Basic Knowledge About The Egyptian
Book Of The Dead
What is The Egyptian Book of the
Dead?
As early as the Eighteenth Dynasty,
which began about 1580 B.C.E., most of the religious literature of
ancient Egypt, including the Pyramid Texts—the oldest extant
funerary literature in the world, dating back to as early as the
fourth millennium B.C.E.—and certain revised editions of those
texts, called the Coffin Texts, were brought together, reedited, and
added to, and painted on sarcophagi and written on papyrus.
This massive literary effort, the work
of many authors and compilers, is now known as the Book of the Dead;
its creators called it The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day. Although
many known copies of this ancient work exist, no one copy contains
all the chapters, which are thought to number around 200.
The subject matter of each chapter is
the beatification of the dead, but the chapters are as independent of
one another as are the psalms in the Old Testament. One of the most
curious aspects of the Egyptian Book of the Dead is that while the
work is filled with realistic and graphic scenes of the preparation
of the deceased for mummification, there are no illustrations
depicting death and dying.
For a people obsessed with the mortuary
and funerary aspects of death, the Egyptians seldom dealt with the
actual ways in which people lost their lives. Some scholars have
observed that it was not so much that the ancient Egyptians wished to
avoid the unpleasant topic of death and dying; it was rather that
they never really formulated any clear conception of the nature of
death or of its cause.
By the time the text of the Book of the
Dead was being copied on rolls of papyrus and placed in the tombs of
the dead, a great social and religious revolution had taken place.
Whereas the Pyramid Texts were meant only to be inscribed on the
sarcophagi of the royals, it was now decreed that anyone who could
afford the rituals would be entitled to follow the god Osiris into
the afterlife.
The cult of Osiris had now been
extended so that any deceased human, commoner or noble-born, who had
the means could become an “Osiris.”
The most important ceremony associated
with the preparation of the dead was the opening of the eyes, mouth,
ears, and nose of the deceased. This rite was thought to guarantee
life to the body and make it possible for the ba to reenter its
former dwelling.
If the deceased’s budget allowed, it
was also customary to bring into the tomb a number of small figures
called ushabtiu, whose duty was to speak up and give character
witness when the entombed stood before Osiris and the 42 divine
judges.
The Book of the Dead also contained
certain holy incantations that were designed to free the ka from the
tomb and allow it to be incarnated again. The spirit might experience
an existence as a hawk, a heron, or even a plant form, such as a
lotus or a lily, moving along through various expressions of the life
force until, after about 3,000 years, it could once again achieve
rebirth as a human.
The Egyptians did not believe that
mummifying a body would enable it to come back to life in the next
world. They knew the physical body would remain in this world, but
they preserved it, believing that the spirit of the person needed its
body as a kind of base or reference point.
If a body could not be recovered, had
it, for example, been destroyed by fire or lost at sea, it was a
serious matter. In cases such as these, a statue or a kind of
reconstruction or artistic portrait would be
used for the departing spirit.
An important ritual was performed at
the funeral service of the departed, called The Opening of the Mouth.
This ceremony was a “magical treatment” of the mouth and other
apertures of the body to ensure the spirit’s ability to continue to
hear, see, eat, and so forth, should it need to in the spirit world.
The Egyptians also performed this ceremony over statues and
paintings, to endow them with a form in the after world.
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