In her 2001 doctoral thesis, Aspects of the interaction between the living and the dead, Clare Plater discusses letters to the dead, reserve heads, warnings to visitors and appeals to the living, medical texts, magical practices, and the role of saints, across a wide spectrum of Egyptian history, from the Old Kingdom to the Late Period. She does not consider funerary or mortuary cult. Lynn Meskell has worked extensively with Deir el-Medina material, publications of which include Private life in New Kingdom Egypt (2002), and Object worlds in ancient Egypt (2004). The domestic religion of the other well-known workmens’ settlement was analysed by Anna Stevens and published as Private religion at Amarna: the material evidence in 2006. Sylvie Donnat in her thesis La peur du mort (2003) uses the corpus of letters to the dead as a basis for exploring the relationship between the living and the dead, especially its more negative aspects: ideal versus “revengeful” funerals, and the blessed versus the damned; some aspects of these phenomena had been discussed by Jan Zandee (1960) in Death as an enemy according to ancient Egyptian conceptions.
Jan Assmann has covered the topic of death and the afterlife most comprehensively in several books and articles, particularly Tod und Jenseits im alten Agypten (2001) translated in abridged form as Death and salvation in ancient Egypt (2005); his studies are mostly text-based. Christina Adams also takes a text-based approach in her work on communication between the living and the dead:6 Appeals to the living and letters to the dead: the interface between the living and the dead in ancient Egypt (2004, BA dissertation); The living and the dead: contact and communication as exemplified in Coptic texts of the 4th to 11th centuries AD (2005, M. St. thesis); Between two worlds: the interface between the living and the dead as evidenced in texts of the Late, Ptolemaic and Roman periods (D. Phil. thesis, in progress). Comparative studies of beliefs in ancient and modern Egypt have been made by Nadia el-Shohoumi in Der Tod im Leben: Eine vergleichende Analyse altagyptischer und rezenter altagyptischer Totenbrauche. Eine phanomenologische Studie (2004), Rawya Ismail in her PhD entitled Aspects of household cults in New Kingdom sites in ancient Egypt compared with such practices in modern Western Thebes (2004),7 and Elizabeth Wickett in For the living and the dead: the funerary laments of Upper Egypt, ancient and modern (2010).
The most extensive study of ancestor busts is Jean L. Keith’s Anthropoid busts of Deir el Medineh and other sites and collections (2011). Other studies of the busts include Karen Exell’s article in the UCLA Encyclopaedia of Egyptology (2008), and Anne Friedrich’s MA thesis (Berlin, 2010). The classic work on ancestor cults, based around the analysis of akh iqer stelae, is that of Robert Demaree (1983). Robert Ritner has presented an overview of household religion (2008), as well as a study of The mechanics of ancient Egyptian magical practice (1993), and John Baines and Peter Lacovara (2002) have analysed the ambivalent attitudes of the Egyptians towards their dead. The death and burial of, and afterlife provision for, children and infants appear not to have been extensively studied for ancient Egypt.8 The principal works covering this aspect are Erica Feucht (1995: 121-34), Joyce Filer (1998), Frangoise Dunand (2004), Cathie Spieser (2007), and Ruth Zillhardt (2009). The most recent publication that touches on the cult of the dead is Emily Teeter’s (2011) Religion and ritual in ancient Egypt. Ron Tappy (1995: 63), in discussing mortuary cults in ancient Palestine, raises the important issue of the difference between ancestor worship (personal, familial relationship) and the cult of the dead (impersonal, non-familial relationship), both of which are considered here. The cult of royal ancestors is not considered because it was independent of beliefs and rituals relating to close kin. 6 7 8
It is not possible within the scope of this book to cover every aspect of mortuary cult and ancestor worship, or every cemetery at which these phenomena are evident. Rather, the research presented here is intended as an overview of the evidence for cultic activities and beliefs regarding death and the dead. Despite the apparent wealth of information available from ancient Egypt and the vast amount of literature dedicated to it, our understanding of many aspects or religious life and the ways in which people, from fishermen to pharaohs, dealt with death and its aftermath is still patchy at best. Nor does this volume address the entire chronological spectrum from the Predynastic to the Late Period, but focuses on the Old to New Kingdoms, with particular emphasis on the latter.9 This is due in part to the nature of the evidence - the sites of Deir el-Medina and Amarna are obvious starting points for discussions of domestic religion, for instance - but it also involves a critique of religious practices and beliefs from textual, iconographical, and archaeological sources over the course of approximately 1500 years: the use of broad brushstrokes in constructing a picture of interaction between the living and the dead over such an expanse of Egyptian history is therefore inevitable.
World History
