Luxor - West Bank
Concepts prevalent within the Valley of the Kings

The Book of the Dead

A lot of what you see depicted on the walls of New Kingdom tombs are scenes extracted from ancient theological compositions. Just as scenes of offerings assisted the sustenance of the ka, parts of ancient funerary texts would be incorporated into the tomb to assist the entry of the deceased into the next life. The New Kingdom saw an expansion in the range and distribution of funerary texts available. Texts written on papyrus roll were not too common in the Middle Kingdom, but from the Eighteenth Dynasty onwards it is common to find burials with a quantity of appropriate papyrus rolls. The exact number can aid inference of social status and personal taste.

A major text is known as, "The Book of the Dead", or, "The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day" (as it was known by most ancient Egyptians), which has a stressed theme of the resurrection of the deceased. No complete unabridged text is extant. What we have is a large corpus of material built from exerts and edited highlights of the complete work. It would seem the extent of the text used was a matter of personal choice and preference. These 'copies' were clearly bought from specialised outlets, and could be tailor-made or off-the-peg. Some papyrus has survived with spaces left blank for the insertion of the name of the deceased. This genre of funerary papyrus was produced from the early New Kingdom and well into the Ptolomaic. The versions of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties are regarded as being the best extant. The text is written in black ink hieroglyphics, arranged into vertical columns with red ink being used for rubrics, at the start of new chapters. Vignettes above the text illustrate what is happening and are often of interesting detail, e.g. The Book of Ani.

The book is essentially a guidebook to the afterlife, with an exam crib sheet to assist a safe passage past the many traps and questions that lie before the successful admission into the next world. The key part of the Book of the Dead is chapter 125, which is the final judgement. The deceased is led before a court of gods headed by Osiris. Anubis, the jackal headed god, places the heart of the dead upon scales as a physical weighing which represents the worth of the dead. The heart is weighed against the feather of Maat, the symbol of truth and justice.

To be successful the heart needs to weigh less than the feather, if this is not the case then the heart is tossed over to the Ammit beast (has the head of a crocodile, body of a leopard and rear end of a hippopotamus) who devours it, thus condemning the deceased to a miserable existence.

The negative confession -Before this critical event the deceased makes a speech called the negative confession. The deceased delivers an exhaustive list of denials to prove he has lead a pure and innocent life, and done no wrong to man or animal:

I have not done evil to mankind
I have not oppressed the members of my family
I have not wrought evil in the place of right and wrong
I have had no knowledge of worthless men
I have not wrought evil
I have not made to be the first considerations of each day that exhaustive labour should be performed for me
I have not ill-treated servants
I have not caused misery
I have not caused affliction
I have not caused pain
I have made no man to suffer hunger

Here are some more interesting negative confessions, some being of a less wholesome nature:

I have never pried into matters to make mischief
I have not stirred up strife
I have not added to the weights of scales to cheat the seller
I have not misread the pointer of the scales to cheat the buyer
I have not defiled the wife of a man
I have not polluted myself in the holy places of the god of my city
I have not committed fornication
I have not set my mouth in motion against any man
I have not committed acts of impurity, neither have I lain with men
I have not caused my wife be intimate with a donkey

The Egyptians therefore appreciated certain codes of good moral conduct, but the very presence of these statements proves they understood, that on occasion, a person could break the odd moral standard. However all was well if you knew what to say, and what not to admit to. It would seem the Ammit beast never really got to have a good chew of the hearts of those judged. Indeed most judgements ended with the outcome like this from the Book of Ani.

(Ashley Cook)