Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [28]
Because of the legacy of the pyramids and the invention and preservation of hieroglyphs, almost everything that we know about ancient Egyptian religion has to do with the ultimate fate of the dead. The hieroglyphs were invented by the priesthood largely for the purpose of recording and glorifying their role in making pharaohs immortal, and keeping track of the riches which that role brought them. Hieroglyphs are, as the name certainly states, sacred script, prominently displayed in pyramids and tombs; other styles of writing, hieratic and later demotic, were reserved for more secular purposes, although even these had some religious uses. In the earliest period, hieroglyphs were carved and painted in tombs, temples, and religious pillars in grand houses. The purpose of the script, as is clear from every place we find it, was to cast spells to immortalize the dead, giving them by invocation a life for eternity.25
Instead of being “damned” or “saved,” the Egyptians distinguished between the akh, a transfigured person in the afterlife, and the only other alternative, to be mut, a corpse. One might, quite simply, die forever, or be “resurrected” for the pleasures of the afterlife.
On the other hand, the Egyptians sometimes depicted this process as a journey through an underworld fraught with danger. Only those who had the protection of the appropriate spells and had lived a moral life could safely maneuver avoiding the pitfalls. With the benefit of the prayers and/or spells, recited by priests, one’s corpse was embalmed and transformed, becoming akh, a word connoting light and everlasting and radiance, and illustrating again how many aspects of Egyptian religion were affected by solar imagery. Akhet, for instance, means “horizon” but can be factored into two parts, the home of light, at least for the transfigured ones, and the sun, the author of all life. Mut, on the other hand, derives from a Semitic root meaning “death,” frequently appearing in both Arabic and Hebrew.26
The Pyramid Texts are found in the tombs of the Old Kingdom pharaohs starting with Unas (or Wenis or Unis; the vowel patterns in Ancient Egyptian are educated guesses), the last king of the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2350 BCE). At first, they were found only on the walls but later also on the sacrophagus. Still later they are found on the hr tp, or the hypokephalos, as the Greeks would call it. Shaped variously, it was often a small disk-shaped object made of papyrus, cartonnage, or some other material, which the Egyptians placed under the head of the dead, to serve as a kind of pillow. They believed it would magically cause the head and body to be enveloped in flames, thus adding to the divinization process. It served as a kind of “prompter,” reminding the head of the mummy of its ritual lines, in case he forgot them at the crucial moment. The hypokephalos itself symbolized the eye of Re or Horus, and the scenes portrayed on it related to notions of resurrection and life after death. The hypokephalos represented the entire world, all that the sun encircles, both the upper sky and the nether world. Writing spells on hypokephaloi and other objects were symbolic of the importance of knowing these correct spells at the correct moment on the journey to the afterlife.
Spells were also found on the tombs of queens and, by the end of the Old Kingdom, on tomb walls and coffins of court officials. They represented the spells necessary to bring the body to its final resting place and are believed to mirror the ritual of the royal funeral, though precisely how the service began and ended is still debated.27 The pyramid of Unas contained 227 spells, which were widely copied into later tombs.
The description of the afterlife, known in Egyptian as the Duat, is somewhat vague in the early period but it does contain a “field of reeds,” a “field of offerings,” a “lake of the jackal,” and a “winding waterway,” which became much more prominent