Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [43]
Secondly, we have seen that this development has a great deal to do with the social forces that dominate Egyptian society over a long period of time. The democratization of admission to the afterlife seems to be related to the breakup of the Old Kingdom and subsequent affluence of the retainers and bureaucracy of the Middle Kingdom. Thus we see in the depiction of the afterlife important social, economic, and political goals as well as personal ones.
Thirdly, the afterlife is an important factor in defining personal goals. In Egypt we see that a notion of a person became inherent in the speculation about fate and disposition after death. Presumably, Egyptians preserved the body because it was more easily effected than in other places in the world. It may itself have been a shesep rankh, a receiver of life like the consecreated statues of the pharaohs. But with the development of more democratic notions of the afterlife, a more sophisticated notion of identity had to develop. There had to be a principle of identity linking the akh, the glorified person, with the person on earth whose moral behavior determined the final outcome. It may be that it was the developing barter economy that forced ma’at to accommodate these new ideas, as it depended on a notion of balance and worth, a concept that came out of the development of a market economy. It is scarcely possible to define exactly how it came about. But whatever factors combined to bring about the scene of the judgment of the soul, it had the effect of validating a notion of individual personhood on earth. Eventually this relationship has the effect of helping to define internal human conscious life in our own religions.
In Egypt, finally, we can see the correlation between the climate of the Nile Valley and the national myths of the ancient Egyptians. Not only does this correlation explain the climate in usable ways, it also gives the Pharaoh the role of the hero, who conquers death as the immortal sun. Eventually, ordinary Egyptians understood themselves, defined themselves and the transcendent part of their lives, by imitating the Pharaoh’s path through the underworld. The afterlife became the mirror of the self.
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Mesopotamia and Canaan
Egypt Compared to Canaan and Mesopotamia
EGYPT CERTAINLY developed significant traditions of life after death; Egyptian styles and influences are found throughout Canaan. Whatever the influence, Mesopotamia and Canaan were more closely related to each other and also to ancient Israel than any of them were to Egypt. The intimate relationship starts linguistically. Whether ancient Hebrew is considered closer to Canaanite or Aramaic, it is a semitic language and, hence, much more closely related to Syrian, Mesopotamian, and Canaanite dialects than to Egyptian ones. This closer relationship applies not only to language but also to mythology and culture as well.
Mesopotamian and Canaanite views of life after death were significantly more pessimistic than Egyptian ones. The Egyptian vision of ultimate felicity with the sun god in the sky vanished. Instead, the dead lived underground in estrangement from humans and gods. This more Stoic vision of the afterlife seen in The Gilgamesh Epic—the great Mesopotamian epic of loss and bereavement—was even found at Megiddo in the land of Israel. Hebrew tradition seems more closely influenced by Mesopotamian and Canaanite traditions but the presence of other semitic mythologies in the Bible is hotly debated. For one thing, it is hard to know precisely which Bible motifs are Canaanite or Mesopotamian and how deeply they affected Israel. This issue will dog every parallel that we examine.
Mesopotamia lacked the unity of Egypt. It had once been ruled by the Sumerians, whose culture and language