David P. Silverman | The Other Book of the Dead

what a wonderful introduction I'm gonna have to cut ten minutes from my talk so we get out on time it's wonderful to be home again I had a wonderful graduate career here and the beginning of my academic life and it was it's really wonderful to to come back and to see some people and to see also the place where places where I used to hang out at and how most of them not there anymore I didn't go by to the house that I lived in and maybe I'll do that tomorrow morning before on my way to the airport but I do hope the weather holds out I'm going back to Philadelphia which you may know won the Super Bowl this year and we're very proud of that and the city is closed down tomorrow so my class is not going to be held and that was the reason I was leaving early and I was just saying that the transportation head of the airport seems to be non-existent and so I'm not quite sure when I'll get home but if the weather holds out I will get home tomorrow so I noticed actually it was just a question was asked I thought this lecture was on The Book of the Dead and somehow magically one of the slaw on one of the images just went ahead but let me go back let's hope I get this right no it's going ahead okay it doesn't say the book of the day this is the thing that I always say that when people ask about is the curse real in ancient Egypt and I say no no there aren't any curses in ancient Egypt just on the lecturers who talk about ancient Egypt and so somehow from my computer to my systems computer the first part of this title which is the other Book of the Dead an essential item for the afterlife of the ancient Egyptian kings got lost so I apologize for that so now I can move forward there we go okay throughout if you can't hear me let me know I'll move the microphone around throughout ain't throughout Egyptian history pharaohs went to great lengths preparing their final resting places and you've seen lots of examples of that here in many ways these structures represented a microcosm of and a metaphor for the eternal life that royalty hoped to enter over millennia of their tombs took many forms but whatever the shapes and whatever their religious symbolism these monuments were a repository for the necessities of the afterlife and we can see a clear evolution already from the early dynastic period and prior to that so I'm just going to run through a couple of slides whoops okay and these are early dynastic ones so you go to one the first one that we had which the superstructure was not a Warren able to reconstruct it in this one attaboy dose we were and move very quickly from early dynastic period into dynastic period dynasty three with the Step Pyramid and where the superstructure is becoming extremely important move on to the fourth dynasty and we can see the great pyramids then the ones at the cocoons she's made the pyramids of Khafre and Khufu okay hold that one for a moment what is important about these or at least what I showed you was a superstructure and all of these burial places had some kind of a superstructure as well as below ground areas for burial and storage and that's what they had in common soon however for safety's sake against robbers and there were lots of those eleventh dynasty builders began to cut out corridors and chambers deep into the rock cliffs over which they found a natural pyramid and this they felt was not so obvious but actually it was pretty much obvious I always say if you want a hide go don't put a giant map on top of it it's sort of like a sign that says this way to the gold well not long after they were architects of the 12th dynasty who used an outcropping in the desert at abidos in the south where my colleague Jay Wagner from Penn works and there was another symbolic mountain and you can see right here this is called Anubis mountain and it was visualized that that Anubis the god of the underworld or the who was there at the final judgment actually sat atop this mountain and from some of the things that my colleague found there are actually cylinder seals with that image and we have to even know the name and you see the interior and the interior also would serve as a funerary residence for the Pharaohs and Lazarus the third as well as represent a three-dimensional version of what is an underworld book called the Amduat which means what is in the underworld so this is a funerary text not the Book of the Dead but it's another one and so this was according to my colleague this was a three-dimensional version of what we would later see in actual texts most royalty of the 18th dynasty built their tombs however in Thebes in the Valley of the Kings because of a variety of reasons first of all it's connection with amon-ra king of the gods in that area it's romack remote location in the rock cliffs on the west bank and again the presence the presence of a natural pyramid now within these tombs were all the necessities the King would need for his journey to the afterlife including his mummified remains can you see here a few examples here is the the Pyramid of Khufu Khafre excuse me and the burial chamber another pyramid on on the right I'm sorry I went totally backwards sorry for that okay this is now we're in the Valley of the Kings which I just told you I'm sorry and the mountain that you can see in the upper left that's the one that's supposed to be your Mountain that symbolized the pyramid now we're in the right order it's my fault so I apologize so these are some of the things that were being protected and that when necessary for the afterlife first of all mummified remains of the kings here you see two non-common ramses ii also they would include a variety of things like food wine and clothing they'd also include weapons jewelry and amulets and in some cases modes of transportation implements of writing and painting and a host of other things especially a coffin or a series of them that you see in the lower right with the the group that should uncommon had becoming more elaborate as time progress these interments were supplied with increasing amounts of various provisions some some came in actual size and form and some were as three-dimensional models and some of them were in two dimensions all the way on the right when you see an opening of the mouth celebration which are the first of them actually of Seti the first other than to not commons this is a very important piece but it's in two dimensions so you can have them in two dimensions three dimensions a variety of different ways and there were reliefs paintings and texts especially in the tombs of the New Kingdom and later that provide more information on requisites for the royal afterlife for example there we go I'm in hotep the second oval room and then City the the first ceiling so you get a raw wide array of different information textually and art historically on exactly how a king would achieve his goal of immortality with these aids and the specific methods that he might choose and all of these things developed over time our knowledge of the many details however depends on the preservation of royal tombs and the preservation also of the contents and unfortunately most veronik burials have not survived intact having been subject to many intrusions some in ancient times some dating closer to more contemporary pyramid the pyramid specific periods what you see here on the upper left is a tomb robbery papyrus so that gives us all the information about how exactly these tombs are robbed and in one case the text says that we Berg through into the burial and we found the king and his wife sleeping on their side we removed all of the wrappings and the jewelry and the gold and then we took their bodies out and we burned them so for that reason we don't have a lot of the material and the on the right side we have one of the earliest quote archaeologists belzoni unfortunately was a good artist and he did at least record a lot of what he found but a lot of that went into the marketplace as well now despite the situation a few of these tunes have retained a significant amount of material relating to the afterlife and some information comes from the design of the team sometimes it comes from the decoration that you see on the team's walls and ceilings and sometimes it's the architectural details that give us information and all of the all this information can help each apologists understand more about ancient Egyptian funerary ideology even in the pre-dynastic period if we go back now with this understanding we see concerns about the afterlife were evident in the impressive early royal burials so for example this is between UJ at Abydos with its contents and it's really quite incredible where you have this the burial chant the the area divided up into places where material would be put in for use in the afterlife for the king and eventually these were enlarged and embellished and they began to have royal statuary and also then relief and here in Joseph's complex you see the statue on the bottom you see the Magnificent Step Pyramid above and then in the relief you see the Jubilee reliefs that are shown as well moving on into the age of the pyramids we have Khafre on the left and then Sahara at atmosphere with the relief of fecundity figures now we get to probably one of the most important parts of of this development that I'm trying to trace at the end of the fifth dynasty the last king whose name is Kunis and you see his pyramid here well it looks like every other pyramid on the outside with the causeway and everything else that we now expected to see but it has something else the burial chamber the antechamber and the passageway between them have walls covered with carved and painted hieroglyphic text and they have stars adorning the ceilings and this is the first time we see royal texts on the interior walls of pyramids and this is a close-up to show you exactly what they look like the language and sophisticated context content suggests that the Pyramid Texts derived from pre-existing concepts and ideas that had developed over time and had probably become an oral ritual it is an interesting thing to read these Pyramid Texts because the grammar isn't like anything that we've had before and not like anything that would come afterwards so it's it is very important to learn a lot about them to figure out exactly when these ideas came into being so if we move on into the sixth dynasty we have a pyramid of teddy the Pyramid of Mary RA and these are versions of the Pyramid Texts that began to appear in all pyramids of the later kings in the old kingdom and queens also of the old kingdom slightly later and eventually private citizens begin to incorporate them into their own funerary texts now these these texts consisted of spells with allusions to numerous deities but the god ray and Osiris were clearly the most important and most frequently referenced occasionally the creators just opposed the name of Osiris there we go with with the god Osiris with the name of the king and that's what you see right here the traditional translation has been the Osiris Pharaoh so and so although some people have suggested it maybe the Osiris of Pharaoh so and so eventually private citizens would also adopt this phrase for their own use in a funerary context certainly by the time of the coffin texts a few generations later and that's what you see here another expression that appears first in the Pyramid Texts is called Maha Pharaoh it means true a voice and also this was associated with the name of the king when it first occurs in the Pyramid Texts and you see the text right here and this the one on the left reads this Pepe was a king of the sixth dynasty he made this Pepe be justified or true of voice and one on the right is a little bit longer it refers to the same thing it made the cow or may the spirit of this King be judged to a voice before the God now this statement seems to suggest that this early period that the deceased Pharaoh attained this state of status after being judged where the state is he needed to attain so he would get into the afterlife so this is early examples of the importance of the idea of judgment for at least the king and possibly others in order to enter the afterlife successfully now in the court in which King would appear the god Osiris and later other deities as well served as the judge and then in Linko Kingdom pride citizens like with everything else began to accumulate this title as well and on the left you'll see an O Kingdom example and then on the right one from one of the tunes I work in in saqqara and this is a private person who claims to be true a voice which means in the afterlife he's gone through the judgment and he is now in a good afterlife by this time the Royal and private use of this term Montero indicates that both kings and their subjects believed in a concept of judgment as part of their journey into the afterlife and this closeness and time frame between what one class of society was doing and what another one indicates that it's probably less what we call democratization it's not filtering down but more of a commonality for certain concepts also at this point it seems as if the boundaries between the two segments of society appear more fluid and especially as the private funerary spells we now call the coffin texts develop fully appearing first in the sixth dynasty the coffin takes one of the largest collection of spells about 1200 focus is on preparing the non royal deceased for a successful trip to the afterlife it's sort of interesting because many of these texts then become the basis for some of the Book of the Dead spells that occur later and are even used by kings so by the 18th dynasty judgment for both royal and private individuals became even more explicit in the mortuary literature one important type of this text is an assemblage of funerary spells or chapters that sometimes included Illustrated vignettes and the Egyptians referred to them as the book of fourth in the day and in modern times we often call it the book of the day there are several great examples that I saw today in your wonderful exhibit of artifacts relating to this topic and in fact one of the long longer ones one of the longer examples of a book of the dead you have also in this exhibit and I think it's a if you haven't seen it you really should see it I took lots of pictures so I can show my students too while the entire corpus included slightly less than 200 spells no single version contained every one of them but but a papyrus can also include here's some more examples and these are also of the same tile the same text showing you more examples and the quality of the art that I'm going into them and also the amount of text and imagery that goes on in some cases as you see and the middle one on the right that it is pretty much equalized this one is an odd one because it's I think the only one that I've ever found and this is a book of the Dead that has only one spell and how can you imagine that's a big papyrus but it only has one spell and the person who wrote the book on this I think has the right idea and the Egyptians very often had the idea that the part can represent the whole and I think that's what's going on here so yes it only has one spell but it actually represents the whole and it's likely that it was a lot less expensive to have only one spell than 30 or 40 however if you were wealthy and you wanted a big one you could do like you have on here this is in the Turin museum you see the length of that case that's all one book of the Dead and it's over 20 feet long and they're probably the only place in the world that has a space that could accommodate it now although Egyptians seem to have considered papyrus the preferred medium for these spells they also put them on different kinds of surfaces for example they did them on ambulance so here is a scarab and this is I well one coming in into the 13th into the 17th dynasty the second intermediate period and so it's an interesting thing it's an early one and it is actually on a royal piece but it can also occur on tomb walls it can also occur on papyrus and sometimes on talisman and I like this particular image because the one on the left is actually tomb wall and on the upper part of it you see a Jed amulet which is associated with a particular figure that amulet itself and it's it's supposed to be put at the throat of the deceased and then you have a papyrus which shows the same thing and then on the right you see from Tutankhamun's tomb that amulet in three dimensions which has the same spell on it so it depends on how you want it to interpret the information as to how it might wind up in a tomb sometimes it appears on jewelry sometimes it appears on coffins sometimes it appears on figurines and this is a famous one in our Museum really a beautiful piece her name is Maya and it's a shabti or OSHA key figure and it has a spell on there to make sure that the deceased will not have to do certain kinds of work in the afterlife it can occur on chests and it can occur on mummy wrappings and these were mummy wrappings in the pen Museum with spells that were translated by Brian use of the Oriental Institute they can also be found on funerary shrouds and this one is another one we pieced together from the Penn Museum and on the very bottom it has a book of the dead spell masks are another place that you're going to so in addition to papyrus texts for the private sector they could also occur on metal films fabric ceramic wood and stone and although some aspects of many of these community mary literature the funeral spells had appeared in one form or another in an earlier mortuary literature so for example the Pyramid Texts or the coffin text from the New Kingdom on the Book of the Dead or the book of going forth in the day became an essential accessory for the afterlife for those who could afford it it helped ensure their chance for an eternal existence in addition to its use in the New Kingdom this collection of funerary texts remain popular even in later periods they're examples written specifically on papyrus and seem to have been owned primarily by private citizens so it's interesting this point that why do private people get to have them on papyri because thus far not a single example of a Royal Book of the Dead inscribed on papyrus has yet come to light so why did I show you all these pictures that refer to royalty and I'm talking about the Book of the Dead well I think the Book of the Dead meant something else perhaps to royalty now some writers suggest that the looting of royal tombs and the fragile nature of papyrus explain the absence of a royal of example however there are a large number of surviving private of papyri most of the dead and that implies that papyrus may not have been so fragile in addition both the tomb of Tutankhamen and the burials of the kings of the 21st to 22nd dynasty contained a large percentage of what originally was placed in the tombs and the bearer and among the burial equipment you see here are two good examples on left his view into Turner Commons antechamber and you see it literally just full of material and then on the right the Tatas tombs in the in the delta area now even though these finds were good representative sampling the excavator found no Royal Book of the Dead on papyrus some Egyptologists have concluded therefore that although Book of the Dead were very popular among private citizens royalty from the tomb of the New Kingdom Han did not use Priory examples one Egyptologists however has suggested that tune our Commons tomb had wooden statuettes the type of which occur in private tombs that had a secret panel and behind that was papyrus sounds like a good movie but we don't have this in any of the royal tombs although he suggests that maybe a few of the type that were found into da Commons might actually have originally have had papyrus but so far nobody's actually examined these to see if there's a fragment of papyrus and Howard Carter was a good excavator and he did not record that well it's perhaps I think possible to interpret the data differently perhaps Book of the Dead spells do occur in royal contexts but not on papyrus they occur rather on stone metal fans fabric wood and all types of other things as well as on the walls of teams and this is exactly what we found with private people royalty may have opted had may have hoped that this distribution would enhance the chance that these necessities would survive and be useful for the afterlife Tutankhamun's tomb had more than 20 Book of the Dead spells on some form in his tomb and some appear more than once for example on jewelry amulets and chests now the the one on the upper left actually has more than one went on the on the back of the front door and one on the side and the amulet is another of these golden dead amulets and the spell for placing that in the right part of the body is on that spell and then there are more spells on the canopic chest of Tutankhamun that you see on the bottom each of the layers that took care of protecting the King are seeing here the coffins of the mask and then the canopic off the net that held the lungs liver stomach and intestines of Tutankhamun all have look at the dead spells on them so Book of the Dead spells for royalty did in fact exist and nobody questions that but the preparers avoided using papyrus as the surface for recording these spells so popular among non royal examples certainly the cost of producing these that I just showed you in two non-common would far exceed what it would have cost for a even a small papyrus or even a large papyrus now the Royal Book of the Dead I think the spells clearly first occurred in the late Middle Kingdom and they run through the 17th dynasty and perhaps they are result of changes in ideology decorum economics variety of other things and they appear on early royal objects mmm a good number of them and also then also some private ones and what you're looking at now are actually inscriptions of the top two are from one coffin we meant to hotep of the 13th dynasty and also and that's from Thebes and the one on the right is from another Queen Kem enabled from dr. ER and that was also from her from her coffin if we move you know just a little bit later in time I already showed you the one that's above but almost precisely at the same time there is one that's produced for a private person and his name was nip off and he served in the court of this particular King whose name is so vague M sob and so it's interesting that he was allowed to have exactly the same thing as the king but that may have been because of his position and the text that's on here is spelled 30b of the Book of the Dead and it's an important one it relates to the judgment of the deceased and it represents the earliest royal occurrence of this particular spell and a clear indication of the importance of post-mortem judgment so we've seen it in texts how important was even from the Pyramid Texts and now we're seeing it in a form in the Book of the Dead and all shows us because we've got them occurring in both private and royal contexts at the same time that everybody wanted to have it now in the 18th dynasty several pharaohs also made use of book of the dead spells in their tombs Tom Moses the 3rd for example had a funerary shroud with 19 look of the dead spells including the critical spell 125 which is the actual judgement text and it's the most widely used one now his successor took Moses the fourth also included this text on his coffin but just a small part of the text but the important part was on it what it was for was to make to ensure that the deceased would have a positive judgment and earned the right to enter into the afterlife in dynasty 19 in the tomb of Marin up top there also was chapter 125 and later ramesside pharaohs continue placing look at the dead spells and their tombs and in some places even in temples in dynasties 21 and 22 the contents of the burials of the rulers based in Tanis in the northern Delta had spells on the many pure funerary items but most important for us is another one that has to do with spell 30 be if you go through the literature's I did for this talk I found another one of these scarabs that has a very similar spell but so far it hasn't been identified because it does not exist in those spells of The Book of the Dead that we're familiar with so among the spells frequently found in the Book of the Dead manuscripts 125 and 30 B occur on both papyrus and scarabs and they were considered of great importance to private citizens and to some royalty as well since they related directly to this judgment spell 30 be focused on the heart the center of wisdom and knowledge and though and this is a very important point it was instructed that is the amulet was instructed and that meant the heart not to hinder to speak or stand against the deceased what the dead wanted was an attestation of a good name a good career and a proclamation of excellent virtues the spell also requested the heart not to utter falsehoods in order to proceed all deceased individuals had to pass this critical step spell 125 which royalty also had on the funerary monuments and tomb equipment focuses on the judgment of a deceased some as now you can find this Illustrated very well on some of the papyri that are in the exhibition that you have here most notably in the Ryerson it depicts the god Osiris seated before a scale with two pans one for the heart of the newly deceased individual and the other for the goddess Maat and those pans had to balance and and since the goddess Maat was also referred to his balance or justice of order or decorum she satisfied watching it but you see in the scale pans you have on one side you have the heart of the deceased and the other you are the feather of Maud and this has the balance it's an interesting question as to whether the heart if it was filled with good things would be heavy or if it was filled with bad things it would be heavy because whenever you see the scene it is in balance which means the deceased is going into the next life so what happens if it doesn't balance well over on the right hand side in red there is this monstrous she devourer who watches the event that is in front of her or nearby and if it doesn't balance she gobbles up the soul or the being of the deceased and that individual has a second and final death obviously he does not go any to the afterlife he or she does not go into the afterlife the Scarab spell 30v directs the heart to make only positive remarks on behalf of the deceased spell 125 is more complicated and detailed it includes a section where the deceased speaks first before our Syrus and secondly he'll go into an area where he speaks to deities and then third one in the Hall of Justice where he addresses both Osiris and other deities in the first to his declaration includes a long list of negative acts and negative behavior in which he did not participate in the last he addresses the gods directly with many reasons for a positive judgment that he deserves and certainly by the New Kingdom both royalty and private citizens had similar needs for the afterlife and both had access to this critical compilation of funerary spells how they each decided to incorporate this material for the afterlife differs somewhat nevertheless spells of the book of going forth in the day whatever form it took was believed by the Egyptians to be and as seneschal aid in receiving a favor of judgment before our Syrus and a good and never-ending afterlife it was not inexpensive and was available only for those people who had the means for example a small book of the Dead papyrus ran about one debin of silver which was the equivalent of three asses in ancient Egypt and I think that sounds like a pretty good deal to get into the afterlife I hope that I answered some of the questions you might have about the book of the dead but I'm here also tonight to answer any more questions that you might have thank you very much [Applause] you

Channel: The Oriental Institute

Views: 15,178

Rating: 4.5708156 out of 5

Keywords: Egypt, Ancient Egypt, Book of the Dead, Religion, afterlife, Penn Museum

Id: BTTpPTpWDfw

Length: 43min 30sec (2610 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018

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From the video description:

The Book of the Dead (the modern term for the ancient Egyptian Book of Going Forth in the Day) is usually described as a roll of papyri with inscribed funerary texts that often included illustrated vignettes. From the New kingdom on, it became part of the equipment Egyptians wanted for their afterlife. The spells, however, were not limited to papyri and appear on coffins, figurines, jewelry, amulets, chests, shrines, wrappings, shrouds, tombs walls, etc. This lecture focuses on this latter group and its use of these magical tests.