Among manuscripts for eternity, the title sakhu, “making akh” is found repeatedly but in specific contexts across the period preserving writing (Assmann 1990). After 2500 Bc, depictions of embalming, funeral, and burial include the caption “reading sakhu” and the word is used as a heading for series of compositions on papyri later than the period discussed here (fourth-second century BC) but with contents already found in pyramids (2200 Bc) and in the same order as found on some coffins from 2000 to 1850 BC. The word sakh means “to make (someone) into an akh” and is sometimes translated rather vaguely as “glorification.” The core term akh in healing and afterlife papyri seems to evoke a power of impact where the cause is not immediately evident; evidently, it could refer to the successfully embalmed and securely buried body, keeping its life source beyond mortality. The sakhu writings envelop both the period of embalming and the offerings for the deceased into eternity.
Although they form a tradition of their own within afterlife literature, they surface within the main stream from Pyramid Texts onward. In the Going Out by Day corpus, they relate directly to the series of formulae for “making the akh excellent,” found on most manuscripts and taken largely from the earlier Book of Two Ways. The “excellent akh” is the precise title given to relatives or friends on small offering stones from the village of royal artists at Waset, 1300-1100 BC. A thousand years earlier, it is found on the several Letters to the Dead, where the living invoked recently deceased relatives or friends for help with problems in daily life. Possibly, in this part of the writings for eternity, we find a shared ground for the living not only in the literate sectors of society but across different social classes. The rites and techniques of embalming to palace standards may have become the overarching goal and theme for all who could afford it, in increasing numbers over the millennia, and may have set the mold for burial practices particularly after the Amarna period. Yet a wider sense of the survival of life, anchored in a physical body, may be at the heart of the culture, expressed not in the mummified body, but in the concept of immortalized akh. From the written record, this would be the term and concept to test back against the record of both funerary and settlement archaeology, across the two and a half millennia considered in this book.
World History
