One of the most pressing philosophical problems for early mankind must have been the question of what happens to the consciousness that each individual felt himself to possess; how could it just end and become nothing? In ancient cultures dreams, hallucinations and imaginings provided materials for an answer, resulting in entire mythologies and funeral traditions.
If an ancient Egyptian were rich enough when he died, his coffin would almost certainly contain a scroll with instructions, incantations and spells to guide him through the afterlife. This was the ‘Book of the Dead’, more accurately translated as the ‘Book of Coming Forth to Daylight’. The scrolls were beautifully illustrated, although scholars say that in many of them the script was not always of the highest quality because they were prepared by undertakers, and in an age when literacy was a restricted skill, pictures were more significant than words.
The scrolls are therefore often exquisite works of art, as is the case with those in a recent British Museum exhibition ‘Journey through the Afterlife’, since recorded in a book preserving the images. It includes the Anhai Papyrus with its gold, pink and green hues, the outstanding Hunefer Papyrus likewise, and the longest Book of the Dead in the world at thirty-seven metres, the Greenfield Papyrus.
This Baedeker for the underworld illustrates how much importance the ancient Egyptians attached to their hopes for a posthumous existence. To reinforce the point, the British Museum exhibited the papyri along with painted coffins and gilded mummy masks, and with a remarkable panoply of the jewellery, trappings and statuary that accompanied them. Together the texts and artefacts expressed an entire universe of belief about a world regarded as vastly more significant than mortal existence.
A standard narrative for the Book of the Dead has the deceased entering the underworld, regaining the powers of speech and movement, proceeding to the place of judgement where his or her heart is weighed and, depending on the outcome, either being admitted to blessed occupancy of the afterlife, or being consigned to annihilation by the terrifying ‘Devourer’.
In the Hunefer Papyrus the crucial sequence of events is shown in remarkable detail: the king’s scribe, Hunefer, is led by Anubis to the weighing of his heart and, having passed the test, is taken by Horus to the throne of green-skinned Osiris, with the goddesses Isis and Nephthys standing behind. Above them sit the fourteen Egyptian gods arrayed as judges. It is cartoon, silent movie, high art and deep theology all in one.
Ancient Egypt was opened to the astonished and admiring view of the rest of the world by Napoleon’s expedition there. Although Jean-François Champollion was the first to discover its treasures, he was quickly followed by other European scholars, among them Karl Lepsius, who invented the name ‘Book of the Dead’ for the funerary texts he found and published.
But it was the British who, having quickly ousted the French, accumulated one of the greatest collections of Egyptian antiquities, including the world’s most comprehensive holdings of Book of the Dead manuscripts.
While Assyrian and Babylonian funerary practices included burying food and weapons to help the dead in their mysterious onward travels, it is only in Egypt that such elaborate preparations were made for that journey. It is as if the whole of existence pointed in that single direction.
This elaborate focus on an afterlife marks a great contrast: one acts very differently if the value of life is located after death rather than before it, and the respective art, thought and literature of cultures focused on these sharply opposed objectives are likewise very different. Funerary traditions are among the best resources on which to meditate on the difference: they are striking evidence of the fact that different phases in the history of humankind devoted very different thought, but similar time and wealth, to the visions at stake.