preserved if she wanted to continue existing. That’s not all of it, but suffice it to say that ancient Egyptians were far more than simple dualists. Several hours would probably still be insufficient to clarify the puzzle pieces of the khat, ka, ba, ab, and so on, and maybe the very complexity of ancient Egyptian selfhood was the reason it was eventually replaced by simpler schemas.

Thus, while the Book of the Dead has some very familiar ideas in it, its doctrines of selfhood are much stranger and more distinct. And speaking of strange and distinct, I think the Book of the Dead is at its strangest and most theologically distinct when its writers pray for bodily preservation after death – for the continued robustness of their khat, or physical body. Let’s look at an example. A supplicant in Chapter 154 resolves that after he dies, “I shall not putrefy; my intestines shall not perish; I shall not suffer injury; my eye shall not decay; the form of my visage shall not disappear; my ear shall not become deaf; my head shall not be separated from my neck; my tongue shall not be carried away; my hair shall not be cut off; my eyebrows shall not be shaved off; and no baleful injury shall come upon me” (520). So, while numerous modern religions share ancient Egypt’s core belief that a person will be judged by a higher power at the time of her death, they’re probably less worried about the eternal life of their eyebrows, or tongue or intestines.

Still, if all of this sounds very faraway and ancient, it’s important to remember that the notion immortality of the body was actually not unique to ancient Egypt. Corporeal resurrection is a central doctrine in the Tanakh, or Old Testament, being described very specifically at several points. The Book of Isaiah, in a prayer to God, foretells that “Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. / O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!” (Is 26:19).¹² It sounds a bit like a zombie movie if you’re unfamiliar with the Tanakh’s widespread doctrine of bodily immortality, as does a famous passage in another prophetic book, Ezekiel. Ezekiel foretells of how God will some day say, “O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. . .I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live” (Ez 37:4-5). God, in other words, will bring a select set of humanity back to life, restoring their bodies to the way that they had been before death. Other verses in the Bible foresee the same thing. The younger book of Daniel envisions how “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life” (12:2). And the New Testament also discusses bodily resurrection, as in 1 Corinthians: “For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality” (1 Cor 15:53). As we’ll learn in upcoming episodes, the Bible is a stranger, and more ancient book than most of us realize – an anthology of documents compiled between 800 BCE and 100 CE, and accordingly, many of them sound as much like the Bronze Age before them as they do the Middle Ages after them.

And to stay with comparisons between the Book of the Dead and the Bible for just a little while longer, maybe the most surprising thing of all is that the Book of the Dead contains something that many of us think is in the Bible, but actually isn’t. Those of us who grow up in Christian majority countries are generally under the impression that the Christian doctrine of salvation is that when you die, you are judged, and then you go to heaven or hell afterward. This is never specifically described in the Bible. The Tanakh, or Old Testament, envisions a general corporeal resurrection on earth, with the Chosen being promised in Isaiah “Your eyes will see Jerusalem, a quiet habitation, an immovable tent, whose stakes will never be pulled up, and none of whose ropes will be broken” (Is 33:20). The Old Testament promises an earthly, general deliverance for the Israelites. In the Old Testament, salvation is collectivistic, and it happens on earth, by corporeal resurrection, at the end of days.

Salvation in the New Testament is actually described quite similarly. The New Testament also describes a general corporeal resurrection in Jerusalem, which, at the end of days, will have gem-encrusted walls, streets made of gold, and angels guarding its gates. The New Testament Book of Revelation offers a complex timeframe for judgment day, with multiple periods of corporeal resurrection on earth, but what the New Testament actually says is that Christian believers, as a collective, will see their deliverance upon judgment day. Jesus’ words in the Gospel of Matthew essentially convey the same schema for judgment described in Revelation – Jesus says that “on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Matt 12:36-7). Jesus does not say here that immediately after death, people will be judged individually and sent to either heaven or hell, because the actual Bible says virtually nothing about heaven or hell as specific locations. Later in Christian history, during the 100s and 200s CE, texts like the apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter and Apocalypse of Paul would begin to describe heaven and hell in great detail, as Dante’s Divine Comedy would in much more detail a thousand years after this. But again, in the actual Bible, we are never told that upon the moment of death, each person will be judged as damned or saved.

Fascinatingly, then, this means that the Book of the Dead is in some ways a more Christian text than the Bible is. In the Book of the Dead, the deceased is straightaway subjected to judgment by the gods, in that ceremony often called the “weighing of the heart.” In the Book of the Dead, the deceased must immediately account for her actions, confessing the things that she did not do, and the things that she did do. In the Book of the Dead, the deceased is then either annihilated by the eater of the dead, Am-met, or she advances forward to Aaru, the field of reeds. If the Book of the Dead had a Biblical doctrine of salvation, it would tell us that ancient Egyptians died, and then, after an unspecified period of time, they would all be judged and resurrected as a collective. So as labyrinthine and strange as the Book of the Dead is, its doctrine of divine judgment is more familiar to many of us than the one actually described in the Tanakh or New Testament. Thus, salvation as we imagine it today in Christian and Islamic societies is as ancient Egyptian as it is anything else.

Histories of antiquity in the ancient near east and Mediterranean basin have tended to imagine that Judaism and Christianity somehow developed in isolation from paganism. But, this is silly. The land called Canaan, and then Judah, and then Roman Judea, was the axis between the Mediterranean, north Africa, and central Eurasia. During both peace and war, populations from the Levant and populations from ancient Egypt were migrating back and forth, and ancient Egyptian stuff has been found littered all over archaeological dig sites of the Levant. And archaeological dig sites, in fact, are good metaphors for understanding what the Book of the Dead and the Bible after it eventually were. Both books contain a lot of ideas, from a lot of different time periods. Those ideas came from different cultural and historical moments – junctures of triumph and times of tragedy; eras of peace and epochs of war. Both the Bible and the Book of the Dead are time lapse photo collages of the long historical process of religion evolving into the belief systems that many of us have today. Both books contain textual artifacts from the Bronze Age nestled right up beside newer prose and poetry. Both books have distinct and unique theological ideas, but they’re also spongy, adapting older tales and the sagas of neighboring regions into their own narratives.

The evolution of monotheism from polytheism took a long time. We see it slowly emerging in Middle and Late Bronze Age pantheons, in which single deities tend to emerge as the sovereigns of their peers. When we see the feather of ma’at, or universal order, balanced carefully on sacred scales by the jackal-headed deity Anubis, the whole image looks exotic and almost ostentatiously Egyptian. But ma’at, like monotheism, holds that there is a single, animating force at work throughout all of reality. And thus, buried in many ancient Egyptian tombs, like seeds stowed in the black lands of the Nile, we can find many of the odds and ends of the religions many of us still practice today – a notion that order lies behind the tumult we perceive all around us, that this order will mete out justice in times to come, that the things we say and do will be recorded and remembered, and that a deity died, and rose again to offer us exaltation in the afterlife. [music]

Moving on to Ancient Egyptian Short Fiction

So that was a very short introduction to the very long ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, and some of the history that led up to it. If you’d like to read it for yourself, I’ve linked to the E.A. Wallis Budge Penguin translation I’ve used in this episode, as well as a newer Raymond Faulkner translation, which places full color illustrations of various books of the dead adjacent to the translation, so you can see the whole thing in what we might call a graphic novel form, as it was originally written. There is plenty more to learn about ancient Egyptian religion, including the Great Ennead, that multigenerational pantheon of nine Egyptian gods worshipped variously throughout history, but our podcast is about literature, and so it is to that subject that we will now turn.

It wasn’t all embalming, building tombs, and griping about the afterlife for our ancient Egyptian predecessors. While the surviving corpus of ancient Egyptian literature isn’t enormous, we do have a small canon of short fiction and philosophical writings from Bronze and Iron Age Egypt, and we’ll cover some of those in the next couple of shows. So in the next program, we’re going to read three ancient Egyptian short stories – “The Shipwrecked Sailor,” “The Eloquent Peasant,” and “Prince Hordedef’s Tale.” Ancient Egyptian fiction is fascinating stuff, and incredibly, we have papyri that date back to the Middle Kingdom, or 2030-1650 BCE. These very ancient manuscripts show us that ancient Egyptians loved a good folktale, wrote a diverse array of fiction with very different themes and endings, and that they excelled at secular, as well as sacred writing. Thanks for listening to Literature and History. Try a quiz on this program on the website to test what you can recall about the Book of the Dead. If you want to hear a song, I’ve got one coming up. And otherwise, see you next time, for Episode 5: Beneath the Obelisks.

Still here? Well if you remember, a supplicant in Chapter 154 of the Book of the Dead earnestly prays that after he dies “my eyebrows shall not be shaved off; and no baleful injury shall come upon me” (520). I got to thinking about how funny that line is – the notion of hoping that one’s eyebrows will exist for all time. And I wondered what it would sound like if a modern Christian rock group wrote a tune praying for the longevity of their eyebrows, and I wrote the following song, which is called, “May My Eyebrows Live Forever.” I hope it’s an amusing way to spend sixty seconds, and I’ll see you next time with some terrific short fiction from ancient Egypt.



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