In common with other Egyptological accounts of relations to the dead in Egypt (3000-525 Bc), this chapter will struggle, and fail, to escape the straightjacket of a singular unilinear history, emanating largely from written and visual evidence. At the end of the chapter, I return to this problem, reconsidering its causes and the potential for future studies to expand to a wider archaeological base (cf. Grajetzki 2003) and comparative anthropological dimensions (cf. Wengrow 2006). Among the surviving sources, the images, inscriptions, manuscripts, and monumental architecture interweave two dominant themes in concepts of an afterlife: sustenance and transformation (Taylor 2001). In the first, the body is a physical anchor for human life, sustained with material or spoken provisions of food, drink, clothing, and items of status. In the second, the body is transformed into an eternal being, becoming netjer-like in immortality. This second goal was secured by techniques of embalming, including rituals for the deceased to share in the identity of Osiris, king of duat - the land of those living forever: the practice of mummification with the goal of Osirification. The two themes, sustenance and transformation, are complementary strands, each implying the other: a preserved body is already an achievement of human intervention, and, conversely, immortal being implies some need for sustaining energies. Published excavations help to write the history of the interplay and changes of focus between the two. The top-down, palace-centered history of embalming practice and care for the dead echoes the story of writing. As techniques of precision, both Osirification and writing seem to creep outward from the center, to achieve hegemonic or normative status across a wider part of society. Even when they achieved their maximum extent, Osirification and writing would still have been accessible only to a minority of the population, in a varying proportion that requires much further research. This chapter charts the chronology of the relationship between the strategies of sustenance and of
Exploring Religion in Ancient Egypt, First Edition. Stephen Quirke. © 2015 Stephen Quirke. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Transformation, through the architecture of immortality, in different social and geographical locations, and through the words, materials, and images of embalming, funeral, and burial rites. At the heart of these is the relation between living and eternal dead, not only at the moment of burying the dead.
The binary model sustenance + transformation is deduced mainly from inscrib ed and decorated monumental architecture, best preserved at Waset, Mennefer, and Abdju. All three cities at their height may have set models emulated at other centers across Egypt, and their impact must be read from the archaeological record in each region across the country. The ancient Egyptians of our books about the afterlife too may be only richer inhabitants of the larger Valley cities at the times of their greatest wealth. Any unified picture from such select material is unlikely to reflect ancient society, as archaeologist Peter Ucko warned: “in the vast majority of cases known ethnographically, a culture or society is not characterised by one type of burial only” (Ucko 1969, 270). In order to balance the picture, consider any Delta site or any Valley town or village away from those monumental sites, and ask how our standard image of ancient Egypt would apply to the inhabitants there, at different periods. Most regions and periods lack localized archaeological investigation and publication on which a series of histories could be written, a precondition for a future overall history. Before reviewing the evidence for the afterlife, reread the map of all Egypt (Chapter 1) to restore some sense of proportion to the modern imagination. As for all topics, we also need to consider dominant modern views on ancient Egyptian afterlife, not least because no area of ancient Egypt has received such heavy modern literary attention and rewriting. Historically, abroad, the ancient akhet net neheh, “horizon of eternity,” became the primary source of the triple staple of Egyptomania: mummy, pyramid, and hieroglyph. The challenge for archaeology remains to track material evidence for practice on the ground.
World History
