Text below was extracted from the transcript of Episode 4: Divine Judgment at a very good page at Literature & History web site. Included is an extensive map of the Nile River.
Exclusive Salvation and the Old Kingdom
During most of the Old Kingdom—about 2650 until 2100 BCE—it was believed that the soul of the Pharaoh, and only the soul of the Pharaoh, was immortal, and thus it was terribly important that his embalmment, mummification, and entombment were all carried out according to stringent traditions so that he could join the gods in the afterlife. Early in the Old Kingdom, what Egyptologists call “retainer sacrifice” was a common practice. Djerr, a king during the First Dynasty around 2900, was found with 318 followers, all murdered so that they could continue to serve their king after he passed away.
The Ancient Egyptian Afterlife Gets Democratized
Something culturally gigantic happened in Egypt when the Old Kingdom fell in the Middle Bronze Age. In the turbulent period between 2125 and 1795, and then throughout the Middle Kingdom, which endured until 1630, there spread the notion that all people had immortal souls, and that upon death, a person’s ab, or heart, would be judged by the gods. If that person had worked on behalf of chaos and done evil deeds, he would be eaten, and annihilated for all time, by a terrible monster called Am-met. If he’d worked on behalf of order and goodness, he’d go to beautiful, fertile fields filled with flowing water and the presence of gods, and be given a homestead there. The question is, who did the judging?
A 19th-dynasty scribe is taken by Horus to meet Osiris, lord of the underworld, in a copy of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Behind Osiris are Isis and Nephthys. Central to this period of Egyptian history was belief in a god called Osiris. Osiris, who had been murdered and dismembered by his wicked brother Set, and then reconstituted by his sister and wife Isis, epitomized the cycle of death and resurrection Egyptians believed everyone went through. Beginning around 2100, a second group of Egyptian writings, which we call the “Coffin Texts,” began philosophizing about a dark place called the Duat, Egypt’s equivalent of Hades or Sheol. In the Duat, the dead needed to be careful to avoid perils and meet the judgment of Osiris, together with his council – frequently, Thoth, the scribe of the Gods, and Anubis, the jackal-headed deity who weighed each person’s heart in the scales.
The years between 1600 and 1000 BCE saw another intermediate period, and then the rise of the New Kingdom. The New Kingdom’s many dynasties were centered in Thebes, hundreds of miles south of Cairo, and it was within the necropolis called the Valley of Kings that the tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered in the autumn of 1922. And it’s also from Thebes of the New Kingdom, or modern day Luxor on the east bank of the Nile, that we have the text we’re going to now focus on, The Book of the Dead.
Between 1600 and 100 BCE, Egyptians who could afford it were buried with the texts of spells and incantations. These spells and incantations were usually accompanied with illustrations, and printed on coffins, papyrus, and/or linen shrouds wrapped around the body of the deceased. In total, we have discovered 192 spells, or “chapters” of what we’ve come to call the Egyptian Book of the Dead. For most of its existence, the Book of the Dead was a miscellaneous, non-standard group of these spells or chapters, the bulk of which were believed to have been written by the scribal god, Thoth.
… that describes The Book of the Dead. We have it in many bundles and fragments, and it’s an encyclopedia, complete with a dizzying number of gods, spirits, prayers, and magical rituals, capturing more than three thousand years of civilization’s beliefs about death and the afterlife.
The Egyptians called their funerary writings “The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day,” based on the notion that the spirit leaves the body on the day of death, wanders all night, and then rejoins the body on the morning of the next day. This of circle departure and return, similar to the sun god Ra’s nightly journey, necessitated careful preservation of one’s earthly remains.
An Opening Prayer and Scene of Judgment
The Book of the Dead opens with a hymn to the sun god Ra. “You rise,” the hymn says. “You renew your youth, and you set yourself in the place where you were yesterday. Oh, divine youth who has created yourself, I am not able to describe you. You have come with your diadems, and you have made heaven and earth bright with your rays of pure emerald light.”2 The sun god Ra upholds the holy order of ma’at. He enriches the earth with the marvelous and extraordinary journey that he takes every day.
A hymn to Osiris follows this, in which a supplicant prays that he’ll be able to descend to the underworld and then come forth, made new with the blessings of the great deity. Then, only a few pages into The Book of the Dead, and before even the first chapter of The Book of the Dead, comes a typical scene of a judgment.
In this scene, a humble scribe prays for a just judgment. He’s brought into the awe inspiring council of the gods. The Egyptian deities Hathor, Horus, Isis, Nephthys, Nut, Thoth, Anubis, and other beings all turn their heads to regard the breathless mortal. His hands extended, his fingers trembling, he studies the frightening figure of Anubis, whose hands are on the scale. The jackal head of the deity symbolized his power to decide whose body will suffer decay and scavengers, and whose will be preserved for all time. But it is not Anubis who the mortal scribe fears the most.
Behind Anubis is Thoth, frequently called “The Great God” by Egyptians. Thoth has the head of an ibis, along with a great headdress symbolizing his preparation to judge anything – even the very length of the seasons. But still, it’s not Thoth that causes the poor mortal’s fingers to quake. Behind Thoth, in the darkness at the rear of the chamber, is Am-met, the monster that Egyptians called “The Eater of the Dead.” With the head of a crocodile, and the body of a lion and hippopotamus, Am-Met smacks his chops and looks expectantly up at Thoth when the mortal enters the room.
Anubis weighs the man’s heart. Thoth considers it for a long time, and the Eater of the Dead licks his gory teeth in the darkness. Finally, Thoth speaks. “There has not been found any wickedness in him,” he says. “He has not wasted the offerings in the temples; he has not done harm by his deeds; he has uttered no evil reports while he was on earth” (26). Collectively, the gods announce their decision. “He has not sinned,” they conclude. “Neither has he done evil against us. Am-met won’t be allowed to prevail over him. Meat-offerings and entrance into the presence of the god Osiris will be granted to him, together with a homestead forever in Sekhet-hetepet.” With that, the mortal’s fate is sealed. He will not be annihilated by the monster Am-met. He will join the gods in a joyous afterlife.
The Book of the Dead, the Bible, and the Qur’an
- … two things that The Book of the Dead shares with the Bible, and the Qur’an. The first is the notion of rebirth in heaven. While scholars have explored the parallels between the story of the physical resurrection of Osiris and the one of Christ in the Gospels, the more general notion that one can start fresh, in a comfortable place where all of one’s needs will be met, is almost unavoidable in the religions of the modern world.
- Egypt made an even more important contribution to religious history. Let’s turn to the central idea of this episode – the notion of divine judgment. Going to heaven, or more precisely Sekhet-hetepet, was the preferred outcome of the judgment by the Egyptian gods. But judgment and its outcomes presuppose something else far larger and more important – more important even, than the gods themselves. I’m talking about ma’at – the aforementioned Egyptian word for order.
- It is the Ancient Egyptians who really bring us to the first of the great philosophical questions we’ll explore throughout this podcast. And that is this. Are we merely material beings, or do we have a spiritual, or extrasensory dimension? The former approach is morally relativistic. The latter can, if it chooses, be morally absolutist. Ancient Egyptians, and after them Plato, the Hebrew prophets, the Christian apostles, and Muhammad, believed that the paramount tier of reality was a realm of spirits beyond the frail and deceptive world of our senses.
- The Book of the Dead tells us that Bronze Age Egypt was the great cauldron where many of the ingredients of modern religion were cooked up. And while the pyramid of Khufu, with its blocks and flat sides and nifty astrological portals, was certainly a great achievement, it was a very, very insignificant thing next to the notions of divine judgment, salvation by good works, the death and resurrection of a god, the multipart being of humanity, and above all else, universal order.
