Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [27]
Egyptian Conceptions of the Afterlife
IN HIS JUSTLY-FAMOUS book, Before Philosophy, John Wilson points out that there are two different kinds of responses to death among the Egyptians.23 We can see them illustrated in different tomb paintings and inscriptions. Near the Step Pyramid in Saqqara, there is a tomb of a vizier of the Old Kingdom, a man who lived around 2400 BCE, which I have seen myself on two different occasions. His rooms were crammed with scenes of life and the lust for it. He is shown spearing fish while his servants trap a ferocious hippopotamus. He is depicted presiding over the judgment of tax delinquents. There are pictures of him listening to his wife playing the harp and watching his children play.
On the other hand, there is another tomb painting from the Late Period, the tomb of a man who lived about 600 BCE. Here we see no joie de vivre, no exuberance, no bellowing hippopotamus, no playful children. The walls were covered with ritual and magical texts. The purpose of the texts was to provide the dead person with a map and the techniques for traveling through the realm of Isiris to find eternal rest there. Successful accomplishment of the journey made the person an akh or transformed dead.24
The temptation, against which Wilson warns us, is to take this stark contrast to indicate a change in Egyptian sensibility. That is an unwarranted conclusion; these two faces of life are two sides of the same Egyptian sensibility, as they are of European and American sensibilities. It may only be the personality of the tomb’s occupant, the predilection of the painter, or merely just a question of the taste or prevailing style in interior tomb decorating. There is no way to tell how characteristic this was of the age in which they lived. Christian cemetery art too alternates between figuration of death and symbols of resurrection. In many New England colonial burying grounds, there is scarce indication of the Christian faith in the resurrection. The inscriptions tend to concentrate on death and decay rather than transfiguration and resurrection. Distinctly Egyptian symbols are also prominent in the Christian burying ground on the property of Yale University for example, which I walked by almost daily for several years. The gate to the cemetery carries Egyptian motifs and is surmounted by an Egyptian, winged sun disk. All we can tell for sure about funerary art worldwide is that the contrasting symbols are part of the complete story.
For Egyptians, the hearty pleasures of life and the grim procedures for maintaining one’s existence in the afterlife were both appropriate to tomb decorations. Yet, the many engravings that picture the dead being revivified by the prayers and spells offered by the living were meant in a more literal way than we can imagine. The ritual texts, the living doing their ritual tasks, the processions and commemorations of the living in the forecourts of the tombs, and the dead cavorting around in their tombs in the sweet Egyptian afterlife, are all part of the same Egyptian conception of our ultimate demise. They all had a part in the life of the Egyptian people; all were happening simultaneously.
Similarly, Egyptian culture seems to contain radically different evaluations of life of this world. Sometimes life was optimistic and sometimes it was shockingly pessimistic. Pessimism is a long-standing tradition in the Ancient Near East, literarily in the same genre as the Bible’s Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, and some Psalms, as well as many famous Mesopotamian