Book Information

The Egyptian Book of the Dead (#ad)

E. A. Wallis Budge

Penguin Books, Great Britain

Copyright 2008

ISBN: 978-0-140-45550-2

and

The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day (#ad)

Eva von Dassow, et. al.

Chronicle Books, San Francisco

Copyright 2015

ISBN: 978-1-4521-4438-2

After the Epic of Gilgamesh, the next literary work in Harold Bloom’s list of canonical works in the Western Canon is the Egyptian Book of the Dead. I confess, I did not enjoy the experience when I first read it because I had a difficult time making sense of it. It read like repetitive mumbo jumbo that made my eyes cross. It seemed remotely ancient, and I could not correlate it with my life in the present day. By contrast, the Epic of Gilgamesh was a relatable story in our modern sense of the word. It had a beginning, middle, and end, with a well-defined cast of characters – some likeable, some detestable, and others whom you love to hate (or hate to love!). The Egyptian Book of the Dead (EBD) is altogether different and is, in some ways, easier to describe in the negative – what it is not versus what it is. When I researched the history of the EBD, I saw it in a new way. I re-read it and found much more enlightenment, and enjoyment, in the process. In this first in a series of EBD blog posts, I will be discussing five common misconceptions about it:

1.      It was the ‘Egyptian Bible’

2.      It was the occult or witchcraft

3.      It was a physical ‘book’ with standardized content

4.      It was only for royalty

5.      It was called the Egyptian Book of the Dead by the ancient Egyptians

Was it the ‘Egyptian Bible’?

To comprehend that the Egyptian Book of the Dead is not a Bible, we must first understand what the Bible is. What we know of as ‘the Bible’ today is, “the final product of a series of stages, including orally transmitted traditions, shorter and longer written units, collections edited and in some cases translated in ancient times, and final selection by various religious communities as canonical scriptures.” (Metzger and Coogan vii) According to Bruce M. Metzger, Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Princeton Theological Seminary, and editor of The Oxford Companion to the Bible, the “English word ‘Bible’ is derived from the Greek word biblia (neuter plural), which means simply ‘books.’ As the collections of Jewish and Christian texts came increasingly to be considered as one unit, the same plural term in medieval Latin began to be understood in popular usage as feminine singular, no longer denoting ‘The Books’ but ‘The Book.’ By the second century BCE, the adjective ‘holy’ had come to be used to designate some of these books. . ., and so now ‘Holy Bible’ means a collection of sacred books.” (Metzger and Coogan 78-79)

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is also a collection, however, that is where most (but not all) of the similarities to the Bible end. Instead of ‘books’, the EBD is a collection of ancient spells, hymns, incantations, and texts composed into a guidebook to be placed with the corpse at the burial. Like the Bible, the collection focuses on sacred concepts such as divinity and eternal life; however, it is not ‘the word of God’ as Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe of their sacred books. Instead, the EBD was a practical tool and was one of several objects placed with the deceased at the funeral. Its purpose was to instruct the deceased on how to face the never-ending challenges one would endure in the afterlife.

Was it the occult or witchcraft?

While the ancient Egyptians had no concept of ‘the word of God’ in the way those of the Judeo-Christian tradition understand it, vocalizations, words, and the naming of things was important. Because translations of the EBD have referred to ‘spells’, there is a negative judgment based on modern righteousness (or fear?) that the ancient Egyptians were practitioners of witchcraft and therefore their religion was of the occult. This view is the cumulative product of medieval and modern thinking, which developed during the thousands of years after the time of the ancient Egyptians. They lived, and their religious beliefs evolved, during the time before Judaism and Christianity were conceived so to hold them to the standards of those formal religions is odd. They had no formal concept that their beliefs even were ‘a religion’ – there was no distinction between being a believer or not. What they believed was simply part of their cultural milieu. Those beliefs have long since died out for the reasons of human history. Additionally, as Barry Kemp, Egyptologist with the University of Cambridge, pointed out in his book, How to Read the Egyptian Book of the Dead, “The Book of the Dead evokes a world of the imagination in which the reader’s individuality, and sense of time and place, lost their boundaries. But despite its creative imaginings, the Book also reflects the limitations of ancient Egyptians. Learned people compiled the spells, sometimes composed additions and occasionally inserted explanatory comments, but neither they nor their readers thought to put into writing any reflections on what the Book of the Dead meant to them. . . The Book of the Dead is a kind of fossil in the history of the human mind. It belongs to a people with a different sense of experience, knowledge and learning than we possess today. This is perhaps its greatest value. It preserves a mindset that is no longer living.” (Kemp 79-80)

Was it a physical book with standardized content?

Like all critiques of the EBD, I have been referring to it as ‘a book.’ This brings me to another common misconception - that the EBD is a standardized, physical object. For most of its history, it was not a physical book. The texts contained in what is now a standardized version evolved over thousands of years, starting with hieroglyphs that were inscribed on the inside of pyramid walls. These are called the Pyramid Texts and were inscribed as early as the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (2500 – 2200 BCE). Later, during the First Intermediate Period (c. 2200 BCE), similar texts were written on the inside of coffins and are called the Coffin Texts. Finally, texts and pictures were written on less permanent materials such as papyrus. Barry Kemp describes the standardization of the Book of the Dead as so: “For almost the first thousand years of its existence (starting from the early New Kingdom [c. 1550 BCE] the Book of the Dead was not standardized. That came later. The scribes who made a particular copy were conscious that there was a model to be followed. . . It seems that it took a long time for a tradition to develop as to length and order, and only settled from around 600 BC onwards, when a fairly set order of 192 Spells was followed. . .  The Book did not claim a single authorship, nor did anyone put their name to a spell. Nor were the spells considered revelations of gods or spirits. The Book is anonymous and generally avoids hints as to its place and time of composition.” (Kemp 14-16)

There are nuances to the definition of the translated word spell that are worth clarifying here. According to Kemp, “. . . [U]sing the Book successfully involves ‘speaking’ the spells, and ‘knowing’ their content. Each one begins with the heading ‘Spell for . . .’. The word translated ‘spell’ means both ‘mouth’ and the speech that comes from it. Alternative translations are ‘chapter’ or ‘utterance’. . . The translation ‘spell’ is justified because within the texts words are uttered to achieve a particular result, and the Egyptian concept of ‘magic’ [heka] is never far away. The reason some scholars prefer the translation ‘Chapter’ is that many of the texts contain long digressions which acquaint the reader with ancient Egyptian mythological knowledge. This is the ‘knowing’ aspect of the spells.”  (Kemp 6)

With respect to the concept of ‘the word,’ ancient Egyptians were similar in their belief of its powerful potential to that of Jews and Christians although the content and conceptions were different. “Heka magic . . . has a close association with speech and the power of the word. In the realm of Egyptian magic, actions did not necessarily speak louder than words – they were often one and the same thing. Thought, deed, image, and power are theoretically united in the concept of heka.” (von Dassow 156)    

Was it only for royalty?

The passing of time and chronology are important concepts to understand when studying ancient civilizations. When we think of ‘the Egyptians’, a specific and stylized visual language comes to mind. Additionally, we think of funerary objects like tombs and sarcophagi, and fascinating practices like mummification. We forget that a culture, any culture, is greater than its visual language and cultural practices, especially since, in the case of the ancient Egyptians, these are only the surviving remnants of a full-fledged civilization. Just because archaeologists have not ‘found’ as many of the mundane rudiments of daily life as they have of grand tombs, coffins, and golden thrones, does not mean that daily living for ancient Egyptians was especially exotic. Its development was a long, slow process that took thousands of years, starting in the prehistoric era sometime around 5000 BCE, over seven thousand years ago. What began as disparate farming communities along the long basin of the river Nile eventually developed into a highly specialized advanced civilization. The first Egyptian royal dynasties began around 2686 BCE. Because the source material for the Book of the Dead originated with the Pyramid Texts, and pyramids were the monumental tombs of ancient pharaohs, it is falsely assumed that the EBD was exclusive to royalty. Over eleven hundred years after the end of the Old Kingdom, the New Kingdom began in 1550 BCE. It was in this new era of stability and prosperity that the pharaoh with whom we moderns are most familiar reigned, the boy-king Tutankhamun. In fact, spells from the Book of the Dead were engraved on the interior walls of the gold-plated shrine that held the sarcophagi of the dead pharaoh. (Edwards) By then those spells were thousands of years old.

While it is true that most Egyptians far down the socioeconomic scale would likely not own a Book of the Dead, well-off people purchased them as part of a ‘kit of tools’ for their eventual funeral. They bought them in advance not unlike today’s practice of pre-paying for one’s funeral or buying funeral insurance. According to Barry Kemp, “Papyrus in ancient Egypt was not expensive and was readily available. Many collections of ‘spells’ are likely to have been in circulation all the time, being bought, inherited, given as gifts, and carried from one town to another. They were part of the common currency of the literate part of the population (though this must have been fairly small, in the cities one might guess 10 per cent). Spells did not belong to a secret, deeply sacred category of writings: anyone who could write could make copies, create personal anthologies and, if one had the predisposition, compose new versions. . . The country was run by a class of scribes from whom the ranks of the priesthood were drawn. . . [They] sought to commemorate themselves for posterity with handsome (and expensive-to-build) tomb chapels, and gave themselves the chance of comfort after death through a well-appointed burial. These were the people for whom most copies of the Book of the Dead were made.” (Kemp 12-13)

Was it Called the Egyptian Book of the Dead by the ancient Egyptians?

The title, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is a modern invention. As Kemp wrote: “Books of the Dead were part of early collections of antiquities from Egypt made before hieroglyphs could be translated, which only happened after the decipherment of hieroglyphic writing in the 1820s and ‘30s. The first full published translation, in German, was that of Carl Richard Lepsius in 1842. The title of his book, Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter (The Book of the Dead of the Egyptians), gave authority to this name, even though the Egyptians themselves called it the ‘Coming Forth by Day’. . . In the English-speaking world dissemination was aided by an edition with an extensive introduction by E. A. Wallace Budge of the British Museum.” (Kemp 6) Translation is an art in and of itself. Translators are influenced by one another. This means, as scholars learn more about ancient texts, translations may change (for the better, one hopes). Depending on the source and age of the translation, the title granted by the Egyptians was either Book of Coming Forth by Day or Book of Going Forth by Day.

Today, the best-known version of the EBD has a sub-title of The Papyrus of Ani. Ani was a New Kingdom scribe who purchased his own personalized version of the Book of the Dead. Because of the work of Budge to replicate it and therefore preserve its text in a format available for study and translation, it has not only survived but has also become canonical. It is this version (or at least the English translation of it) that Harold Bloom included in his list of canonical works in Western literature.

According to Dr. Ogden Goelet, Jr., clinical professor of Egyptian Language and Culture at New York University, someone who purchased the Book of the Dead had two goals after death: “. . . [T]o be accepted into the presence of Osiris, where the judgment would take place, and ultimately to join Re in his various sun-barks [boats], in order to accompany the god there forever. Osiris was the predominant deity of the Duat, the netherworld, but a stellar and solar afterlife in the company of Re was the more desirable form of eternal life. The appearance of a sun-hymn as the first text in Ani’s papyrus is consonant with the hope embodied in the very title of the BD, ‘Book of Going Forth by Day.’" (von Dassow 164)

One can imagine the scribe Ani poignantly wanting nothing more than the comfort of having a guidebook buried with him at death. He believed that once his spirit had passed from this earthbound world, he would ‘awaken’ to read instructions that would help him pass the test of the Judgment of Osiris and lessons that would teach him to navigate the frightening underworld each evening. He would learn to come forth at the start of each new day in the presence of Re, the Sun-King. King Tutankhamun hoped and prayed for the same. And, while the forms and contents of funerary objects have changed since ancient Egyptian times, the fundamental desires for a painless death and a peaceful existence after have not.

Bibliography

Edwards, I.E.S. Tutankhamun: His Tomb and Its Treasures. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art & Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1976.

Kemp, Barry. How to Read the Egyptian Book of the Dead. (#ad) London: Granta Books, 2007.

Metzger, Bruce M. and Michael D. Coogan, The Oxford Companion to the Bible. (#ad) New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

von Dassow, Eva, ed. The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day. (#ad) San Francisco, 2015.