PART ONE
1
DESERVEDLY OR NOT, ancient Egypt is known as a culture obsessed by the afterlife. Even the Egyptian cultures of the Neolithic era buried their dead with grave goods, suggesting a continuation of life in the grave. The Hebrews may have been deeply influenced by the Egyptians. When the Hebrews finally arrived in the land of Canaan to stay, by 1200 BCE, they arrived from Egypt. During the Egyptian captivity of the Hebrews, the major beliefs of Egyptian afterlife had already been developed and practiced for a millennium. According to the Biblical account, Egypt had been the home of the Israelites, who were sojourners there for four hundred years. Canaan itself was nominally under the influence of Egypt, as the Canaanites were Egyptian vassals. The material culture of Canaan shows innumerable Egyptian influences. Egypt was the strongest political force in the area until the Middle Iron Age, and Egyptian influences appear frequently in Canaanite and Israelite religious, political, and decorative motifs until the rise of Assyria.1 Nevertheless, the Hebrews were not overly impressed with Egyptian religion.
Egyptian Geography and Its Effect on Egyptian Myths
THE GREEKS, on the other hand, were impressed. For the Greeks, Egypt was an ancient, mysterious, and mystical world. The pyramids were already two millennia old in the sixth century BCE, when Herodotus visited Egypt. He stood at a comparable distance to the pyramid’s builders as we do to Jesus’s followers and so he stood in appropriate awe of Egypt’s antiquity. He also singled out Egyptian science, in particular its effective use of geometry, as worthy of great veneration.
Ancient Egypt gives us the longest continuous history in the ancient world. It was a fabulously wealthy and stable culture. Egypt’s stability depended on its wealth and its insulation from the rest of the ancient world by oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges. The Nile river gave it a rich agriculture and an easy means of transportation, while the mountains and deserts gave it unprecedented security for vast periods of time. These blessings combined to yield a deeply conservative political and religious culture of enormous longevity, all based on its uniquely favored geography.
In Egypt, geography is destiny. Egyptian religion is a meditation in narrative form on the significance of the unique geographical and climatic features of the country. The warm Nile flows northward out of Africa like a languorous cobra: Its tail starts in African lakes, carrying the rich volcanic soil northward to Egypt. Its body is contained between twin, almost impenetrable desert mountain ranges of the Upper Kingdom. Its hood is stretched out in broad fertile swamps of Lower Egypt’s delta, it jaws biting at the underbelly of the Mediterranean. No wonder the Egyptians depicted the cobra so often as the symbol of kingship.
The desert and the mountains make the country virtually invulnerable on the east and west, disciplining the Nile into a long, thin valley. Through the middle of this long, oval basin runs a pronounced but very narrow, green stripe of alluvial fertility, on either side of the river. The border of green represents the furthest reach of the Nile’s flood; in many places that border is so distinct that one can stand with one foot on the desert sand and one on cultivated land. Indeed, one ancient Egyptian word for Egypt is Khemet—the Black (i.e., fertile) Land.
In ancient Egypt, the most practical movement throughout the country was up the Nile or down the Nile, greatly aided by the prevailing wind originating from the north or northwest and blowing southward on many, fortunate days. For the ancient Egyptian, upstream therefore meant south, a direction navigated by sailing with the wind, or by tacking across it, which explains the invention of the lateen-rigged, triangular sail of the Egyptian faluka (pl. fala’ik). Travel north was simpler still, as it was downstream, running with the current. The Nile Valley as a climatic and geographical system is unique among the world’s great river basins, leaving a mark on the Egyptian sensibility in culture and religion. Egypt is virtually a self-enclosed system.
Given the poverty and overpopulation of modern Egypt, it is hard to remember that, in ancient times, Egypt was synonymous with both wealth and wisdom. Since the ancient world’s wealth depended on agriculture, Egypt was a paradise on earth. It could harvest three crops a year. The regular annual flooding of the Nile deposited a constantly renewing layer of fertile soil, carried down river from Africa, producing an unparalleled agricultural opportunity, which was exploited for millennia for grains, fruits, and vegetables. In the Delta, this dark stripe spread out into wide green marshes; along the banks to the south, the arable land was extended east and west by cleverly designed irrigation pumps and canals. The river itself was richly populated with tasty animal life-including game, fowl, and fish.
Rightly did Herodotus call Egypt “the gift of the Nile.” No one since has proclaimed a more apt or heroic epithet for this country. As there is virtually no rain in the country, the Nile river is the only practical source of water. Flooding of the Nile is not a catastrophe but a great divine blessing-the source of Egypt’s very existence. In a sense, the Nile has a cycle of birth and death on an annual basis. By summer, the river lies quietly and moves slowly, while the fields beside it gradually parch, turn to dust, erode, and blow away into the desert with the sandstorms. After which, the only available water for agriculture comes from a few wells, likely fed by the Nile too, as the winter rains of the Near East almost entirely bypass Egypt.
The cycle starts in August as the sun ends its eclipse of the Dog Star, Sirius, giving the month one of its oldest epithets, “the dog days of summer.” In Egypt Sirius was known as the goddess Sothis, who was the harbinger of the Nile’s flooding. At the start of autumn the Nile begins visibly to stir, responding to rain falling in Central Africa. Increasing in momentum, it floods in fall and winter over the miles of flat land on either side, creating at its northern end an enormously broad, triangular delta. Consequently it is often called in modern Egyptian Arabic Baḥar An-Nil, the Nile Sea. When it recedes, it leaves a layer of fertile mud in which crops can be planted, almost seeming to seed themselves and grow magically, without help from man. This process continued yearly for millennia until the building of the High Dam at Aswan in the 1960s prevented the soil from reaching the farmlands and thus breaking Egypt’s ancient connection with the Nile’s annual flood cycle.
The Egyptian sun is incessant. Summer and winter, it is like a great broiler-oven. Every day it is ignited in the east, burns furiously all day, and is not extinguished until it mercifully falls below the horizon in the west, only to roar into flame again the next day. Plants, birds, and animals all respond to its rhythms. Even the winds seem to emanate from its disk. The path of the sun down the western mountains and under the earth, where the dead were buried, followed by its daily reascent from behind the Eastern mountains, was a source of wonder for ancient Egyptians as it was for all peoples. The notched, eastern and western mountain ranges let the Egyptians calibrate the sun’s movements exactly, designating seasons and festivals. The sun made an evident, diurnal journey under the earth, followed by a regular rebirth, slowly moving north then south annually along the mountain ranges. With the Nile, this movement was used as both a timepiece and a metaphor for the rebirth of the dead in eternity.
All of this imagery manifested itself in the ancient Egyptians’ view of the universe, which not only described their world but defined their place within it. The flood of the Nile, human reproduction, and the sun were the three obvious symbols for life in Egypt, and they also served as the basis for the Egyptians’ notions of the afterlife. To appreciate the influence of these symbols, we shall first have to look at the mesocosm, the social system, from the ancient Egyptian point of view. Like many other societies, Egyptians applied the term “humanity” to themselves only, sometimes using the words for “foreigner” and “subhuman” interchangeably. The Greeks called non-Greeks barbarians (from the word for bearded), because they were not civilized enough to shave. The Egyptian royalty and priesthood too shaved their hair off, but unlike the Greeks who shaved their faces, the Egyptian nobility shaved off all their body hair, wore perfumed wigs, and painted their eyes. Hairy outsiders were therefore seen more as animals than humans. Foreigners, having hair, were also infested with lice and vermin, like animals.
Foreigners were associated with disorder. Geography gave the Egyptians ways to describe foreigners as well as avoid them. The words for desert or mountain were synonymous with chaos, as they were characterized by inconstant rains and other irregular occurrences. The Egyptians hated chaos and praised the regularity of the Nile.2 For them, the capricious rain could only be understood as an imperfect example of the benefits available to them from the Nile.
Aten was so good he even gave the uncivilized, foreignors in strange lands an approximation of the Nile-rain-poor and unreliable though that may be in comparison to the regularity of the Nile floods. Exceptional as their life was, to them it was natural and everyone else lived in imperfect imitation of it. Inside the sheltered land of Egypt, however, all was blissfully ordered, regular, and patterned for well-being; anxiety came from the disruption of the plan. The word that the Egyptians used to express this well-being and truth was “life,” Ankh, symbolized by the famous Ankh sign, a cross with a loop at the apse. The Egyptians also personified order as justice, ma’at, which was depicted as a fragile feather or a lovely young goddess wearing a single feather in her headdress who often spread her multicolored wings to protect her charges, as she does at the entrance to the sarcophagus chamber in the tomb of Nefertari, principal wife of Rameses II.3
The Egyptians were not foolish enough to think that all this well-being, order, and justice were given naturally and without effort. No, these benefits could not be achieved without constant human attention to the details of life. For instance, though reliable enough to make the Egyptians complacent, the river could be mischievous. The annual flood could fail or be insufficient to meet the needs of the people. The river had to be carefully and painstakingly controlled by elaborate irrigation channels. In addition the Nile was filled with terrible dangers: snakes, vermin, disease, hippopotami, and crocodiles. These dangers had to be controlled by force or appeased with various exorcisms and offerings. Agricultural advantages could best be maximized by strong authority to supervise irrigation, dike and canal building, and city planning. Ankh had to be earned by appeasement of the gods and by regulation. Consequently leaders served in both sacral and military roles. “Good order” or “justice,” again called ma’at, was both a gift from the gods and the result of good government. It had to be earned by each Egyptian, by upholding justice and right dealing, thus putting oneself in perfect harmony with the forces of nature.
Ma’at was preeminently the responsibility of the pharaoh, the king of Egypt as well as its god on earth. The title “pharaoh” is a kind of polite euphemism, to avoid saying anything directly to the king, much as we say “Your Majesty.” It literally means “the great house”; the term was a synecdoche, like “the White House,” used today to stand for the executive branch of the American government.
Another way of describing the pharaoh was as the shepherd of his people. The concept of the king as a benevolent herdsman made it necessary for him to dispense ma’at, good order, which was related to the proper conduct of life. If ma’at were interrupted, it was a sure sign that the divinity was displeased. So the king had to make sure that the administration of his country was properly done, just as herds had to be properly maintained. The pharaoh was the feeder of the people, just as the shepherd was feeder of his flock.
Physically and culturally, the Valley of the Nile breaks into the narrow trough of the Nile Valley-Upper Egypt-and the spreading delta of Lower Egypt. Upper Egypt has ties to the desert and to Africa; Lower Egypt faces out toward the Mediterranean Sea and Asia. Separated from the rest of the world by protective mountain ranges to the east and west, these two kingdoms are also separated from each other very effectively by rapids or cataracts. The name for Egypt in Hebrew is Mitzrayim—literally, “the two Egypts.” In fact, the two Egyptian dialects were different enough to produce the constant refrain: “It was confusing, as if a man of the Delta were suddenly to speak to a man from Elephantine.”4 This saying reflects that the first and most important of the five cataracts separates the two kingdoms near Elephantine, though all of them are serious boundaries, forcing portages and delaying trade, communication, and military control. The earliest kings, of which Pharaoh Narmer is the most famous, were responsible for unifying the country. The so-called Narmer Palette displays many symbolic representations of the unification of the two countries, including the depiction of two snakes intertwined, perhaps engendering offspring.
Thereafter, the unification of the two kingdoms is seen in virtually every aspect of the pharaoh’s symbology. Pharaoh united in his person both Upper and Lower Egypt as stable dynastic kingship in Egypt was achieved with the union of the two parts of the valley. This uniting was a creative force for Egypt. Pharaoh was the descendant and holder of the military force that united the two kingdoms. Pharaoh’s bureaucracy and the cults he supported kept that unity strong.
Pharaoh’s life was also symbolic of his role in guaranteeing ma’at. Like the Nile, everything about his life was ordered and symbolic. Diodorus Siculus, a Greco-Roman writer of the first century CE, painted a picture of the king of Egypt as the actor of a lifelong symbolic drama, in which rituals controlled the King’s every hour and every act. Like Le Roi Soleil of eighteenth century France, the hours of his day and night were laid out according to the strictest plan. The king was directed by law and tradition to do what was politically and ritually required. Diodorus goes on to state that these regulations covered not only the king’s administrative actions but also his personal freedom to take a walk, bath, or even enjoy his wives and concubines. He was allowed no personal initiative in his governmental actions but was required to act in conformity with established laws. There is good evidence that this was not always so. But Diodorus insists that the pharaohs of his time were quite happy in this obsessive schedule because they believed that those who followed their natural emotions fell into error, whereas pharaohs, by compulsively following the ancient laws, were personally freed from responsibility for wrongdoing and thus guaranteed a beatific afterlife.5
The ritual drama was a national representation of the forces that made Egypt possible: The king’s person was thought divine, united with the sun in various ways. The pharaoh was reborn, as it were, with every new generation just as the sun was reborn every day and the Nile renewed agriculture every year. Thus, the king of Egypt issued out of the body of the sun god and, on death, returned to him, or, just as frequently, was seen as the falcon-headed sun god Horus of Upper Egypt and became Horus’ father Osiris, the god of embalming, upon his death.
The same might have been said of any king, in various ways, from the beginning of Egyptian history to the end. As long as the dynasty was secure and prospering, so was the country. The converse was just as true. The relationship between geography and religion begins with cosmology, the study of creation, moves through the order of the state, and ends with the famous Egyptian views about the afterlife. As their geography is unique, so too the Egyptians were virtually unique in depicting the sky as a goddess, the earth a god. In almost all nations, it is the sky god, with his warlike thunder and his fertilizing rain who naturally becomes the masculine principle in the sexual drama of cosmic creation. However Egypt’s rainfall is too sparse to support agriculture. For the Egyptians, the sky, Nut, was a woman, while Earth, Geb, was a man, since the earth carried the Nile flood. The mud that came in the flood brought fertility to the land. Hence some Egyptian myths picture the first creation as an act of male masturbation. Corresponding to this solitary sexual act, the Nile itself appears to bring fertility by a surge of creative fluid, without the help of anyone or anything else but itself.6
But myth is never content to symbolize a process only once. Whether or not the myths that we have are combinations of countless local myths, the end effect is that the crucial aspects of life are symbolized again and again, in various related ways, as if, in Levi-Strauss’s words, two people were trying to communicate across a raging waterfall. The message is repeated and repeated in many different ways and with many different symbols because, in Levi-Strauss’s estimation, the interference level in cultural communication is very high.
The complexity of Egypt’s religion is sometimes dizzying. The various gods of the Nile had their own animal emblems and could be depicted in animal, human, or mixed animal-human form, seemingly related to the local fauna. In fact, depictions of gods varied widely across the country. Possible contradictions between local versions of stories did not seem to bother the Egyptians overly much. Animals animated the Egyptian pantheon. For instance the lion was associated with Ra at Heliopolis. The dog and jackal were animals of Anubis, whose cult was centered at Sekhem. The vulture was connected to Neith at Sais. The black boar was the symbol of Seth at Avaris. At Hermopolis, Thoth had the form of the ibis and the ape. Amun of the Libyan desert, like Khnum the wind god, was sometimes depicted with the horns of a ram. So also was Arsaphes, sometimes called “son of Isis,” worshiped at Fayyum, where Ichneumon was equally sacred. The crocodile divinity was Sobek, in whose city, Crocodilopolis for the Greeks and now called Kom Ombo, was a temple with a lake where tame crocodiles were kept and mummified after death. The wolf-headed deity was Wepwawet, like Anubis, a lieutenant of Osiris. His name, which literally means “the wolf of North Nubia (Wawet),” displays his geographic origins and his appearance in one myth is a way of tying far-flung localities to a national, master myth. The great sky goddess was Hathor, the celestial cow of Dendera. Horus, offspring of Isis, was portrayed as a falcon and associated with the sun, worshiped at Edfu. To Osiris the special bulls known as Apis and Mnevis were consecrated at Memphis. Bastet was a cat who was worshiped both nationally and locally. Just as the local deities were connected to national myths, so the narrative of that myth connected the local rites to those of the nation.
According to Diodorus, the deification of these animals was introduced (at the bidding of Isis) throughout the land of Egypt because of their special help in the discovery of wheat and all the labors of tilling the ground. But we can also see them being swept up into a “master narrative” to unify an originally disunified country. Each of these animal sanctuaries accrued its own rituals and purity regulations, which were constant and quite stringent. The Egyptian pantheon was thought strange to foreigners even in antiquity, and not by Hebrews alone, with their uniquely monotheistic sensibilities. The Greeks made fun of the Egyptians for deifying their pets and, seemingly, anything that grew in their gardens.
On each of these local icons, the name of Ra would be grafted, with a conventional vowel change, in an act of priestly imperialism in honor of the sun god. Thus the sun was Atum-Re, the creator god, at Heliopolis (’Iwnu). He was Re-Harakhte, Re-Horus of the Horizon. He became Montu-Re a falcon god, Sobek-Re, a crocodile god, and Khnum-Re, a ram god. He became Amon-Re, king of the gods at imperial Thebes.7 The earliest texts, the Pyramid Texts, are associated with the solar Ennead (group of nine) of Heliopolis. Many of the early kings constructed solar temples in association with their tombs, an association that continues into the pyramid-building period.8 At Heliopolis, the sun god took the name Atum “the All.” Thus, the sun could even be Atum-re, explicitly combining two different names for the sun god. In this guise, he was often represented as pharaoh in human form, wearing the double crown of Egypt.
Although gods have been depicted as the authors of our lives as far back as the time of the Egyptians, depicting them with the forms of political power that are indigenous to the people worshiping them suggests that the causation of who caused whom to be runs in both directions at once. Consequently, Atum engenders Shu, the dry air and light, and Tefnut, the power of moisture. This creation can be depicted as an act of magical power (heka) or by an act of masturbation. A third generation of gods comes from Shu and Tefnut, now more tangible in the form of the earth, Geb, and the sky, Nut. Geb and Nut engender two further pairs of gods before they are separated by Shu. The latest pair are Osiris and his brother Seth, with their respective sisters/spouses, Isis and Nephthys. The gods married their sisters and so did the pharaohs. These nine, the Heliopolitan Ennead (or the Nine of Heliopolis), are predominate in the religious literature of Egypt. But there are also other groups of gods to consider, including prominently, the Ogdoad (the group of eight) of the city of Khnum (later called Hermopolis) in Middle Egypt. These gods were Nun and Nunet (primeval waters), Heh and Hehet (eternity), Kek and Keket (darkness), and Tenem and Tenemet (twilight).
Instead of seeking simple analogies among the various pantheons, we should attempt to understand the symbolic nature of Egyptian religion. Sometimes a myth was created by the interaction between the ideographic hieroglyph and the Egyptian word. For instance, in the Middle Kingdom, humanity was created out of the tears of the creator sun god. The myth, like the rebus-like system of hieroglyphics itself, is based on wordplay, because humans (rmt) and tears (rmit) have the same consonantal structure.9 Consistency seems to be more important to us than it was for the Egyptians; or else they were unable to achieve it right away. For the ancient Egyptian, the sky could be supported by posts or held up by a god. It could rest on walls or be a cow or a goddess whose arms and feet touch the earth. The process of slowly unifying many local traditions encompassed a much larger degree of ambiguity than would appeal to us. Each of the major accounts of creation in ancient Eyptian documents, namely those found in the Pyramid Texts, The Book of the Dead, and The Memphis Theology, suggest several incongruent ways that the creation took place. These ambiguities reflect underlying different geographical origins for many creation stories.
Pyramids and Mummies
MUMMIFICATION was practiced in Egypt as early as the Old Kingdom. In burial sites dating millennia before the historical period, we have evidence that the Egyptians purposely took advantage of the natural preservation of bodies in the desert. Mummification, artificially aiding natural preservation of the body in dry sand, evolved into a science quite early. Because of the dry climate, the Egyptian interest in stability could be technologically applied to mortuary practice. Once the dessicating properties of natron (a naturally-occurring mixture of salts and carbonates) were discovered, the technology developed rapidly. The mummified body was also eviscerated, presumably because the internal organs are more apt to decay, and the organs were separately interred in what Egyptologists now call canopic jars. The body was dipped in various other unguents and preservatives, then carefully, ritually, and symmetrically wrapped in yards of linen ribbon, which also enclosed various charms, amulets, and talismans. Finally, it could be covered with a mask made of costly materials, as it was in early days, or, later in Hellenistic times, with a very realistic, encaustic (beeswax and honey-based) painted image of the deceased encased in cartonnage or papier-mâché.10 Then it was placed in a series of coffins.
Our word “mummy” derives from the Arabic word for bitumen because the desiccated mummies develop a characteristic dark pitchlike hue and bitumen was, in fact, sometimes used in the preservation process. Since the desiccating process virtually destroyed all tissue except the skin and bones, mortuary priests began to pad the skin with various substances so as to conserve a more natural look. Artificial eyes were often placed on top of the eyelids and the eye socket filled with marbles or onions.11 All this contributed to a more naturally appearing mummy. No one fully understands what mummification meant to the Egyptians but its meaning seems to adhere to the process of preserving the body for eternity. In early Egyptian society, the body itself could stand for the “self.” Transforming the body somehow symbolized or paralleled the transformation of the self into its afterlife form.
The mummies were originally placed in masteba tombs, an Arabic word which simply means “bench” and refers to their trapezoidal shape. Pyramids (Egyptian m’r) were constructed, in some sense, by placing mastebas on top of each other, in ever decreasing size like a wedding cake, as the famous step pyramid of Saqqara shows. As the form developed, the steps between them were then filled in. Many texts suggest pyramids represent the primal mountain emerging from the sea at creation. Over a hundred pyramids were built, of which more than eighty survive today. After several failures, the Egyptians found the ideal proportions for their pyramids, the ratio of base to height being exactly 2π. This occasions a mystery, as the early Egyptians are otherwise unaware of the value and importance of π. Tabloid television programs regularly attribute this ratio to the arrival of visitors from outer space.
The mystery is solved, however, when one posits that the Egyptians laid out their pyramids with a measuring wheel with a known radius, which also served as the basic unit of height. Since the measuring wheel’s circumference automatically measured one unit of π for each unit of height, it automatically built π into the equation. So, if the construction engineers laid out the pyramid with each half of the base measuring the same number of revolutions of the wheel as they planned for the units of the height, the ratio of base to height would be exactly 2π, even if the architects themselves had no knowledge of how to calculate the constant. In any case, the result is an exceptionally massive and stable building, the equivalent of a man-made mountain of stone. Indeed they have survived like mountains.
The person credited with the invention of the pyramid is Imhotep, the great architect of King Djoser (2630-2611 BCE) of the Third Dynasty. He designed the famous step-pyramid as the pharaoh’s tomb, which soon evolved into the smooth-walled pyramidal form. Pyramids were exclusively used for royal tombs during this period. The steps suggest a ladder or staircase for the king to ascend to his heavenly abode, as in one of the depictions of the ascent of the pharaoh in the tomb of Unas. The first true pyramid was the one constructed for Sneferu near Saqqara and was quickly joined by the one built for his son Khufu (Cheops) and, finally, by those of their successors, Kaphren and Merikare, completing the great pyramid complex at Saqqara, which tourists visit daily by the thousands. The pyramid was also associated with the famous pyramidal benben (perhaps meaning “shining”) stone of Ra, attesting to the importance of the priests of Heliopolis in the development of the form, as the shape appears to be a depiction of the spreading out of the sun’s rays. The pyramidal capstone made of shining electrum (a natural alloy of gold and silver), reflecting light in all directions at the top of pyramids and obelisks, was known as the benbenet, a term also derived from the base meaning of “shine” or “reflect.” The king’s ladder to heaven and the rays of the sun become architecturally wedded together by the Fourth Dynasty. Many of the spells in the Pyramid Texts suggest that the pharaoh rises to heaven by means of a ladder:
N. ascends on the ladder which his father Ra made for him.12
or
Atum brought to N. the gods belonging to heaven, he assembled to him the gods belonging to earth. They put their arms under him. They made a ladder for N. that he might ascend to heaven on it.13
Indeed many pyramids made use of a spiral ascending staircase, later filled in to achieve the pyramidal shape, as both a construction necessity and a religious symbol.14 The ladder, the staircase, was part of the magic of the pyramid itself.
In the first pyramid inscriptions, found in the pyramid of King Unas, we see a variety of methods for achieving this ascent. After the first inscriptions in pyramids, the pyramid symbol itself became the determinative in hieroglyphic writing to indicate that the next word was a tomb; that connection continues long after the Egyptians stopped building pyramids. It is quite important for the later history of Western notions of afterlife that the Egyptian pharaoh achieved immortality by stepping into the heavens. The association of heaven with immortality is uniquely an Egyptian invention, occurring many millennia before it becomes part of Biblical or Greek tradition.
The ancient pharaohs were at first the only ones to climb to heaven with the sun because they were the only ones who could organize the community and pay to construct the great pyramids, the great stone machines that propelled the dead pharaoh to heaven. The great pyramids of Giza are laid out according to the compass directions and also line up exactly with important stars, suggesting the location of the pharaoh’s akh (transformed spirit) or the direction of his journey.15
Two different sets of stars were important to Egyptian burials. Up until the Twelfth Dynasty, the Egyptians were interested in stars above the ecliptic, hence stars which never set. Like the North Star, they were the “indestructible” stars (Ikhemu-Seku, the stars that never fail), representing astral immortality in a direct and important way. Until the Twelfth Dynasty, the entrances to the pyramids and tombs were aligned with these stars, likely so as to enable the ba-soul of the pharaoh to ascend directly to them. The Middle Kingdom focused on the stars that set and rose in the sky periodically, some of which were planets (Ikhemu-Weredu, “never resting stars”). They sank into the netherworld only to rise again at regular intervals (which were often noted in the tomb) and so became a potent symbol for regeneration, especially important for the Osiris cult.16 The stars known to the Greeks as the “decans” because they helped keep time in the night were also used by the Egyptians.
These exact parallels with geographical and astral features were designed to aid the dead directly in their flight to immortality. Very quickly too, the tombs were filled with spells for the same purpose. Unfortunately pyramids were very expensive and vulnerable to looting. When Thebes, with its central location, became more important as a capital, burial was thence moved to the Valley of the Kings, where the tombs were carved out of the foot of a very obvious and prominently pyramidal-shaped mountain. So, in a sense, the pharaohs never did leave behind the notion of resting in pyramids; they merely moved their final resting places to a much greater pyramid, closer to their new capital, and one where their costly possessions could be more easily protected.
The Osiris Myth
THE OSIRIS-ISIS mythology was central to Egyptian notions of the afterlife. It also functioned to help unify the countries of Upper and Lower Egypt into one single political and religious unit. A complete text of the story of Osiris was not obtained until the first century when Plutarch wrote de Iside et Osiride, probably conflating several versions of the story to a single consistent text. Before that, we have but fragments of the same myth. The legend runs thus: Just as the Nile flows again after its deathly ebb in summer and yearly restores the land of Egypt, so the divine Osiris, both husband and brother of Isis, undergoes many periodic trials for the salvation he brings through the funerary cult. Osiris is a beneficent king, teaching Egypt how to grow crops, establish laws, and worship the gods. Isis and Osiris, sister and brother, are also perfect lovers. They even mated in the womb of Nut, the sky goddess. Isis is invoked as the one who made her brother Osiris endure and live. She, the Great One, burns incense for her young child, the new-born god Horus; so Egyptian mothers did in imitation of her. Isis is figured in the Hellenistic period as an especially kind warm-hearted wife, sister and mother, nursing her child and keeping a good home, indeed later serving as the sculpture-model for the Christian figure of the Madonna and child. It is Isis’s tears that make the Nile rise and bring back life to the dead earth.
Life is never perfect, in myth or reality. Osiris is victimized by his evil brother Seth. Seth tricks Osiris into entering a chest, prefiguring the mummy case, where he is slain and set afloat. Isis discovers that Seth has killed and cruelly dismembered the body of Osiris. With this event, the story begins to take on its characteristic emphasis on the process of disposal of bodies and their transformation into new life.
Since Osiris and Isis are the divinities most associated with the mortuary rites, this story is quintessentially a justification and legitimation of that science. According to the tale recounted by Plurarch, Isis casts about looking for ways to bring her brother back to life. She visits Byblos in Phoenicia to make the cedar ark in which the body is to be buried, as indeed one of the pharaoh’s sarcophagi was usually made from cedar, a wood whose preservative properties were here given mythical justification. In fact this is the same place Solomon goes to find cedar paneling for the Temple of YHWH.
Isis finds Osiris near Byblos and frees him from the chest but then Seth chops Osiris’s body into fourteen parts and scatters them over Egypt. After a long search, Isis finds all the missing parts save one-the phallus. Indeed, many Egyptian spells are dedicated to reanimating the phallus.17Then, grief-stricken Isis, wife and sister of Osiris, reconstitutes the body and restores it to life with the help of Anubis, by means of the mummification process:
Look: I have found you lying on your side, O completely inert one! My sister, said Isis to Nephthys, it is our brother, this. Come, that we may lift up his head! Come that we may reassemble his bones! Come that we may erect a protective barrier before him! Let this not remain inert in our hands! Flow, lymph that comes from this blessed one! Fill the canals, form the names of the watercourses! Osiris, live, Osiris! May the completely inert one who is on his side rise. I am Isis.18
Isis buries all the body parts but, since she is not able to find Osiris’s penis (it has been thrown into the Nile), she makes him an artificial one.19 As is clear here, this action somehow refers yet again to the Nile’s flood and its perceived creativity while also symbolizing that even the funerary cult cannot bring back the power of generation to the dead king. Isis then impregnates herself magically with the relics of Osiris and gives birth to Horus (or Harpocrates, as he was known in Greek), sired by her brother and husband Osiris.
While Osiris becomes lord of the underworld, his son Horus, the falcon-headed sun god of Upper Egypt, stays permanently on earth, fighting continuously with his uncle Seth, the ruler of chaos, until he succeeds both in battle and in the courtroom. The pharaoh is both Osiris and Horus, in two different sequential “avatars,” attempting to live up to the divine symbol systems of the Upper and Lower Egypts, as well as this world and the next. The reigning pharaoh is identified with Horus, so these battles are mythologically equivalent with the battle to keep civilization safe in war and to rule wisely in court, the two great venues of the pharaoh on earth. The dead pharaoh is transformed by mortuary ritual into Osiris, where his responsibilities change to the good government of the dead. A stable and intact tomb was a symbol of prosperity and harmony between this world and the next. But the physical intactness of the tomb certainly also provided the launching pad that allowed its inhabitant to ascend to heaven. As Morenz says,
Logically, and as a rule, ascent to heaven and existence there are linked with the heliopolitan doctrine and are counterpart to the dominion of Osiris over the dead. This is expressed most distinctly in an address of the sky-goddess Nut to the dead king: “Open up your place in the sky among the stars of the sky for you are the Lone Star…; look down upon Osiris when he governs the spirits, for you stand far from him, you are not among them and you shall not be among them.” Accordingly, the desire is voiced that the king should not die, or his death is simply denied: “Rise up … for you have not died;” or: “My father has not died the death, for my father possesses a spirit [in] the horizon.”20
Meanwhile, back on earth, the strife between Seth and Horus continues into the next generation. Finally, Atum-Re intervenes, telling Seth and Horus to stop quarreling. Seth invites Horus to his house for a banquet. During the night, Seth inserts his penis between Horus’s thighs in an act of homosexual frottage, seemingly establishing his dominance over him, but Horus catches Seth’s semen in his hands, afterwards delivering it to his mother Isis. Isis cuts off Horus’s hands, throws them in the water, and then makes him a new pair of hands. Since the water now has the hands of Horus, it gains the powers of Horus. Furthermore, the constant substitution of artificial limbs for dead or polluted natural ones seems to be another reference to the magic of the priests in restoring fertility.
The writer Diodorus Siculus gives us some further hints about the meanings of this perplexing myth, by telling us some details about how the story was institutionalized in temples and ritual. From him, as well as Plutarch and Herodotus, we learn that since Isis wishes Osiris to be honored by all the inhabitants of Egypt, she fashions over each of his cut-up fragments the figure of a human body. Then, she calls the priests of each locality together and asks them to bury the artificial body, made out of spices and wax, in the various districts and to honor Osiris as a god. At each supposed burial place, a temple or shrine was dedicated. This story also legitimates the spread of the funerary cult and the primacy of the Osiris priesthood in its performance, as well as giving each locality a specific role in the cult and hence a narrative place in a united Egypt.
Besides enacting the story of the flood of the Nile and the annual return of life of the land, Diodorus shows us that each of the local temples of Osiris became part of an organization of central religion through this myth and, in effect, the unity of the state is brought about through the combination of local cults and deities into a central religious procession. The myth, among other things, narrates this unity in story form. Such a story is not what we would call a constitution but it is certainly part of what unified the state into a conceptual whole that could apprehended by the ancient Egyptian.
Rituals of the Osiris cult associate the annual story of the god with the fertility of the land, as well as with the death of kings. The “Great Procession” at Abydos, the place where the early kings were buried, took place at the first rise of Nile (late summer) and involved bringing the statue of Osiris to a designated tomb area, where he stayed overnight, followed by his triumphal and jubillant return to the temple. Since Osiris was identified with the dead king, logic suggests the continuity of the pharaonic succession, going from the death of the old king to the birth of the new one, just at the time when the Nile was about to renew Egypt’s fertility. In Ptolemaic temples, there was often a room called the “tomb of Osiris.”
The connection between Osiris-strictly, a god of the dead-with fertility was seen in his other major festival, which took place at the end of the inundation (3ḥt), in the month of Khoiak (approximately December), known from a long Ptolemaic inscription at Denderah. In this ceremony, which resembled a funeral because it signified the end of the flood and the start of Spring (i.e., prt, “the coming out” of the seeds), Osiris was identified with the erection of the Djed pillar, a commonly occuring Egyptian symbol which somewhat resembles a modern high-tension tower. The pillar itself seems to to symbolize the power of Osiris. Two important rituals firmly associate Osiris with new vegetation. The first was the central role of “Osiris Gardens” and the second was the ritual of “the grain mummy” or Osiris effigy. The grain Osiris was an effigy made of soil and seeds, which was publicly paraded and then displayed as it germinated, which could then be placed in a trough called a garden (ḥspt). These grain effigies also represented the reunification of the body of Osiris. These aspects of the dead Osiris were depicted in temple art as a reclining mummified body of Osiris with rows of grain growing out of the length of his body.
This festival’s liturgy featured what Jan Assman calls “raise yourself litanies” (in German: Erhebe-dich Litaneien).21 These are prayers beginning with the words “Raise yourself” (ts tw), suggesting the imagery of “resurrection,” except that Osiris never returned to the world of the living. Only the grain, which was fertilized and raised by his presence, did. Significantly, these litanies are well known from the Pyramid Texts and became more and more important to mortuary literature.22 The festival securely linked the two different worlds of Osiris, his mastery of the arts of mummification and the king’s burial with his ascribed role as a vegetative god linked to the Nile flood. The depiction of the death and rebirth of vegetation in the natural world has become crucial for cultural descriptions of the afterlife world over.
Egyptian Conceptions of the Afterlife
IN HIS JUSTLY-FAMOUS book, Before Philosophy, John Wilson points out that there are two different kinds of responses to death among the Egyptians.23 We can see them illustrated in different tomb paintings and inscriptions. Near the Step Pyramid in Saqqara, there is a tomb of a vizier of the Old Kingdom, a man who lived around 2400 BCE, which I have seen myself on two different occasions. His rooms were crammed with scenes of life and the lust for it. He is shown spearing fish while his servants trap a ferocious hippopotamus. He is depicted presiding over the judgment of tax delinquents. There are pictures of him listening to his wife playing the harp and watching his children play.
On the other hand, there is another tomb painting from the Late Period, the tomb of a man who lived about 600 BCE. Here we see no joie de vivre, no exuberance, no bellowing hippopotamus, no playful children. The walls were covered with ritual and magical texts. The purpose of the texts was to provide the dead person with a map and the techniques for traveling through the realm of Isiris to find eternal rest there. Successful accomplishment of the journey made the person an akh or transformed dead.24
The temptation, against which Wilson warns us, is to take this stark contrast to indicate a change in Egyptian sensibility. That is an unwarranted conclusion; these two faces of life are two sides of the same Egyptian sensibility, as they are of European and American sensibilities. It may only be the personality of the tomb’s occupant, the predilection of the painter, or merely just a question of the taste or prevailing style in interior tomb decorating. There is no way to tell how characteristic this was of the age in which they lived. Christian cemetery art too alternates between figuration of death and symbols of resurrection. In many New England colonial burying grounds, there is scarce indication of the Christian faith in the resurrection. The inscriptions tend to concentrate on death and decay rather than transfiguration and resurrection. Distinctly Egyptian symbols are also prominent in the Christian burying ground on the property of Yale University for example, which I walked by almost daily for several years. The gate to the cemetery carries Egyptian motifs and is surmounted by an Egyptian, winged sun disk. All we can tell for sure about funerary art worldwide is that the contrasting symbols are part of the complete story.
For Egyptians, the hearty pleasures of life and the grim procedures for maintaining one’s existence in the afterlife were both appropriate to tomb decorations. Yet, the many engravings that picture the dead being revivified by the prayers and spells offered by the living were meant in a more literal way than we can imagine. The ritual texts, the living doing their ritual tasks, the processions and commemorations of the living in the forecourts of the tombs, and the dead cavorting around in their tombs in the sweet Egyptian afterlife, are all part of the same Egyptian conception of our ultimate demise. They all had a part in the life of the Egyptian people; all were happening simultaneously.
Similarly, Egyptian culture seems to contain radically different evaluations of life of this world. Sometimes life was optimistic and sometimes it was shockingly pessimistic. Pessimism is a long-standing tradition in the Ancient Near East, literarily in the same genre as the Bible’s Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, and some Psalms, as well as many famous Mesopotamian Wisdom works. Some of their literary works contemplate suicide suggesting that death is better than life, as does the book of Job here and there.
Because of the legacy of the pyramids and the invention and preservation of hieroglyphs, almost everything that we know about ancient Egyptian religion has to do with the ultimate fate of the dead. The hieroglyphs were invented by the priesthood largely for the purpose of recording and glorifying their role in making pharaohs immortal, and keeping track of the riches which that role brought them. Hieroglyphs are, as the name certainly states, sacred script, prominently displayed in pyramids and tombs; other styles of writing, hieratic and later demotic, were reserved for more secular purposes, although even these had some religious uses. In the earliest period, hieroglyphs were carved and painted in tombs, temples, and religious pillars in grand houses. The purpose of the script, as is clear from every place we find it, was to cast spells to immortalize the dead, giving them by invocation a life for eternity.25
Instead of being “damned” or “saved,” the Egyptians distinguished between the akh, a transfigured person in the afterlife, and the only other alternative, to be mut, a corpse. One might, quite simply, die forever, or be “resurrected” for the pleasures of the afterlife.
On the other hand, the Egyptians sometimes depicted this process as a journey through an underworld fraught with danger. Only those who had the protection of the appropriate spells and had lived a moral life could safely maneuver avoiding the pitfalls. With the benefit of the prayers and/or spells, recited by priests, one’s corpse was embalmed and transformed, becoming akh, a word connoting light and everlasting and radiance, and illustrating again how many aspects of Egyptian religion were affected by solar imagery. Akhet, for instance, means “horizon” but can be factored into two parts, the home of light, at least for the transfigured ones, and the sun, the author of all life. Mut, on the other hand, derives from a Semitic root meaning “death,” frequently appearing in both Arabic and Hebrew.26
The Pyramid Texts are found in the tombs of the Old Kingdom pharaohs starting with Unas (or Wenis or Unis; the vowel patterns in Ancient Egyptian are educated guesses), the last king of the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2350 BCE). At first, they were found only on the walls but later also on the sacrophagus. Still later they are found on the hr tp, or the hypokephalos, as the Greeks would call it. Shaped variously, it was often a small disk-shaped object made of papyrus, cartonnage, or some other material, which the Egyptians placed under the head of the dead, to serve as a kind of pillow. They believed it would magically cause the head and body to be enveloped in flames, thus adding to the divinization process. It served as a kind of “prompter,” reminding the head of the mummy of its ritual lines, in case he forgot them at the crucial moment. The hypokephalos itself symbolized the eye of Re or Horus, and the scenes portrayed on it related to notions of resurrection and life after death. The hypokephalos represented the entire world, all that the sun encircles, both the upper sky and the nether world. Writing spells on hypokephaloi and other objects were symbolic of the importance of knowing these correct spells at the correct moment on the journey to the afterlife.
Spells were also found on the tombs of queens and, by the end of the Old Kingdom, on tomb walls and coffins of court officials. They represented the spells necessary to bring the body to its final resting place and are believed to mirror the ritual of the royal funeral, though precisely how the service began and ended is still debated.27 The pyramid of Unas contained 227 spells, which were widely copied into later tombs.
The description of the afterlife, known in Egyptian as the Duat, is somewhat vague in the early period but it does contain a “field of reeds,” a “field of offerings,” a “lake of the jackal,” and a “winding waterway,” which became much more prominent later.28 It is hardly a surprise that the sky was envisioned as needing to be traversed by boat, given Egyptian geography, consequently the dead were dependent upon the services of various ferrymen and servants to accomplish the journey.
The myth of Osiris’s dismemberment by Seth, his evil brother and god of disorder, served as a narrative structure on which to base the transformation to eternal life, but like writing itself, its ritual observances were largely confined to the aristocracy. For one thing, mummification itself was very expensive. When a deceased was properly embalmed by the priesthood of Osiris, his (or her) everlasting life was symbolized by putting the hieroglyphic symbol of Osiris before the proper name. At first, this symbol was reserved for the pharaoh only. As we have seen, the pharaoh was considered to be Horus on earth and Osiris when he rose into the heavens. The victory of Osiris’s son Horus against Seth was declared “true of voice,” and the same term followed the cartouche of the immortalized mortal. Indeed, each of the utensils or statues in temples had to receive a special rite of consecration, an “opening of the mouth,” in which a sword symbolically opened the nostrils or mouth of the deceased to enable breathing in the afterlife. Again, we see that the intervention of the living was necessary as an act of piety for the immortality of the dead.
Thus, the great funerary rituals of ancient Egypt were not simple acts of piety for the corpse but performative utterances, processes of actual revivification in the afterlife. The artist who created the sacred objects was called sankh, “giver of life,” and the ritual of bringing the corpse life was called heka, a great cosmic power to make rituals effective. The term heka itself is often translated as “magic” but in fact it overlaps quite fully with what we would call “religion” as well, there being no need in Egypt to separate religion and magic. Heka depicts a creative and protective power, a precondition for all life.29 It is probably most profitably translated into English as “power.” Heka was often depicted as the Werethekau, the cobra, who also appears as Wadjyt, the symbol of Lower (northern) Egypt on the brow of the pharaoh.
All we today have left of these ritual observances are the huge monuments of this religion but it is clear that each pyramid and tomb was but the solid remains of a vast social drama of remembrance and ritual transformation and that the immortalization service was carried on for the benefit of the person entombed. The religious duties and rituals performed by the priests ensured the immortality of the dead as much as the tomb and the mummification itself.
As with most cultures, the Egyptian view of the afterlife contained many different and often conflicting opinions at the same time. The Heliopolitan priesthood promoted the identification of its local god Amon-Re, the sun, with the pharaoh. The pharaoh, identified with this divinity, was believed to return to his immortal status after death, from which he surveyed the earth from the heavens each day. King Unas was the first “to make the walls of his tomb speak.” Compared to the bare walls of previous dynasties, Unas’s richly inscribed pyramid burial chamber has a programmatic sequence including formulas against serpents and others that might invade the extremities of the tomb. A complete menu of offerings was provided to sustain the body of the departed on its way to the afterlife. Next declarations of the continued life of the pharaoh were delivered.30 One extract from the pyramid of Unas declared:
There is no word against Unas on earth among men.
There is no misdeed against Unas in the sky among gods.
Unas has removed the word against himself, he has erased it,
in order to rise up to the sky.
Wepwawet (the ‘opener of ways’) has let Unas fly to the sky among his brothers the gods.
Unas has moved his arms as a god, has beaten his wings as a kite, and flies up, the flyer O men! Unas flies up away from you.31
Following these declarations, Unas was said to have ascended directly to heaven.
In Pyramid Text 306, this conception of ascent was transformed into Unas’s ride in the solar boat. Just as the pharaoh visited his kingdom by means of a boat, so the sun god sails across the skies to his more exalted destinations. As the sun went to rest every night and was gloriously reborn every morning, so also the pharaoh was reborn for eternal happiness in the other world. The eastern horizon of heaven becomes the analogue for entry into paradise:
Going in and out of the eastern doors of heaven among the followers of Re. I know the Eastern souls.
I know that central door from which Re issues in the East. Its south is the pool of Kha-birds, in the place where Re sails with the breeze; its north is the waters of Ro-fowl, in the place where Re sails with rowing. I am the keeper of the halyard on the boat of god; I am the oarsman who does not weary in the barque of Re. (ANET, 33)
There is a suggestion of a test to prove the pharaoh’s divine birth as he ascends heavenward. Although originally used for the pharaoh only, the texts were extended eventually to the pharaoh’s queens by the end of the Sixth Dynasty and by the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties (twenty-first century BCE and later) they were being used by the elite nonroyal class. By the First Intermediate period, the imagery was being used beyond the pharaoh’s family and palace, suggesting that the chaos of the Intermediate period which brought wider and more diffuse political control also brought with it a correspondingly wider access to the benefits of the afterlife.
The Ka, the Akh and the Ba
THE EMBALMING process was a ritual enactment of the myth of Isis and Osiris. It preserved the body for the afterlife, and the techniques of embalming were a secret of the priesthoods. The name of Osiris was affixed to the dead pharaoh, completing the identification of the king with the god. As everyone knows, if only from the tomb of King Tutankhamun in the Eighteenth Dynasty, during the first dynasty of the New Kingdom, the Egyptian pharaohs expected life in the world to come to be physical and pleasurable, just as this life had been. Thus, they saved their possessions for their future life.
So too even in the early period. The tombs of private citizens, not kings, provide the best evidence about the state of belief in life after death during this early period. Persons of high station adorned the walls of their tombs with scenes of everyday life, possibly indicating their conception of life after death. The ka was the most ritually important of all the Egyptian words for a person’s afterlife. The tomb was the “house of the ka,” which could physically dwell in it. The ka was often understood as something like a “twin” or “double.” Thus, the ka was an image of the living person, which after death could be viewed as living on in the tomb, requiring regular food offerings.32 The ka could just as well dwell in a statue, a portrait of the living person, while the deceased’s embalmed body lay below in a sarcophagus.33
But the ka was not just at the tomb. The ka could also dwell in the sky, as this example shows:
He that flieth flieth! He flieth away from you, ye men. He is no longer on earth, he is in the sky. Thou his city-god, his ka is at his side (π). He rusheth at the sky as a heron, he hath kissed the sky as a hawk, he hath leapt skyward as a grasshopper.34
The relationship between Horus and Osiris can be expressed through the agency of the ka. The hieroglyph for ka is two arms raised in adoration or embrace. Thus Horus, as the son of Osiris, can be seen as his worshiper and embracer, sharing his ka. The present pharaoh was then the embracer, the worshiper, the adorer, and the sacred sharer in the essence of his father, Osiris, who was his ka. As Jan Assmann writes:
This constellation of father and son, one in the hereafter, one in the world of the living, is one of the most fundamental elements of ancient Egyptian culture. The funerary cult is based on the idea that only the son is capable of reaching into the world of the dead and of entering a constellation with his dead father that bridges the threshold of death and that is mutually supportive and life-giving. This is what is meant by the Egyptian word akh. A widespread sentence says: Akh is a father for his son, akh is a son for his father.35
When the pharaoh died, he returned to his father Osiris, tracing the way to the afterlife. Ascent could be effected in any number of ways-by bird or beetle, for instance-but a favorite image was of a passenger on the boat of the sun, which appeared close to earth at dawn and dusk and mounted high in the sky the next day. The person, or his ka, survived death in the sky but his image remained on earth to receive the rites and rituals which were due the departed.
This image made of the departed was as close a likeness as possible, considered to be a physical embodiment of the individual, so that the ka could take up residence and receive offerings. The common word for statue, shesep, probably originally means “a receiver,” and when used in the phrase shesep-r-ankh (a receiver in order to live, a receiver of life), it denotes the capacity of the image to serve as a “receptacle” for the vital image of the deceased.36 The Sphynx, the famous human-headed lion at Giza, was originally one such shesep-r-ankh on a grand scale and originally supported a mortuary temple for a cult to the ka of the king at its base. Attention to the image as the receptacle of life-giving spirit may explain the meticulous attention given to producing a lifelike mummy. Like a hieroglyph, a lifelike mummy conveyed the essence, or identity, of the dead person. This conception of the image possibly also lies behind the entire hieroglyphic writing system of ancient Egypt and is mirrored in the commemorative cult, where the priestly establishment dramatized the process of immortalization in ritual. In a way, the pharaoh’s mummy becomes his hieroglyphic spell generating his immortality.
The grave was also visited by the ba, another and in some ways more important Egyptian soul concept, which was often represented as a human-headed bird.37 Like the ka, the ba was a complex and diverse phenomenon, whose use changed through time and depended on the referent as well.38 Proving that even the iconography was not stable, the ba was also designated as a ram or a ram’s-headed divinity, as the nocturnal sun god was sometimes understood to be a ram, probably because the syllable ba also could mean “ram.” His barque traveled on a watercourse that was the otherworldly mirror image of the earthly Nile, returning him to the place where he was to rise each morning in the East. At first, only the pharaoh was described as having a ba, so it may function as the pharaoh’s divinity in this context. Gradually, however, first the court and then, by the New Kingdom, the nobility and royal bureaucracy were described as having a ba, which seems to parallel their participation in the afterlife.39 Especially from the New Kingdom onwards, the focus of Egyptian interest in the afterlife appears to have concentrated more and more on the realm of Osiris underground.
No one knows precisely how the ka, ba, and akh interact, were synthesized, or how all of these related to “spirits,” “ghosts,” or “demons.” It sometimes seems as if the transformed dead successfully reunite the three aspects of life.40 Probably, these words, like the complicated pantheon itself, reflect local differences brought into a national system. Very likely there were different explanations for the three major types of soul even in antiquity.41 The word “shadow,” shut or showt, could also have the force of what we call “soul” in a general sense.42 But all these different words occurred in different rituals performed at the tomb, in the presence of the departed, and yet the departed was also enjoying the afterlife in the Duat, the Egyptian name for the afterlife land. The fact that these several aspects of the person could remain separate after death, to be reunited at night with special ceremonies-and indeed did not congeal into a single notion of soul until the Hellenistic period-may suggest that the Egyptians did not reify the concept of the self as strongly as did other cultures that superseded them, as we shall see later. Furthermore, the ancient Egyptian could speak of his djet-body, his ha’u-body, his “belly,” or his “soul” and mean his body proper. The sah, another word for “body,” was not itself expected to rise up physically after death.43
Indeed, there is good evidence that ancient Egyptians did not normally understand themselves as a single “self” at all but rather as a kind of harmony among forces. For example, the chagrin of love can be described in terms of dissociation of heart and self:
My heart quickly scurries away
when I think of your love (= my love of you).
It lets me not act sensibly,
It leaps up from its place.
It lets me not put on a dress,
nor wrap my scarf around me;
I put no paint upon my eyes,
I’m even not anointed. (Chester Beaty Papyrus: C 2.9; C 3.1)44
Great fear is likewise understood as a dissociation. Here is quoted Sinuhe, the main character of a famous Egyptian story, before pharaoh:
Stretched out on my belly I did not know myself before him
while this god greeted me pleasantly.
I was like a man seized by darkness.
My Ba was gone, my limbs trembled,
My heart was not in my body,
I did not know life from death. (Sinuhe B 252-56)45
Thus, the coherence of “the self” in ancient Egypt is problematic. One of the most famous wisdom pieces in Egyptian literature is the Dialogue of a Man and his Ba (sometimes called The Dialogue of the Self and the Soul). The “self” addresses the ba and is answered by it. Since this dissociation did not happen in ordinary circumstances, it was an important and extraordinary condition, symbolizing great emotional distress. The subject of this important internal dialogue was whether to “go away” (ŝmj) or not, a conventional way to express “to die.” In this context, we see a man contemplating suicide, asking Hamlet’s famous question: “To be or not to be?”
It is unclear whether the self says that there is no afterlife or there is no earthly remembrance of those who have gone on. The moral of the story is that what is worse than death is never to have been born.46 It is life that provides us with enjoyment. But just as important to notice is that Egyptian anthropology had not quite unified “the self” into a single, cognizant being. We also notice this contemplation in early Greek thought, but there we can trace a gradual rise of a single concept of a thinking, transcendent self. Here all three conceptions continue in use. In both cultures-early Greek and early Egyptian-the separation of the self into several different parts is correlated with the various social situations in which a person was expected to participate in the afterlife: present at the tomb as ka with the mummified body, in the heavens with the divine ba or akh residing in the house of Osiris, while enjoying the Duat in the “field of rushes,” receiving gifts at the “field of offerings,” riding the “barque of millions,” and many more. There was no need to posit a single experiencing self as long as the person appeared in all the contexts that society determined. A great many of the aspects of the self specifically have to do with the ways in which the dead were expected to participate in the institutions of social life in Egypt, either within religious rituals or in the journey to the afterlife, in which such scenes as judgment recapitulated the values of Egyptian culture. So, in important ways, the notion of a consistent self was a product of human speculation about the nature of the afterlife. We shall see this point repeated again and again in various ancient cultures.
Returning to the plight of the supplicant in the Dialogue of a Man with his Ba, we see that the condition of the soul got worse before it got better. The third stanza contains the widely quoted ode on the comforts of death:
Death is before me today
Like a sick man’s recovery,
Like going outdoors after confinement.
Death is before me today
Like the fragrance of myrrh,
Like sitting under a sail on a day of breeze.
Death is before me today
like the fragrance of lotus
Like sitting on the shore of drunkenness.
The repetition emphasizes that death can be a release from the troubles of life. This is not the standard notion of life in Egypt, where death is avoided and life is loved, but an exploration of doubt, anomie, and depression; and that accounts for its remarkable power. All the Egyptian love lyrics and exuberant scenes of life in Egyptian wall painting show how strange this dialogue was. It was an eloquent paean to the end of an unhappy life. The promise was for greater felicity in the next life.
Jan Assman finishes his discussion of this articulate and sad poem by saying that it is extraordinary and perhaps characteristic of a particular moment in Egyptian history:
The basic problem is what an individual does with his or her own solitariness in the context of a culture that constructs the person in terms of plurality. How can a person built on communication and constellation persist when communication fails and constellations break? It is the same question that underlies Whitehead’s famous definition: “Religion is what an individual does with his own solitariness.”47
The answer that the Dialogue of the Man with his Ba provides is the answer of religion.48
Akh: Felicity on the Other Side and Its Attainment
ASSMANN SUGGESTS further, in another work, that the notion of a consistent “self” was reached in parallel fashion with the development of the notion of a transcendent akh, the glorified body of the afterlife.49 It was, he professes, the development of the notion of ma’at, justice, right order, that allowed this consistency to develop.50 If ma’at could be achieved in this life, could it not be achieved in parallel fashion in the next life? The same notions of justice and equity, which followed good behavior in this life, ought also to obtain in the life to come. For this to develop, one needed to bring the notion of a courtroom from this life to the next. One had to develop a more sophisticated notion of the principle of identity between the person in this life and the next, a notion of “person” who could be punished and rewarded for behavior in this life. I would suggest that it is the glorified self, the akh, which is in some ways the completed form of the Ba, the “transcendent self” after death that provides the key, as it were, for knitting together a unified notion of the self in Egyptian culture, making the imaginative exercise of an afterlife indispensable for coming to full terms with ourselves as persons.
The condition of an Egyptian in the afterlife was first of all dependent upon correct behavior in this life but also apparently dependent upon amassing enough possessions to use in the next world, and more importantly on completing the correct funeral rituals, at least in the eyes of the priests, who wrote the texts. When the dead achieved akh status, usually translated “glorified being,” he had evidently completed all necessary steps for reaching the afterlife. This, no doubt, implied the attainment of priestly ritual purification, mummification, and burial. To achieve this status was to achieve the balanced and enduring order of justice, or ma’at, as it was known in Egyptian. This implied right order in the cosmos and right order on earth, brought by the power and authority of the pharaoh but maintained by the Osiris priests, who had the primary responsibilities for mummification.
By the Middle Kingdom, the tombs also depict star charts and figures quite clearly, presumably to help the dead navigate their trip, thus adding the starry heaven to the vocabulary of images of immortality available to the Egyptians for decorating tombs. In particular, the north star was invoked as “the star that cannot perish” a proof from nature that the pharaoh was immortal, since this star is at the top of the heavens, just where the pharaohs should go.
Burial was the beginning of this upward-bound process. The continued survival and well-being of the royal and aristocratic dead also depended on the establishment and maintenance of a mortuary cult. The cult might have been performed by the relatives of the deceased in ordinary families or by priests for the more aristocratic dead. An organized priestly cult was normally endowed by a grant of cultivated land, from which profits the offerings and ministrations of the priests were financed. Consequently the mortuary temples were the province of the very powerful and wealthy but employed a large number of caretakers and priests who reaped the benefits of the aristocracy’s piety.
The Social Sources of Egyptian Afterlife
TO WHOSE benefit was this religious system? The social implications of this system are obvious. Immortality was the prerogative, first of the pharaoh, and only afterwards of his most trusted and intimate retinue.51 It was essentially provided by the Osiris priests who knew how to embalm the body of the pharaoh and hence how to benefit from royal patronage. Since they dispensed salvation, in sacred spheres they were more powerful than the pharaoh himself. The priests and the pharaoh thus cooperated in the earthly power whose purpose was to provide the land with stability and peace, the pharaoh with eternal life, symbolized by ensuring the state of continuity between Osiris and Horus. At first, the attainment of immortality was closely associated with the state cults, controlled by powerful priesthoods. Even as the attainment of life after death became more and more democratic, more and more individual entrepreneurs of the afterlife sprang up, led by more and more needed priesthoods, embalmers, and funeral directors.
Essentially, the state cults and their entrepreneurial imitators were supported by those who could pay to have embalming done. They, in turn, benefited from the stability of political power which the pharaoh enforced, further implying that service to the gods brought natural stability as well as political stability and completed the circle by promising an eternal afterlife for anyone who respected ma’at.52
A number of histories of Egypt trace the continuing “democratization” or popularization of the immortalitization process through the succeeding dynasties.53 The Coffin Texts, collections of inscriptions taken from funerary stelae of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2160-1580 BCE), and The Egyptian Book of the Dead, succeeding Egyptian religious documents compiled in the New Kingdom (c. 1539-1075 BCE), both attest to the expanding clientele of persons who applied for and attained the akh state. Whether this represents a real democratization or merely an expansion of the literary record to nonroyal persons cannot be clearly distinguished. But the Coffin Texts allowed a wider circle of people the immortalitization of the pharaoh by a union with the gods.
Along with this seeming expansion of divine membership came an increasing “Osirification” of the mortuary ritual. The dead person was seen as an avatar of Osiris, with the ritual surrounding the Osiris myth coming to predominate in funerary practices. Finally, this seems to parallel the weakening of kingship during The First Intermediate Period, followed by the strengthening of kingship again under the Theban rule of the early Middle Kingdom.
A number of scholars see this progressive identification of the dead with Osiris as a backwards step in religious evolution because it seemed to make the success of the process more and more dependent upon correct Osirian ritual practices alone. This is a bold, modern, Western, value judgment. As S. G. F. Brandon noted, it is particularly interesting that concomitant with the wider clientele of persons eligible for eternal life came the scene of the judgment of the soul in the underworld.54 The judgment of the “soul” was what allowed nonroyal persons into the afterlife.
An Egyptian word for the self-conscious self is the “heart,” as it is in Israel. In contrast to the Old Kingdom, where the heart played no role at all, the heart became a central topic in the tomb inscriptions starting in the Intermediate Period and the Early Middle Kingdom. With the coming of personal judgment comes a confession of the self’s purity also, as the following inscription demonstrates.55
I am truly an official of great heart, a sweet lovable plant.
I am no drunkard, I was not forgetful;
I was not sluggish at my task.
It was my heart that furthered my rank,
It was my character that kept me in front.56
In the earliest Egyptian period, the pharaoh himself was described as attaining his immortal state upon the successful completion of the funerary rites, presumably because the pharaoh himself served as judge in this world. As more and more people were able to attain to akh state, however, a judgment scene developed in Egyptian literature. Prior to the Instruction for King Merikare (found in wisdom texts dated around 2100 BCE) the idea appeared that a person’s destiny depends upon the absence of complaints made against him or his ability to refute them in the heavenly court. In this particular wisdom text, the emphasis of the judgment shifts to the person’s own moral achievement. The person’s deeds were pictured as heaps of good and ill to be laid in front of the court. Furthermore, the striking image of the balance of the god Re, in which he weighed ma’at, became a major theme of the judgment scene.
A major new theme, found in the Coffin Texts, was the depiction of the dangers of the journey through the earth. The earth should not have kept the dead king imprisoned in its depths when he must always strive for the sky. The Coffin Texts fairly swarm with chthonic demons and other obstructing forces. Perhaps this dates from the growing practice of burying the court officials of the king around his pyramid in masteba tombs, most of which have not survived the ravages of the ages.
In the Amduat, the pharaoh traveled to his final reward through the hours of the night. He undergoes several adventures. Initially, he begins in his boat but must also navigate through the desert where the boat transforms into a snake. He encounters trials at almost every hour of the night. He finally was reborn in the East in the morning. Egyptian descriptions of beings of the underworld, the enemies of Osiris are represented in either human form or by hieroglyphs denoting “shadows” or “souls.” They were drawn in pits of fire. The damned were condemned to a “second death,” which was evidently equivalent to consignment to a “hell” in the afterlife. Brandon suggests that Egyptian mortuary cults were essentially magical techniques for the acquisition of immortality.57 So, there were other aspects of Egyptian religion as well, aspects in which moral behavior was not emphasized and monitored, especially when the epic adventures of the pharaoh in the afterlife were narrated. Pharaoh’s subjects, on the other hand, needed to demonstrate moral behavior to gain a glorified afterlife.
Akhenaten and The Egyptian Book of the Dead
THE REIGN OF Amenhotep IV, the famous Akhenaten, provided a brief respite in the process. A member of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and possibly the father of King Tutankhamon (born Tutankhnaten), Akhenaten briefly changed the religious culture of New Kingdom Egypt. As his name change suggests, he stopped patronizing the traditional gods of Egypt in favor of the single cult of Aten, the sun disk itself, with the result being that the traditional cults fell into disfavor. He even changed the capital to a newly constructed city, Akhetaten, where he and his wife Nefertiti were free to develop the new cult.58 Erik Hornung suggests that his religious reform, worshiping the religion of light, totally stopped the mortuary practices of the Osiris priesthood.59 As Hornung says:
The wakening of the dead to new life was no longer accomplished nocturnally in the netherworld, but in the morning, in the light of the rising sun and at the same time as those still alive. All was now oriented toward the east, and indeed, even the tombs lay in the eastern mountain of Akhetaten-in the text of the earlier boundary stelae Akhenaten gave directions to prepare his tomb there, “where the sun rises”; the “West,” previously the mortuary realm on whose “beautiful ways” the blessed dead had walked, disappeared from the concept of the world.60
Whatever actually happened in this interesting period in Egyptian history, after Akhenaten’s death, the religion of Egypt returned to its traditional gods and its traditional interests. The change of this young heir’s name to the now familiar Tutankhamon suggests that he was early put in the tutelage of the Osiris priesthood, while the religion of his predecessor, whatever it was exactly, was zealously erased. After Akhenaten we find The Egyptian Book of the Dead, which seems to signal the orthodox renaissance after its brief interregnum.
Beyond the brief religious reform, we might wonder how many other religious reformations were tried and defeated in Egyptian religion. Considering how important the mortuary cult was and how few people had access to it because of its expense, it is a wonder that more revolutions are not recorded. The Egyptian penchant for wiping out the memory of history’s losers is, no doubt, part of the issue. Another part is the likelihood that some way for ordinary people to share in the ultimate felicity was present but that it did not reach historical remembrance.
Whatever the reason, the failure of Akhenaten’s reform brought with it a new creative stage in Egyptian religion. The centerpiece of the restoration was a new book: The Egyptian Book of the Dead. By itself it is not an innovation. The Egyptian Book of the Deadis a compilation and anthologization of similar sorts of material found in the Coffin Texts, under the further influence of Osirification. There is no telling whether the texts were brought together in this way in the early copies. Our extant books are a kind of expanded anthology, evidently without too much editorial activity, in which every text known at the time was included in some way. It first appears on the interior walls of the coffin of Queen Mentuhotep, who ruled in the Middle Kingdom. The text was not written in either the classic, very educated and formal hieroglyphics or the less formal cursive hieroglyphics but in a yet easier script, known as hieratic. Sometime after the text was deciphered, the coffin itself disappeared, so no new research can be done on it.
In The Egyptian Book of the Dead, quintessentially the work of the New Kingdom, which is historically parallel with the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, it is the heart of the deceased that is balanced against ma’at, symbolized by a single feather. The title, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, is a Western invention, just as inaccurate as our title for the Bardo Chodol, the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead. The Egyptian work’s actual title is “The Book of Going Forth by Day,” meaning that the spells contained within the book gave its benefactors the power to live during the day instead of just existing at night, like ghosts and spirits. Chapters 30 and 125 of The Egyptian Book of the Dead are especially concerned with the judgment scene. In chapter 125, we find this famous negative confession:
I have not done that which the gods abominate.
I have not defamed a slave to his superior
I have not made (anyone) sick.
I have not made (anyone) weep.
I have not killed.
I have given no order to a killer.
I have not caused anyone suffering.
I have not cut down on the food-(income) in the temples,
I have not damaged the bread of the gods.
I have not taken the loaves of the blessed (dead).
I have not had sexual relations with a boy.
I have not defiled myself. (ANET, 34)
Here, we find the values that were expected of the Egyptians who could read this text. The list in the later chapter is even more complete. Besides noting that pederasty, murder, and profanation of religious objects was forbidden, so too was valorized and rewarded the generous treatment of servants and all the behaviors valuable to the Egyptian state. Since the scrolls were richly illustrated, it was probably read out to those who could not read, with effective use of the accompanying pictures.
Of the many depictions of this interesting scene, perhaps the most complete, is to be found in The Papyrus of Ani. In this fine papyrus, dating from the Nineteenth Dynasty (ca. 1320 BCE), Ani, an important ecclesiastical official at Thebes and Abydos, was depicted together with his wife, in festal attire watching the judgment scene in the “Hall of the Two Truths” (ma’ati).
The center of the picture depicts a great suspension scale with two balance cups suspended. The hieroglyph for heart is engraved on one side and a feather, the symbol of ma’at, on the other. The weighing of the heart was obviously a depiction of its worth against the standard of justice, bringing the invention of interchangeable measurement into the science of the soul. This, in itself, helps us understand what democratization of the afterlife must have meant because people with different deeds and occupations were measured against a fixed standard. The point of the scene was that Ani’s heart had to be found lighter than the feather of ma’at. Since the heart was the seat of intelligence, it was the part of the person answerable for moral behavior. It was commonly associated with the ba. As a result of this trial, Ani became, in effect, an akh in the afterlife and achieved in death a kind of complete personal reintegration in his exalted and transcendent state. The obvious representation of this would be depictions of the deceased among the stars, and indeed such illustrations exist. Ani apparently preferred to think of himself as savoring the joys of life. One vision of beatific existence did not contradict or prevent him from enjoying the other as well.
Heka, or Power
TO BE SURE, many of the rituals were supposed to work merely by the power of the ritual itself, the heka. But the underlying tone of moral character assumed in this scene is found explicitly in chapter 125 of The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Here was a profession of moral innocence. In the first section, addressed to Osiris, the reciter protests innocence of a long list of impieties and immoralities. In the second section, addressed to forty-two tutelary divinities, is a second list of protestations of innocence. This is followed by a prayer:
Hail to you, O gods of this place! I know you, I know your names. I shall not fall under your blows. You will not report that I am evil to this god in whose retinue you are. My case shall not come through you. My case shall not come through you. You shall say that ma’at returns me, in the presence of the Universal Lord; for I have practiced ma’at in Egypt. I have not offended the god. My case shall not be reported as evil….61
Power over the tutelary divinities depended on knowing their correct names, apparently so that one could address a spell or report on them in the event that they did not behave as instructed. In the afterlife, as in this life, the bureacrats and administrators could not be expected to automatically represent one’s case impartially. Special spells were like divine bakshish (the contemporary Arabic word for small “tips” or “bribes”), necessary at every turn to insure performance.62 This procedure looks to us like magic, but it is a commonplace even in the modern Middle East. One wonders whether it should not be considered high religion in Egypt because the effect of the spells is to change one’s immortal status, not change one’s life on earth. And, as I said above, Egypt did not make any distinction between magic and religion, so probably we should not in our attempt to distinguish various facets of their religious life.
But besides what seems to us to be an obvious magical response to an anxious life, we recognize that moral values are present as well. The pharaoh may have achieved immortality because the gods loved him so much they gave him the correct spells or prayers, or he may have successfully passed all the ordeals he faced in his journey to the afterlife. But the “the middle classes” (i.e., the client retainers and workmen of the pharaoh) definitely had to lead moral lives, as the judgment scene shows, in order to receive their just reward. The history of Egyptian religion, at first blush so stable and conventional, like most Egyptian inscriptions, by its very steadiness underlines important moves forward in the history of religion. We have now moved squarely into a moral universe, governed by a final ordeal of guilt or innocence. The result is a new sense of self.
Once more Egyptians made the trip to the underworld, more moral values crept into the narrative. There can be no doubt of the moral functions of The Egyptian Book of the Dead. It instructed the reader on how to live one’s life so as to gain “acquittal” of charges that might prevent life in the hereafter. In a bureacratic world, which was just as given to lying and political intrigue as our own, the tale illustrated by example the rewards for truth-telling and moral behavior. It is particularly interesting that the demonstration of the moral basis of the afterlife was concomitant with the expansion of that reward to a wider clientele of persons. It is as if to say that the worth of the pharaoh for life ever after goes without saying. His role was to represent the state and the Egyptian people in all dealings with humans and gods. But when the process of sharing the benefits of the afterlife with pharaoh’s loyal supporters began, the standards for worthiness were specified with more exactness. The virtues explicitly discussed were those that served the pharaoh’s and the priests’ state, but they were also personal virtues. The attainment of life in the hereafter was therefore dependent upon piety and a life of use and service to the Egyptian state. Furthermore, like most cultures, the Egyptians did not abandon previous notions when new ones came along. Instead, they just added the new ones so that sometimes the ritual and literature appears to contradict each other. Yet, it is more likely that Egyptians saw all the various notions as additive, describing a complex reality.
During The Third Intermediary period and thereafter, the capital and hence the royal tombs, were moved to Tanis, in the reedy areas of Lower Egypt. The preservation of the tombs in this area is poor, due to subterranean moisture. In addition the government unraveled, and Egypt began a rare period of feudalism. Power was restored by the Kushite kings of the Sudan in the south, beginning a foreigner-dominated period. But at the same time, they were the saviors of Egypt from certain political degeneration. The Kushites obeyed the degenerated conventions of The Third Intermediate Period, putting few hieroglyphs on the wooden coffins.
At the same time, they renewed interest in monuments, first, by imitating the stone coffins of the past out of wood and, second, by reviving texts such as The Egyptian Book of the Dead of the Ramesside period-in particular, formulas for breathing air to power over water in the afterlife. When the Tanite or Kushite dynasty took over, the process accelerated. Stone was reintroduced by Tarhaqa (the Tirhakah of the Bible) who constructed a tomb complex deep in the Sudan at Nuri. The Ushabtis (servant figures for the tomb) are among the finest carved in Egypt. An Ushabti text promoted The Egyptian Book of the Dead into its rightful place at the center of Egyptian rites of life after death. What followed was the beginning of a large temple and tomb complex. The vast scale was due to the efforts of Padiamenipet’s assuming the title of chief-lector priest, which had more or less gone into desuetude for a millennium. His tomb complex contains many themes of the late Old Kingdom, as well as friezes of objects and the Coffin Texts from the early Middle Kingdom and The Egyptian Book of the Dead as well as the full range of underworld books of the New Kingdom.63
Egypt in Late Antiquity
CAMBYSES OF PERSIA, the Shah of Iran, ended the renaissance in 525 BCE when he invaded and conquered Egypt. This corresponds to the early Second Temple period of Israelite history and marks the period in which the Jewish colony of Elephantine at Aswan was founded. Like the Egyptians, the Israelites were ruled by the Persians. The Persians ruled Egypt for far longer than the brief Assyrian conquest under Esarhaddon in 671 BCE. The Persian kings and governors were styled as pharaohs after the Egyptian fashion, but they must have needed ambitious native talent to rule as some Egyptian administrators rose very high in the Persian bureaucracy. Egypt was turned into a regular province of the Persian Empire, with the priesthood protecting the rights of the Persian ruler, the King of Kings or Shahan-Shah, just as elsewhere in the Persian Empire. Ezra and Nehemiah in Israel, as well, ruled at the pleasure of the Shah of Iran.
Two centuries later, in 332 BCE, Alexander the Great conquered Egypt, styling himself as the savior of Egypt by assuming the title of Horus, the son of the sun god, and putting an end to Iranian rule over all of Western Asia. Yet, he retained the Persian administrative units, the satrapies, and their governors the satraps, even as he restored the hieroglyphic texts and temples. Alexander commanded the building of a fine new port city, to be named Alexandria, but left before construction began and did not live to see the city built.
Alexander died a mere decade later, leaving his general Ptolemy in charge of Egypt. His successors, the Ptolemaic dynasty, in effect, became the Greek pharaohs of the whole country. Although Ptolemy declared himself pharaoh and king (305 BCE), he did not aggressively meld cultures, as Alexander legendarily wanted. Though they often styled themselves in Egyptian fashion, the Ptolemaic rulers spoke educated, Attic Greek, not Macedonian Greek or Egyptian. The aristocracy supported them, making the Greeks a ruling class apart from the previous Egyptian culture. Cleopatra VII, the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty, just as purebred Greek as the first Ptolemy, was the first to claim to understand demotic Egyptian. But, so far as we know, there was not a single Egyptian document in the famous library at Alexandria and all government correspondence was in Greek, thus excluding most native Egyptians from controlling their own country or even understanding what the government was doing much of the time.
Instead, the rulers continued the ancient cults as a way of communicating with the people. The Ptolemies kept the good order of the people, as the Persians did, by patronizing the Egyptian temples and religious cults of the people, building many huge new edifices, styling themselves in the traditional roles of the pharaohs. The Egyptian priests, for their part, cooperated. But they went far beyond cooperation. They began the process of explaining their religion to a classical audience and later developed hellenized forms of their cults which became popular all around the Roman world.
The Romans continued this two-tiered system of social stratification on the basis of language for a thousand years, until the Arab conquest. A brief revival of Egyptian texts and funerary beliefs surfaced during the reign of Cleopatra VII. But Egypt did not regain its independence until the twentieth century. The Romans offered not nearly the same kind of support to the Egyptian cults as the Ptolemies did, setting the stage for the arrival of a new religion, Christianity, to replace the weakened old one.64
Diodorus Siculus, who wrote about the Egypt of 56 BCE when he visited it, describes funeral ceremonies that suggest a parallel between the supernatural judgment in the afterlife and the social judgment placed on the person in this life. Before the burial, there was a public evaluation of the deceased, with an attendant verdict, he tells us. When the judgment was negative, the person was denied a proper burial, unless it was a crime for which the family was able to make restitution. When the burial was not done properly, the deceased’s way to the afterlife was blocked.65 In general, then, Diodorus was extraordinarily impressed with the level of Egyptian morality. (212)
This late report is one of our clearest views of popular religion in Egypt. How far back this practice goes, we cannot speculate. But it certainly would explain why ordinary people were able to put up with the conspicuous consumption of the aristocracy. And it shows how religious beliefs can function in social situations as well as how much of religion is a social discourse where the prescribed script interacts with all the actors to produce socially acceptable rewards.
During the Greco-Roman period, the cult of Isis spread throughout the Greek-and Latin-speaking world. This was facilitated by the visit of Manetho, chief priest of Isis, to the mysteries of Demeter celebrated at Eleusis. Upon his return, he reformulated Isis worship into a “mystery cult,” from whence it became easily understandable throughout the Roman Empire. In spite of the Roman aristocracy’s resistance to foreign religions, the Mysteries of Isis were soon found virtually everywhere in the Empire, including Rome itself.
Roman Egyptians also began to adopt new forms. For instance, a new secular document, the passport, was paralleled in religious documents when magical texts began giving safe-conduct to the dead. This clearly bears on the Gnostic gems and the later Jewish magical spells to be found in the Hekhalot texts (early Jewish mysticism), all of which detail how inscribed amulets operate as passports throughout the perilous journey up to the highest heavens where the angels or, alternatively, the gods of salvation reside. It is as if Roman bureaucracy formed the basis of the description of the evil world. The Egyptian had to rise to an area of joy above it, where the true high gods of Egypt were still powerful, though the demons now controlled the earth.
In the second century CE, the funerary tradition was still alive and well, though almost entirely transferred into the demotic language. The priesthoods certainly were employed to gain the favor of the Roman emperors, whom they styled as immortal gods. Yet in the third century not one text produced showed any innovative signs, which corresponds to a period of bleak military tensions and bloodthirsty revolts and suppressions. After that, Rome actively suppressed Egyptian religious forms, just as they suppressed Jewish symbols of independence. The last known hieroglyphic text is datable to August 24, 394 CE at Philae near Aswan while the last demotic text was two graffiti, again from Philae, datable to 452 CE. In Kush, Egyptian forms continued for a while, especially as Kushites had never completely given up pyramid building. They also continued to place judgment scenes on tomb-temple walls.66 The final blow came when Christianity arrived as a Roman protest movement, soon becoming quite popular throughout the Empire.
In the Christian period, little can be said to have survived intact from the Pharaonic period. As telling as may be the relationship between early Egyptian religion and some of the forms of Christianity, we lack any proof for the channel of transmission. Maybe the connection is through the religion of Isis and Serapis (a Greek contraction of Osiris-Apis) which had already entered Roman life. And again the sign for life ankh, seems to be the predecessor for the crucifix, which was not an early Christian symbol and appears to evolve out of contact with Egyptian culture through the monasteries of Pachomius, the founder of Christian monasticism in Egypt.67
Some Relationships with Israel
EGYPT WAS ONE of the two birthplaces of the Israelite people, according to Biblical legend. We find archeological evidence in the First Temple period, that at Kuntillet ’Ajrud, Israelites could figure YHWH as a calf-headed deity in much the same way as Osiris-Apis of Egypt.68 It is likely to have been influenced by Canaanite tradition as well, but the imagery of Egypt is much in evidence. Especially the West Semitic pantheon has been influenced by Egyptian religion.69
Because of the close historical contact at the origin of Israelite history, it is also possible that Egyptian beliefs in life after death had some effect on Israelite culture. One would expect a relationship to emerge. Israelites did in fact develop a notion of bodily resurrection returning to a perfected life, though no such ideas made any inroad in Israelite texts during the First Temple period (1000 BCE-586 BCE). No specifically Egyptian imagery can be seen in it, however, and had any putative Egyptian origin been known, it would have been sufficient to condemn it in Israelite eyes.70
Freud popularized the notion that Israelite monotheism came originally from the Egyptian heresy of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV, Akhenaten, but Freud’s chronology was off by centuries. As Akhenaten worshiped the disk of the sun and the cult that he founded was all but erased afterwards, it seems unlikely that it could have converted the Hebrews centuries later, when even Hebrew imagery about God is so different. There is a certain amount of evidence that Hebrew psalms occasionally borrowed from Egyptian sources. For instance, Psalm 104 seems to incorporate aspects of The Hymn to Aten, but the specific traces of Egyptian religion were removed, leaving only the suspicion that some Hebrew intellectual admired the turn of phrase of the heretical “monotheistic” Egyptian priesthood.
So, in general, if Egyptian thought is present in some attenuated way in Jewish or Christian thinking, it is hard to demonstrate. The Egyptians spoke an afterlife far away in another place, sometimes in the stars, and accompanied by a long and dangerous journey, with a postmortem judgment scene. The Biblical Israelites of the First Temple period spoke hardly at all of an afterlife. In the Hellenistic period, Jews living in the land of Israel most often spoke about a reconstructed earth at the end of time, with a judgment scene there and no resurrection until then, and no embalming or mummification.71
It is true that the Exodus narrative says that Joseph’s body was mummified but that is specific to his adventures in Egypt, a little historicizing detail inserted into the narrative, not a pattern that Israelites followed. Egyptian religion was based on the hieroglyphic script and was always very graphic, while Israelite thought was, in general, aniconic. It is worth noting that Egyptian imagery has little in common with Israelite notions. The only exception to this would be the obvious borrowing of the figure of the Madonna and child from the Mysteries of Isis (Isis with Horus on her lap) into Christianity, which is as likely to have taken place first in Rome as in Egypt. This illustrates the phenomenon that images sometimes move where sense might more easily forbid their entry. This phenomenon will be more obvious in the relationship between Israel and its close Canaanite neighbors.
Instead, what most strikes any reading of the vast Egyptian traditions on the subject is not just the complete lack of parallel in Israelite thought but Israel’s opposition to Egyptian religion, and vice versa. The Egyptian figuration of Seth is in important ways a caricature of the gods of the Semitic Shepherd Kings, the Hyksos, evincing a polemical edge to Egyptian mythology, as happens in every culture. Israelite tolerance of Egyptian religion can hardly be expected to be any better, considering how widely Egyptian religion was itself satirized. The story of the golden calf is a satire on religious practices amongst the Canaanites and the Egyptians but is also likely to be a product of the civil war between the North and South in dynastic Israel.72 Here, one sees clearly, the victory of the Judean version of monotheism, which predominates in the Bible, over the Northern cult is extremely important. For the Hebrews, the sky could not contain Osiris, as it already contained YHWH, and the dead, who were at best spirits, could not travel there.
Egyptian notions of the preservation of the body may at first seem related to the Second Temple period Jewish notion of resurrection. But this connection too becomes a contrast when one considers the differences in the treatment of the body. The Egyptians considered the preservation of the body necessary for the journey to heaven, as life would continue there in much the same way as here. But they did not envision the afterlife in the physical body. The Hebrews held no such notion that the body had to be embalmed. Indeed, they forbade it. But they later affirmed the notion that the afterlife would be on this earth, perfected, and it would arguably take place in the physical body (or at least a perfected physical body). There is a strong tradition in Jewish mysticism that the dead will achieve a transformed angelic state. It is quite possible that Egypt helped Israel come to these conclusions, as we shall see. In this respect, it is likely to be the general mystical synthesis of the Hellenistic world, in which Egypt had an important part, that affected Jewish mystical views, and not a specifically national Egyptian tradition. In other words, Egyptian ideas affected Jewish mysticism but the Egyptian tag had to be removed first.
In earlier times the evidence is much more tenuous. YHWH does not specifically share any of Osiris’s characteristics. The dead do not go to heaven in ancient Israelite thought, rather if anything they remain underground. Israelite tradition does, of course, show the rudiments of a belief in spirits and ghosts, though worship of them is proscribed by the party that produced the Bible. So does every culture known to us. Yet, there is almost nothing in Israelite thought that allows us to directly link any of the concepts of heavenly afterlife with the very vibrant traditions that we see in Egypt, at least until the Hellenistic period.
Canaanite religion certainly did influence Israelite conceptions of the deity and Canaanite religion is clearly influenced by Egypt. The difficulty with this theory is not the conceptualization of the influence but the demonstration of the relationship. In the Hellenistic period too, Egyptian thought was popularized by the religion of Isis, which spread everywhere. In this guise, these notions had important consequences in Jewish and Christian thought; indeed, Egyptian ideas may still be influencing our thought today. But, if this can be granted, then it was an already very denatured and denuded Egyptian thought that served as the basis of the influence. The Egyptian tradition of Late Antiquity was taken over by philosophers and mystics and other independent religious practitioners. It will be one basis, as we shall see, for a rarified astral immortality that became very popular among the privileged pagans of Late Antiquity. In the process, it lost any organic relationship it had to the situation-in-life (Sitzim-Leben) in Egypt.
Summary
EGYPTIAN NOTIONS of the afterlife can yet be appreciated for the touching beauty they contain. Throughout antiquity, from the Sixth Dynasty on, Egyptian literature produced magnificent, affecting, vibrant, personal prayers in the form of letters to the dead:
A communication by Merirtyfy to Nebetiotef: How are you? Is the West taking care of you according to your desire? Now since I am your
beloved upon earth, fight on my behalf and intercede on behalf of my name. I did not garble a spell in your presence when I perpetuated your name upon earth. Remove the infirmity of my body! Please become a spirit for me before my eyes so that I may see you in a dream fighting on my behalf. I will then deposit offerings for you as soon as the sun has risen and outfit your offering slab for you.73
Egyptian culture is one of great antiquity and also great conservatism and stability. Yet, we can see definite and important developments in Egyptian religion. From our vantage point, we see from the immensely long history of Egypt that even heaven has a history. Such a perspective was not available to people living in ancient Egypt. They naturally connected their views of the afterlife with those of the first pharaohs, seeing mostly the continuity. Such perceptions ought, at the very least, make us aware of the limitations of our own perceptions of stability in our culture. We too have undergone vast changes since the birth of Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. We may not blithely conclude that we believe the same things as did our coreligionists at the origins of our traditions. Consequently we may not conclude that the afterlife is a fixed place with fixed characteristics, a geographical location which never changes. We must face the obvious conclusion that even our afterlife is suited to our interests in this world. It is a projection of our own desires and goals, as we shall see. But we have a long story ahead of us yet.
Secondly, we have seen that this development has a great deal to do with the social forces that dominate Egyptian society over a long period of time. The democratization of admission to the afterlife seems to be related to the breakup of the Old Kingdom and subsequent affluence of the retainers and bureaucracy of the Middle Kingdom. Thus we see in the depiction of the afterlife important social, economic, and political goals as well as personal ones.
Thirdly, the afterlife is an important factor in defining personal goals. In Egypt we see that a notion of a person became inherent in the speculation about fate and disposition after death. Presumably, Egyptians preserved the body because it was more easily effected than in other places in the world. It may itself have been a shesep rankh, a receiver of life like the consecreated statues of the pharaohs. But with the development of more democratic notions of the afterlife, a more sophisticated notion of identity had to develop. There had to be a principle of identity linking the akh, the glorified person, with the person on earth whose moral behavior determined the final outcome. It may be that it was the developing barter economy that forced ma’at to accommodate these new ideas, as it depended on a notion of balance and worth, a concept that came out of the development of a market economy. It is scarcely possible to define exactly how it came about. But whatever factors combined to bring about the scene of the judgment of the soul, it had the effect of validating a notion of individual personhood on earth. Eventually this relationship has the effect of helping to define internal human conscious life in our own religions.
In Egypt, finally, we can see the correlation between the climate of the Nile Valley and the national myths of the ancient Egyptians. Not only does this correlation explain the climate in usable ways, it also gives the Pharaoh the role of the hero, who conquers death as the immortal sun. Eventually, ordinary Egyptians understood themselves, defined themselves and the transcendent part of their lives, by imitating the Pharaoh’s path through the underworld. The afterlife became the mirror of the self.