2.1 Positive Views of Death
Egyptian positive views of the afterlife constitute one of the few aspects of the ancient world to have caught the popular imagina-tion and to be well known in our own times. They have been ex-tensively treated in detailed scholarly work and competent
sum-1So S. Morenz, Egyptian Religion, London 1973, 187; M. M¨uller, ‘After-life’, Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, vol. 1, Oxford 2000, 36.
2Morenz, Egyptian Religion, 195.
3For comparisons across many cultures, see e.g. P.J. Ucko, ‘Ethnographic and Archaeological Interpretation of Funerary Remains’, World Archaeology 1 (1969), 262-80; S.C. Humphries, ‘Introduction: Comparative Perspectives on Death’, in: S.C. Humphries, H. King (eds), Mortality and Immortality:
The Anthropology and Archaeology of Death, London 1981, 1-13.
Death in Israel and Egypt 95
maries,4 so a brief summary of their outline and development down to Ptolemaic times will suffice here.
In the Old Kingdom the king alone could achieve a blessed afterlife among the gods. This prospect was gradually extended to non-royal officials from at least the Middle Kingdom onwards, and by the New Kingdom it was accessible in principle to all.
Correct preparation was vital, notably preservation of the body in mummification, provision of material needs in perpetual offerings by the living, knowledge of the underworld route, and protection from its dangers. This knowledge and protection were provided first by Coffin Texts and later by the Books of the Dead (or more accurately, Books of Going Forth by Day). These texts, inscribed successively on tomb walls, coffins and papyri, would guide the deceased either directly to the heavens or through the elaborate underworld to the great hall of judgment, where Osiris presided, and where one’s heart was weighed against the feather symbol of Maat. Those who passed the test proceeded to the Field of Reeds / Field of Offerings, those who did not were devoured by the crocodile-headed Ammut. Before judgment the deceased would pronounce the famous negative confession contained in chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead, with its numerous declarations of innocence.5
As with any complex culture extending over several millen-nia, there were inevitably variations and ambiguities concerning the dead and their situation. For instance, they were located vari-ously in the sky and the underworld, they were in their tomb yet free to wander, they enjoyed a good life yet depended on repeated provision by the living. Nevertheless, apart from an increasing in-clusiveness, Egyptian afterlife beliefs remained remarkably stable through the dynastic period.
2.2 Contact with the Dead
One interesting feature of the continued existence of the dead is their assumed ability to affect the lives of the living. In particular, a number of letters to the dead have been recovered. These
ad-4See most recently M. M¨uller, ‘Afterlife’, Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, vol. 1, Oxford 2000, 32-6; J.H. Taylor, Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt, London 2001; J. Assmann, Tod und Jenseits im alten ¨Agypten, M¨unchen 2001.
5For text, see ContS, 2.12, 59-64; ANET, 34-6.
dress the recently departed, reminding them of the writer’s past affection and continued loyalty, and requesting help in a current difficulty.
These letters have a long history from the Old Kingdom to the New Kingdom,6 though only a few have survived.7 However, the very mundaneness of the letters imply that this was a common, widespread, unremarkable custom, part of the popular religion for which we have relatively little evidence.8
The procedure is summarised colourfully by Gunn:
We of course communicate with our departed friends by letter. That the dead can read is obvious, for in the after-life they retain all their faculties; and if the addressee is illiterate,9there are others who will read the letter to him.
As to transmitting it, since the dead, who spend much of their time in their tombs, take the food-offerings that we put down for them there, they can also take a letter if we leave it in the same place; and if, by an artful combina-tion, we write the letter on the bowl containing an offering, delivery is as good as certain. As to the form of the let-ter, it is a good thing to begin by recalling some incident which shows that we, or the person on whose behalf we are writing, parted from the addressee on good terms; we will then state our trouble, and, while calling him to take the necessary steps, work in a reminder that powerful as he is he depends on us for the upkeep of his tomb and the sup-ply of his offerings, so that if he does not help us we have the power to make things very unpleasant for him. This is not perhaps very delicate, but it is necessary because the dead, in the very different circles in which they now move, may easily lose interest in our affairs.10
6A.H. Gardiner, K. Sethe, Egyptian Letters to the Dead: Mainly from the Old and Middle Kingdoms, London 1928. Also E. Wente, Letters From Ancient Egypt (SBL.WAW, 1), Atlanta 1990.
7Less than twenty in a thousand years; so J. Baines, ‘Society, Morality, and Religious Practice’, in: B.E. Shafer (ed.), Religion in Ancient Egypt, Ithaca 1991, 155. Gardiner and Sethe give 11; Wente reproduces 8 of these and adds another 6, i.e. ‘most of the letters that have survived reasonably intact’ (p. 1). I have not had access to S.R. Keller, Egyptian Letters to the Dead in Relation to the Old Testament and Other Near Eastern Sources, PhD Dissertation, New York University, 1989.
8On this, cf. A.I. Sadek, Popular Religion in Egypt during the New King-dom, Hildesheim 1987. I thank Prof. K.A. Kitchen for this and two other references, and for kindly reading a draft of this paper.
9Wente reports estimates that only 1% of ancient Egypt was literate (p. 7).
10B. Gunn, review of Gardiner, Sethe, Egyptian Letters, JEA 16 (1930), 147.
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One example on a bowl from the Old Kingdom, cited here for its compactness and concluding comment, reads as follows:
It is Shepsi who addresses his mother Iy:
This is a reminder of the fact that you said to me, your son, ‘You shall bring me some quails that I may eat them’, and I, your son, then brought you seven quails and you ate them. Is it in your presence that I am being injured so that my children are disgruntled and I, your son, am ill?
Who, then, will pour out water for you?
If only you might decide between me and Sobekhotep, whom I brought back from another city to be interred in his own city among his necropolis companions after tomb clothing had been given to him. Why is he injuring me, your son, so wrongfully, when there is nothing that I said or did? Wrongdoing is disgusting to the gods!11
The final comment could be Shepsi’s indirect appeal to the gods over the head of his mother Iy, or a veiled threat that they will not look kindly on Iy in her afterlife for allowing her son to suffer.
These letters show that the dead and living were thought to exist in symbiosis, ‘engaged in a network of mutual relationships which were conceptualised in highly ambivalent, even contradict-ory terms’.12 The dead were both weak, needing regular susten-ance, and powerful, able to influence affairs on earth. And the living met their physical needs and supplicated their benevolent influence.
One letter urges: ‘Please become a spirit for me [before] my eyes so that I may see you in a dream fighting on my behalf.’13 Currid describes this as ‘a form of necromancy, an attempt to know or influence the future’.14 But this requested dream appar-ition is nothing like the consultation of the dead practised in the Semitic world and elsewhere. For necromancy proper, i.e. seeking to interact directly with the spirits of the dead, there is no evid-ence from pre-Ptolemaic Egypt. As a topic, necromancy merits
11Wente, Letters, 212, no. 342. L.H. Lesko, ‘Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egyptian Thought’, in: J.M. Sasson, Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 3, New York 1995, 3, 1765, quotes 4 others from Wente, from both ends of the second millennium.
12S.J. Seidlmayer, ‘Necropolis’, Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, vol.
2, Oxford 2001, 511.
13Wente, Egyptian Letters, 215, no. 349.
14J.D. Currid, Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament, Grand Rapids 1997, 222.
no article in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt or in-dexed reference in the Lexikon der ¨Agyptologie,15 and is ignored in recent monographs dealing with magical practices in Egypt.16 2.3 Disrespect of the Dead
Baines and Lacovara write tellingly: ‘Ancient Egypt offers a para-digm contrast between ideals of respectful care for the dead, on the one hand, and realities of medium- and long-term neglect, de-struction and reuse on the other.’17 This contrast, often ignored or down-played in popular introductions to Egyptian afterlife be-liefs, reveals a glaring disjuncture between theoretical respect and practical disrespect. To our knowledge, it was seldom addressed directly within Egyptian society itself.
First, mortuary material was reused. This took many forms:
stone was taken from old monuments and reused in newer ones;
parts of one mortuary complex were annexed to another; tombs were appropriated for later burials, often without any family con-nection; new tombs cut into and violated the integrity of old ones; even coffins and sarcophagi were recycled. This frequently occurred for monuments and tombs already centuries old and neglected, but it could also occur for relatively recent mortuary material.18It was so common that a tomb inscription could even warn against it: ‘[One] interesting curse written on a small stone block was originally placed at the entrance to a tomb to tell po-tential interlopers to find a place of their own and not disturb even a pebble from the magically protected site.’19
The practical reasons for doing so are obvious. The construc-tion of tombs, sarcophagi and coffins was a very costly enterprise, suitable dressed stone was in short supply, and the needs of fam-ilies for necropolis space would vary over time. But whatever the immediate justification for such recycling of material and
how-15W. Helck et al. (eds), Lexikon der ¨Agyptologie, Wiesbaden 1972-1992. Nor is it noted in J. F. Borghouts, ‘Witchcraft, Magic, and Divination in Ancient Egypt’, in: J.M. Sasson et al. (eds), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, vol. 3, New York 1995, 1775-85.
16E.g. R.K. Rittner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice, Chicago 1993; G. Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt, London 1994.
17J. Baines, P. Lacovara, ‘Burial and the Dead in Ancient Egyptian Society:
Respect, Formalism, Neglect’, Journal of Social Archaeology 2 (2002), 5.
18For references, see Baines and Lacovara, ‘Burial and the Dead’, 18-9.
19Lesko, ‘Death and Afterlife’, 1771.
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ever official or unofficial its status, it clearly reflects a lack of respect for the dead whose mortuary material was thus co-opted.
In theory they were to be honoured in perpetuity; in practice they were forgotten and their funerary accoutrements were command-eered by another generation for its own – theoretically perpetual – commemoration.
Secondly, tomb-robbery was widespread. Indeed, Baines and Lacovara state: ‘The only reasonable insurance against robbery was to have a grave too poor and insignificant to warrant plun-dering’ (p. 25). Royal and elite tombs may have survived in-tact through periods of strong state control, but were plundered of their wealth at the earliest opportunity. The so-called Tomb Robbery Papyri indicate how pervasive was such activity in the Theban necropolis, implicating many of the very officials em-ployed to guard and provide for the dead.20 ‘As soon as a tomb dropped out of the network of social processes within the com-munity, it was bound to face rapid destruction.’21
Robbery of non-royal tombs was endemic, often occurring shortly after burial but occasionally during or even before burial, as evidenced by disturbed body wrappings, empty sarcophagi, non-operative blocking stones, etc.22The robbers were often tomb diggers who knew the exact locations of the treasures, sometimes tunnelling directly into a coffin from below or from an adjacent wall. They also knew how to circumvent the increasingly elabor-ate protective devices of blocking stones, pits, portcullises, etc.23 Even the great pyramids with their warren of false tunnels and array of other protective devices were eventually robbed of their treasures. The tomb of Tutankhamun is a very rare exception, and stunning proof of the riches which tempted robbers.
As Seidlmayer rather cautiously concludes: ‘tomb robbery, while clearly considered a criminal act, was in fact a regular phe-nomenon, and so it seems that religious fears did not trouble the minds of the ancient Egyptians as overwhelmingly as is
some-20For recent summary see O. Goelet, ‘Tomb Robbery Papyri’, Oxford En-cyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, vol. 3, Oxford 2001, 417-8.
21Seidlmayer, ‘Necropolis’, 506-12.
22Discussion and references in Baines, Lacovara, ‘Burial and the Dead’, 25;
Lesko, ‘Death and Afterlife’, 1771.
23These are well described and illustrated in A.J. Spencer, Death in Ancient Egypt, Harmondsworth 1982, ch. 4.
times supposed . . . ’24 Indeed, endemic tomb desecration sug-gests that the afterlife beliefs solemnly expressed by some in their tombs were simply ignored by others for material gain. And ac-knowledgment of the reality of tomb robbery is extremely rare.25 Thirdly, mortuary offerings which family or priests were ex-pected to present in perpetuity were soon abandoned. Property was regularly endowed to ka-priests on condition that they reg-ularly furnish the dead with food. But, as Gardiner eloquently explains:
Needless to say, in the lack of legal enforcement, such con-tracts lapsed all too easily not long after their author’s de-mise. When this happened, and after the tomb had been wrecked and plundered, all that was left to its owner was the despairing hope that his name might be remembered or that a funerary formula might be pronounced on his behalf by some kindly passer-by. . . . What bathos that a people who had staked their hopes upon the luxury of their tombs should have to plead thus, whining like beggars that it will cost the passer-by nothing and may well bring him luck!26
2.4 Negative Views of Death
In his classic, aptly titled work, Death as an Enemy,27 Zandee notes several indications from the Old Kingdom onwards of what he terms a ‘negative view’ of death. For instance, in the Pyr-amid Texts the common people28 cannot pass through doors to
‘heaven’ as does the king. Instead, they stay in the earth, locked up in the realm of its god Geb. Hence one line reads: ‘Take NN by his arm, take NN to heaven, that NN may not die on earth among men.’29 Alternatively, they may stay with Osiris in the underworld, as implied by the king’s own avoidance of this fate:
‘Re-Atum has not given you to Osiris . . . ’; ‘I do not deliver him
24Seidlmayer, ‘Necropolis’, 511.
25E.g. Papyrus Chester Beatty IV, cf. Lesko, ‘Death and Afterlife’, 1767.
26A.H. Gardiner, The Attitude of the Ancient Egyptians to Death and the Dead, Cambridge 1935, 27-8.
27J. Zandee, Death as an Enemy According to Ancient Egyptian Concep-tions, Leiden 1960.
28Replaced by ‘foreign peoples’ in variants Pyr. 1726.a.b.
29Pyr. 604.e-f, cited by Zandee, Death, 8.
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to Osiris . . . ’30 Further, those consigned to the underworld walk upside down, as often depicted pictorially and occasionally textu-ally, for example: ‘It is NN’s horror to walk in darkness, he cannot see walking upside down’.31(By the time of the Coffin Texts, this fate was reserved for the impious.) And the West, the place of the dead, was to be avoided: ‘May you not go on the roads of the western ones; who go on them, they do not return; may you go on these roads of the eastern ones, among the followers of Re.’32 A negative reaction to death, probably from the First Inter-mediate Period, occurs in chapter 175 of The Book of the Dead, in words said by ‘the Osiris NN’:
‘O Atum, what does it mean that I go to the desert, the Land of Silence, which has no water, has no air, and which is greatly deep, dark and lacking?’
‘Live in it in contentment.’
‘But there is no sexual pleasure in it.’
‘It is in exchange for water and air and sexual pleasure that I have given spiritual blessedness, contentment in exchange for bread and beer’ – so says Atum.33
Another hint that death was unwelcome comes in the common Middle Kingdom formula addressed to the living: ‘O you who love to live and hate to die, speak [the prayer for the dead].’34 An early sceptical view is voiced in the ‘Dialogue of a Man and his Soul’ (or ‘Dispute of a Man with his Ba’), from the late 12th Dynasty (19th century bce). In this the man in traditional mode extols the afterlife, while the soul less conventionally praises the present life. The soul challenges the man to ‘ponder life’ and counters his views of peaceful and welcome death with tales of tragedy and the comment that ‘you will not come up again to see the sunlight’. Only in the final line of the poem is there a measure of resolution, with the soul accepting a more tranquil perspective and concluding: ‘we [shall] make harbour together’.35 Parkinson
30Respectively Pyr. 145.b; Pyr. Neith 779; cited by Zandee, Death, 8.
31Pyr. 323.a-b, cited by Zandee, Death, 8. Spells for not walking upside down were often linked to not eating excrement.
32Pyr. 2175, cited by Zandee, Death, 10.
33ContS 1.18, 27-30; extant texts from the 18th Dynasty onwards.
34M¨uller, ‘Afterlife’, 36; Morenz, Egyptian Religion, 187. Morenz also cites the fragmentary earliest known instruction, that of Hor-dedef: ‘Lowly [i.e.
depressing] for us is death; life we hold in high esteem.’
35R.B. Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems
comments: ‘Neither vision of death triumphs in isolation . . . the horror of death is not mitigated, and both aspects of death are found acceptable in a literary resolution.’36
Many tombs were decorated with so-called Harpers’ Songs extolling the traditional positive afterlife perspectives. However, a few so-called ‘heretical’ songs portray a significantly different, more sceptical, carpe diem philosophy.37The Harper’s Song from the tomb of the (probably) Middle Kingdom King Intef includes the lines:
None comes from there,| To tell of their state, | To tell of their needs,| To calm our hearts, | Until we go where they have gone. . . .
Do your things on earth as your heart commands! | When there comes to you that day of mourning, | The Weary-hearted [i.e. Osiris] hears not their mourning,| Wail-ing saves no man from the pit!38
Similarly, Song I in the New Kingdom tomb of Neferhotep (c.
1300 bce) states:
Recall to yourself only joy,| until the coming of that day of mooring| At the Land that Loves Silence, | Where the Son-whom-He-Loves [i.e. Horus] is not weary . . .
Sitting powerlessly in what was made for his shade.39 These songs present death as a land of silence and no return, and urge the living to enjoy life while it lasts. The mouth-opening ceremony for Neferhotep has a similar gloomy view:
Sitting powerlessly in what was made for his shade.39 These songs present death as a land of silence and no return, and urge the living to enjoy life while it lasts. The mouth-opening ceremony for Neferhotep has a similar gloomy view: