Egyptians and the Afterlife
With regard to the dwelling-place and occupation of the blessed dead, there was an almost inextricable confusion of ideas. The Egyptians never attempted to reconcile these, or even to select one of them to the exclusion of the others, and in their religious texts they are jumbled up together in the most extraordinary medley. What is probably the earliest and certainly the simplest idea is that after death the deceased person leads another life of very much the same type as that which he lived on earth. His home is the tomb; the same joys and privileges which marked his earthly career are continued to him; especially he must eat and drink, and must be provided with the means of sustenance if he is not to be reduced to the abhorred necessity of sustaining existence upon filth. Therefore there arose the necessity of offerings for the dead. Originally these were actual offerings of food and drink, and were either furnished directly by the relatives of the dead man, or provided for by an endowment left for the purpose. Later these offerings were merely pictured on the tomb, while sepulchral inscriptions called upon the passer-by to recite the formula of prayer which ensured a sufficient supply of provisions for the dead: 'A thousand jugs of beer, a thousand loaves of bread, a thousand head of cattle, a thousand ducks, for the soul of '.
This very simple view of the after-life, which maintained itself more or less throughout all the periods of Egyptian history, was, however, felt to be not altogether satisfactory, and other views arose to supplement it. In one of these, also of very early date, the dead man flies up to heaven like a bird, and becomes one of those happy souls who are seen at night shining as stars. In heaven he is received by Ra, and is assigned a place in the bark of the Sun-god, with whom he journeys across the sky. He even becomes one of the company of the gods, and in one version of the idea found in the Pyramid Texts he is represented, with the wildest flight of extravagant fancy, as lassoing and devouring the gods and the illuminated souls. 'The great ones among them are his morning meal, the middle ones are his evening meal, and the small ones his night meal. The old men and women among them come into his oven.' Stripped of such wild extravagances as this, the idea of the illuminated soul sharing the voyage of the Sun-god seems on the whole the most spiritual conception of the life after death to which the Egyptian mind attained.
In its later development, which was reached particularly in the Nineteenth Dynasty, this conception degenerated, and became a ground for the exhibition of the most degrading superstition, and of all the Egyptian belief in the power of magic arts. The Book of Amduat, or of 'him who is in the underworld,' describes the voyage of the sun through the twelve hours of darkness. This underworld is the abode of the dead, and through it the sun sails in his bark, accompanied by the dead man who has been instructed in all the magical formulae required for the voyage. Each hour of the voyage has its own special characteristics and dangers, and each is guarded by a massive gate, the approach to which is further obstructed by fire-breathing serpents.
The god, or his human companion, was required to know the names of all the various serpents, gates, and daemons to be encountered, and the special magical formula suited to each. Such knowledge was held to be an infallible protection to the dead man. 'To him it is of the greatest use upon earth, and of use in the great underworld'; while the unfortunate who is ignorant of it cannot hope to escape from the great serpent Apap. It is the detail of this degenerate version of the voyage of the Sun-god which is pictured in such profusion upon the walls of the royal tombs in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties. But this conception of the underworld, and the books which dealt with it, the Book of Amduat and the Book of the Gates, never became really popular. It was more of an excrescence upon, than a true development of, the Egyptian religion.
Yet another conception of the life after death was that of the Elysian Fields, or, as the Egyptians called them, the Sekhet Aaru, or Field of Reeds. This kingdom of the blessed was originally supposed to lie somewhere in the Delta marshes; as knowledge widened, it was transferred to more distant Syria, and finally to the sky, where the streams of light forming the Milky Way, and the dark patches of sky which these encircle, may have led to the conception of islands of the blessed, surrounded by a celestial Nile. To these happy islands the souls of the blessed dead were borne. They passed the surrounding waters, some by the help of the hawk of Horus and the ibis of Thoth, some in the bark of the Sun-god, but most by the aid of the Egyptian Charon, the ferryman 'Turnface' or ' Look-behind,' so called from his attitude as he poled his boat across the stream. Arrived there, they paddled on the streams in their papyrus skiffs, or they hunted and fished as on earth. The main occupation, however, was agriculture; but in this blessed abode the corn grew seven ells high, and the ear alone measured three. When the day's work was done, there was rest and a game of draughts under the shade of the sycamore-trees. This simple life, with its labors, ceased to appeal to the great men of the nation at a comparatively early stage.
They had never laboured on earth; why should they labour in heaven? The difficulty was probably got over at first by the actual slaying of the servants of the king or great noble at his tomb, that they might accompany the great man and toil for him in the spirit-world as they had done on earth. But the mercifully inclined Egyptian mind quickly passed away from this ruthless custom, and from the time of the Middle Kingdom there appear the curious and ingenious substitute-servants known as 'ushabtis,' or 'answerers.' These were figurines in the form of a mummy, bearing hoes and other implements of labour. It was their duty, when their master was called upon for work in the Sekhet Aaru, to rise up and take his place, that so he might spend eternity in the same dignified leisure which had marked his earthly career.
The stock inscription upon these little figures declares their purpose. 'Oh, thou ushabti, when I am called, and when I am required to do any kind of work which is done in the underworld, . . . and am required at any time to cause the fields to flourish, to irrigate the banks, to convey the sand from the east to the west, thou shalt say, "Here am I."' This naive precaution against the need of labour contained, however, a possibility of danger. The ushabti, if not properly instructed, might obey the call, not of the dead man, but of someone who had been his enemy in life, and was still his enemy in the life after death. • An especially cautious man would therefore write on his ushabti, after the usual formula, these words: Obey him only who made thee; do not obey his enemy.'
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