Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt

The Old and Middle Kingdoms

Julia Troche

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501760167
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Egyptian Ancient History
• Index: History

Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt uniquely considers how power was constructed, maintained, and challenged in ancient Egypt through mortuary culture and apotheosis, or how certain dead in ancient Egypt became gods. Rather than focus on the imagined afterlife and its preparation, Julia Troche provides a novel treatment of mortuary culture exploring how the dead were mobilized to negotiate social, religious, and political capital in ancient Egypt before the New Kingdom. Troche explores the perceived agency of esteemed dead in ancient Egyptian social, political, and religious life during the Old and Middle Kingdoms (c. 2700–1650 BCE) by utilizing a wide range of evidence, from epigraphic and literary sources to visual and material artifacts. As a result, Death, Power, and Apotheosis in Ancient Egypt is an important contribution to current scholarship in its collection and presentation of data, the framework it establishes for identifying distinguished and deified dead, and its novel argumentation, which adds to the larger academic conversation about power negotiation and the perceived agency of the dead in ancient Egypt.

PART ONE

Death and Power

CHAPTER 1

Mortuary Culture

You have not gone away dead, but you have gone away alive.

—Pyramid Text 213

Death Is Only the Beginning

What happens to us when we die? Ask a thousand people and you will get a thousand different answers. Even those with shared religious views will likely possess individually determined, unique ideas about the Hereafter: darkness, nothingness, eternal sleep, decay, Pearly Gates, Sheol, heaven, hell, purgatory, reincarnation, your own planet. What happens to us after our bodies die has concerned humans throughout history. The finality of death and our ignorance of it has been a constant source of anxiety that humanity has tried to overcome with mythology, religion, and faith. The ancient Egyptians were no different. They were, perhaps famously, preoccupied with life after death.

The dead in ancient Egypt remained very much “alive” as active members of social systems. To paraphrase Pyramid Text 213, they did not go away dead but went away alive. Despite their corporeal demise, the dead lived on in various states and through certain formulaic relationships, such as ba (bȝ), ka (kȝ), akh (ȝḫ), m(w)t, and jmɜḫ.w, and so on, which are described more fully in the following chapters. Mortuary culture in ancient Egypt included practices of real and symbolic offerings to the dead so that they could “live” in the afterlife. Their largest and most impressive monuments were tombs, and they put great care into the preservation of the body through mummification. The primary locus of mortuary engagement was (seemingly) the tomb, but this may be a product of surviving evidence. By the New Kingdom, and likely earlier, this practice was also certainly situated within settlements and temples (see Demarée 1983; Keith 2011; Stevens 2006). Engagement with the dead did not, in itself, challenge the king’s semi-divine position as intermediary between the earthly and divine realms. In fact, engagement with the dead was always a fundamental aspect of the Egyptian worldview and was part of expected social behavior. Indeed, the Instruction of Ani reminds us that one should always “Libate for your father and mother who are in the necropolis.”¹

The Divine Hereafter

Despite the thousands of excavated tombs and funerary monuments, many plastered with scenes of the Egyptian afterlife, we do not know, we cannot know, what the ancient Egyptians believed. Belief is nearly impossible to locate in the textual and archaeological record. Their rituals and practices are traceable, and from these it is possible to surmise and estimate Egyptian religious ideology. But whether the ancient Egyptians bought into this ideology, on an individual level, is impossible to ascertain. A modern example may be useful here to explain: A house with a Christmas tree is likely to be a house of Christians, but not necessarily. Perhaps only one of the members of the household is Christian. Perhaps the household includes inhabitants who were raised Christian but are now atheist—they simply enjoy the Christmas culture. The possibilities are endless. While it may be impossible to precisely reconstruct each individual’s belief in the Hereafter, the ideology of the Egyptian afterlife is accessible. It is inscribed on funerary monuments, evinced in the architecture and equipment of burial, and related in texts. The term “divine Hereafter” or simply “Hereafter” is used here to refer to the ancient Egyptian supernatural realm that included the dead, but also gods, guardians, and gatekeepers (i.e., a range of supernatural actors). Depending on the text, this realm is described as being “below” Egypt (e.g., a “netherworld” or “underworld”), while others, such as the Pyramid Texts, speak of things happening in the sky, and others, such as Letters to the Dead, clearly indicate that this realm overlapped the realm of the living. All of these terms are more or less interchangeable with the more familiar concept of “afterlife,” but by definition the term “afterlife” refers to the experience of something that was once alive, in corporeal form within the earthly realm, that has since transitioned to a postliving state. This does not entirely capture the imagined reality of the Egyptian Hereafter, in which the “dead” were perceived of as “alive” and which was populated by not only those who were once living but also the gods and supernatural actors in their transient states of “life.” No modern term can perfectly encapsulate such a dynamic and ancient concept, and I use these terms largely interchangeably throughout. Perhaps the best term would be the ancient Egyptian term for this realm, Duat, which hopefully will become more widely recognizable.

FIGURE 2. Egypt

The earliest burials in Egypt predate the Egyptian state and Egyptian “culture.”² By the Egyptian Predynastic period (i.e., fourth millennium BCE), dozens of cemeteries reflected local cultural systems, with distinct artifacts and burial practices (Stevenson 2009). Those of Lower Egypt, in the north, tended to be simpler than those in Upper Egypt, in the south (see figure 2). What was shared, though, among these populations was a religious ideology that supposes life after death. An increase in posthumous bodily care and the inclusion of artifacts in the burial with the dead evince the existence of such an ideology. Very quickly, tombs became a locus for social and political display. The earliest extant decorated burial chamber—Hierakonpolis Tomb 100, dating to the Naqada II period—included images of dominion: man over nature and man over man, in what might be an early smiting scene (Quibell and Green 1898–99, 20–23; pls. 64, 6, 9; 67). Burials were, then, politicized from nearly the very beginning; they were loci for the display of social, religious, and political capital. The tomb owner of Hierakonpolis Tomb 100 was likely a local leader, a proto-king. Thus, political authority was already, in the fourth millennium BCE, tacitly associated with the mortuary sphere.

Funerary complexes of the First and Second Dynasties (the Egyptian Early Dynastic era) mostly lacked inscription. The Third-Dynasty pyramid complex of Djoser at Saqqara was inscribed, but the texts did not speak explicitly of the king’s afterlife, focusing instead on the ritual actions of the king in life. It is possible these were meant to mirror the king’s actions in death, but it is impossible to say for certain. The pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty were similarly un-inscribed; however, the valley temples and other monuments within the kings’ mortuary complexes were indeed inscribed. But again, these inscriptions did not speak explicitly of the Hereafter. Not until the Fifth-Dynasty pyramid of Unas did an explicit source speak of how the Egyptians (or at least kings) perceived of their afterlives. The Pyramid Texts found in Unas’s tomb were robust and certainly were not new compositions for his tomb (Allen 2015). The Pyramid Texts, however, were not composed to describe the divine Hereafter but were meant to help the deceased in their transition into the afterlife. The Pyramid Texts included offering lists, ritual directions, and spells for protection and transfiguration. Similar spells, called the Coffin Texts, were painted on the coffins of elites during the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom. Many of these same texts later evolved into the Book of the Dead. By the New Kingdom, funerary literature and tomb scenes explicitly described the divine Hereafter.

During the New Kingdom, there was an increase in written funerary literature—broadly known as “Books of the Netherworld”—which described and provided instruction about the Hereafter. It is worth noting that these were not actual books but rather scrolls of papyrus or inscriptions on tomb walls and equipment. These Netherworld texts included well-known corpora, such as the Book of the Dead, Book of Gates, and Am Duat. The Am Duat, literally, “that which is in the Duat,” breaks the Hereafter into twelve hours of night (Hornung and Abt 2007). Osiris and the sun travel through these hours, each hour being a lifetime to those upon whom the sun shines. Additionally, tomb scenes may depict the sun’s journey, which is tacitly tied to the royal and nonroyal afterlife: The ceiling of the Abydene cenotaph of Seti I shows the sky goddess Nut swallowing the sun at night and birthing him anew in the morning. The Ramesside tomb of the official Sennedjim shows him and his wife working the fields as part of their idealized afterlife. Upon the wall of Sennedjim’s tomb, Book of the Dead Spell 110 describes his afterlife, which is here referred to as the “Fields of Offerings” and the “Field of Reeds”: “Here begin the spells of the Fields of Offerings and the Spells of Going Forth by Day … being provided for in the Field of Reeds.… Being powerful (jqr) there … harvesting there. Eating and drinking there. Having sex there. Doing everything that is done on earth by Sennedjim.”³ Here the afterlife is paralleled to the life of the deceased on earth.

The Am Duat, however, depicts an afterlife full of anxiety and supernatural creatures: The sun, and thus humanity and the world itself, is threatened with nonexistence by the snake god, Apopis. The Am Duat papyrus of Panebmonut depicts lion-headed goddesses burning the dismembered bodies of those who failed their judgment before Osiris (British Museum EA 79430). In the demotic tale of Setna II, dating to the forty-sixth year of Emperor Claudius, Setna descends to the Hereafter, much like Dante or the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna, and describes some of the horrors, such as people being tortured in what is identified as the fourth hall: “Some people who were plaiting ropes, while donkeys were gnawing at them, and there were others whose provisions of water and bread was suspended above them, and as they raced to bring them down, some others dug pits under their feet to prevent them from reaching it” (Simpson 2003, 473–74). In the seventh hall sat the enthroned Osiris with Anubis and Thoth at his sides. The Devourer, who is also known from earlier funerary literature, also sits before Osiris’s throne. The Devourer is part crocodile, part hippopotamus, and part lion—a creature that consumes the essence of those who fail their judgment, bringing onto them total destruction.

Unfortunately, much of this evidence postdates our current discussion. We would of course expect conceptions of the Hereafter to change across the millennia. Fundamentally, though, some basic elements of the Hereafter seem to have remained consistent if we compare New Kingdom and earlier funerary literature (e.g., Pyramid Texts,...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: Death and Power
• Part Two: Apotheosis
• Conclusion
• References
• Index