Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [38]
Once more Egyptians made the trip to the underworld, more moral values crept into the narrative. There can be no doubt of the moral functions of The Egyptian Book of the Dead. It instructed the reader on how to live one’s life so as to gain “acquittal” of charges that might prevent life in the hereafter. In a bureacratic world, which was just as given to lying and political intrigue as our own, the tale illustrated by example the rewards for truth-telling and moral behavior. It is particularly interesting that the demonstration of the moral basis of the afterlife was concomitant with the expansion of that reward to a wider clientele of persons. It is as if to say that the worth of the pharaoh for life ever after goes without saying. His role was to represent the state and the Egyptian people in all dealings with humans and gods. But when the process of sharing the benefits of the afterlife with pharaoh’s loyal supporters began, the standards for worthiness were specified with more exactness. The virtues explicitly discussed were those that served the pharaoh’s and the priests’ state, but they were also personal virtues. The attainment of life in the hereafter was therefore dependent upon piety and a life of use and service to the Egyptian state. Furthermore, like most cultures, the Egyptians did not abandon previous notions when new ones came along. Instead, they just added the new ones so that sometimes the ritual and literature appears to contradict each other. Yet, it is more likely that Egyptians saw all the various notions as additive, describing a complex reality.
During The Third Intermediary period and thereafter, the capital and hence the royal tombs, were moved to Tanis, in the reedy areas of Lower Egypt. The preservation of the tombs in this area is poor, due to subterranean moisture. In addition the government unraveled, and Egypt began a rare period of feudalism. Power was restored by the Kushite kings of the Sudan in the south, beginning a foreigner-dominated period. But at the same time, they were the saviors of Egypt from certain political degeneration. The Kushites obeyed the degenerated conventions of The Third Intermediate Period, putting few hieroglyphs on the wooden coffins.
At the same time, they renewed interest in monuments, first, by imitating the stone coffins of the past out of wood and, second, by reviving texts such as The Egyptian Book of the Dead of the Ramesside period-in particular, formulas for breathing air to power over water in the afterlife. When the Tanite or Kushite dynasty took over, the process accelerated. Stone was reintroduced by Tarhaqa (the Tirhakah of the Bible) who constructed a tomb complex deep in the Sudan at Nuri. The Ushabtis (servant figures for the tomb) are among the finest carved in Egypt. An Ushabti text promoted The Egyptian Book of the Dead into its rightful place at the center of Egyptian rites of life after death. What followed was the beginning of a large temple and tomb complex. The vast scale was due to the efforts of Padiamenipet’s assuming the title of chief-lector priest, which had more or less gone into desuetude for a millennium. His tomb complex contains many themes of the late Old Kingdom, as well as friezes of objects and the Coffin Texts from the early Middle Kingdom and The Egyptian Book of the Dead as well as the full range of underworld books of the New Kingdom.63
Egypt in Late Antiquity
CAMBYSES OF PERSIA, the Shah of Iran, ended the renaissance in 525 BCE when he invaded and conquered Egypt. This corresponds to the early Second Temple period of Israelite history and marks the period in which the Jewish colony of Elephantine at Aswan was founded. Like the Egyptians, the Israelites were ruled by the Persians. The Persians ruled Egypt for