Immortality - An Egyptian Dream

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Jan Assmann, What a name!

👍︎︎ 6 👤︎︎ u/RedrumSsam 📅︎︎ Apr 09 2019 🗫︎ replies

I would think that beliefs in life after death would developed much earlier when our pre-Homo Sapiens ancestors' brains were able to grasp the concept of the distant future. I think (probably read it somewhere many years ago) that life after death beliefs are fictitious fight-or-flight responses to the eventual inevitability of death.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/aykontakt 📅︎︎ Apr 09 2019 🗫︎ replies

From /r/LDQ

The Egyptians believed Pharaoh to be a god on earth who after his death would fly up to heaven and unite with the sun, his father. After the collapse of the Old Kingdom, this idea of royal immortality became accessible for non-royal persons but dependent on justification before a divine tribunal, the judgment of the dead. Immortality became a question, not of royalty but of morals. Jan Assmann, Professor Emeritus of Egyptology, University of Heidelberg, explores the origins and evolution of these concepts. Recorded on 10/09/2015. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Lectures"

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/alllie 📅︎︎ Apr 09 2019 🗫︎ replies
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- [Narrator] This program is presented by University of California Television. Like what you learn? Visit our website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the latest UCTV programs. (upbeat music) - I'm Ron Hendel, I'm the Norma and Sam Dabby Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies at Cal and I'm a member of the Foerster Lecture Committee. It's my pleasure to welcome you here today. We are pleased along with the Graduate Council to present Jan Assmann, this year's speaker in the Foerster lecture series. The series is dedicated to an exploration of the immortality of the soul and other kindred subjects. Among the many distinguished past lectures in this series, and you can see the impressive list of names in the back of your program. Professor Assmann will actually address the main topic that the lecture series is in theory dedicated to, that is to say the immortality of the soul, rather than other kindred subjects. As a condition of this bequest, we're obligated to tell you how the endowment supporting the Foerster lectures on the immortality of the soul came to be at UC Berkeley. In 1928, Edith Zweybruck, a public school teacher in San Francisco, established the Foerster lectureship to honor the memory of her sister Agnes Foerster and her husband Constantine Foerster. He was a lawyer and partner of Alexander Morrison, who was one of the most prominent attorneys in San Francisco, and the man for whom our Morrison Memorial Library is named. In her last days, Edith Zweybruck expressed her deep and abiding interest in spiritual life by creating this lecture series on the subject, the immortality of the soul, and kindred subjects. Now I turn to our distinguished lecturer Jan Assmann, is a name to conjure with in both Egyptology and in the wider humanities. A longtime Professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg, and currently an honorary Professor at the University Konstanz. Assmann is a master of physiological and historical detail, who has the rare talent of synthesis of being able to situate the details into a sophisticated scheme of culture, history and philosophy. He has transcended the field of Egyptology, in his pioneering work in the field of cultural memory, and in the history of religious transformations in Western culture. He has written dozens of books, many of which have been translated into other languages. A selection of my personal favorites which adorn my bookcase at home, are "Egyptian Solar Religion in the New kingdom, "Re, Amun and the Crisis of Polytheism." "The Search for God in Ancient Egypt." "The Mind of Egypt, History and Meaning "in the Time of the Pharaohs." His classic, "Moses the Egyptian, "the Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism." Another classic, "Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, "Writing, Remembrance and Political Imagination." Various collections of essays including religion and cultural memory, recently a book called, "Religio Duplex, "How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion" and many, many more. He has also written recently written books on Thomas Mann, Mozart, Handel, and I must say, not this Hendel, but Uncle George Frideric Handle and the Book of Exodus. And I'm happily The Book of Exodus is now being translated, his book on Exodus is now being translated into English. I must confess that Assmann is one of my personal intellectual heroes, whose work has inspired me, and taught me how to think about ancient religion, cultural memory, and other complicated subjects. Many other scholars of my generation owe him a similar debt. It has been a great pleasure to host him at Berkeley this week. Since the founding of this lecture series in 1928, the Foerster lectures has been delivered by such distinguished individuals as Paul Tillich, Aldous Huxley, and Oliver Sacks. This evening Jan Assmann will join that list with a lecture on Immortality an Egyptian Dream. Please join me in welcoming, Jan Assmann. (clapping) - Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am extremely happy to be here, extremely grateful to the Foerster Committee for this invitation, and to Ron Hendel for his very kind and warm introduction, and also to Ron and to Ellen Gobler for making my stay in Berkeley so extremely pleasant. Well, Immortality, an Egyptian Dream. Immortality was the Egyptian dream, in the same way as the rise from rags to riches is or was the American dream. The ancient Egyptians formed very early a strong idea of immortality. And my contention is that this concept exerted in the course of time, an enormous influence on the other civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean world. Immortality is a concept that involves at least three dimensions, time, space, it was obvious that immortality takes place in another sphere time. It obviously implies the concept of eternity and the social dimension. On immortality is obviously not for everybody but for heroes, emperors, artists of outstanding achievements. Let's start with space. Well should all the religions of the ancient world around the Mediterranean and in the Near East, lived in a tripartite world comprising the realms of the gods, the living and the dead. In this respect, Egypt made no exception, heaven or some other remote sphere for the gods. The upper word for the living and the netherworld for the dead. Realm of the dead is the place where human beings continue the existence of having lived in the upper world. They do not live on in this realm, but are dead. Being dead, however, does not mean to disappear from this world all together, but to pass from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead. There was no way back to life once the passage from life to death has been performed. No way out, was there the possibility of a second passage from the realm of the dead to the world of the gods. Exceptions such as obvious attempt to restore you, raise you to life in the upper world, or to receive heroes such as Hercules after death in the divine world, only confirm the rule by their very exceptionality. The exception that ancient Egypt did make in the context of these religions consisted in the introduction of a space within the divine world that under certain conditions was also accessible for human beings. Besides the world of the living and the world of the dead, they recognized an Elysium sphere, for which there are many names and descriptions in Egyptian texts, such as fear of rashes, feared of offerings, bulk of millions House of Osiris and so on. And this ternary distinction between a, the world of the living, b, the word of the dead and c, the Elysium world, ai reflected by the distinction of three classes of beings, or a mature humans, moved to the dead and Akh transfigured spirits Maat-heru gods, constitute a fourth class sharing the divine world with the Akh. And this distinction between the realm of the dead, and the Elysium sphere or move to the dead, and Akh, transfigured spirits, marks in my opinion, the exceptional structure of ancient Egyptian religion, and its concept of immortality. Now to the dimension of time. The ancient Egyptian concepts of time, may determine by two central phenomena, the daily cause of the Sun and the angular cycles of the inundation of the night and the vegetation. In the Egyptian imagination, both referred to as transcendence sphere, the heaven in the case of the sun, and the netherworld in the case of the night. And these two spheres are dominated and represented by two gods, Re, the sun god and Osiris to god of the netherworld. Re and Osiris sent also for two aspects of time or eternity. Neheh for the time of endless repetition and regeneration is represented by Re, the sun god, especially in his morning form of Khepra, and Djet, the time of endless duration and continuation is represented by Osiris, the lord of the netherworld and of the dead, especially in his cock Norman as an Manafle, he who endures in perfection. The two aspects of time refer to the aspect system of the Egyptian language, Neheh, left, on the left side is time in its imperfective aspect as an ongoing process. Djet, on the right is time in its perfective aspect as an accomplished process, whose final result is unchangeably and forever enduring. Neheh as time is visualized and symbolized by the celestial bodies, and they are cyclical movements, especially the sun whose higher lift serves as a determinative or classifier of the world, which you'll see on your left, the sun between these two Hs. And Djet is visualized and symbolized by the stone, and the word is written with the sign of the Earth as a classifier. And these two worlds complement each other to form the encompassing concept both of time and of eternity. They serve as both denotations and negations of time. They negate time as transience by denoting the endless lists of repetition and duration. The ancient Egyptian ideas and hopes of immortality are directed towards these two aspects of endlessness, endless regeneration in Neheh, and endless duration in Djet. The third dimension as implied in the concept of immortality is the social dimension. Who is granted immortality? In the third millennium, the Old Kingdom, this was the privilege of the king. The dead king transformed himself into Osiris and partakes of endless duration in the subterranean chambers of his monumental pyramid, and he ascends to heaven and reunites with the sun god by means of the sun pyramid, which is pointing towards heaven, and oriented to the cardinal points. Normal mortars, by contrast, are buried in mastaba tombs, and instead of ascending to heaven they dwell in their tombs, and descend to the realm of the dead. The domain of Osiris. Humans hide, but gods fly up, we read in the stay of the pyramid takes. The king being a god flies to heaven. The humans hide in their tombs and descend to the realm of Osiris. Their hopes of an afterlife are based on duration, and its medium, the stone and so far as they have access to building craft and stone masonry, which is a monopoly of the state. They built themselves monumental tombs in which they can both hide, and communicate to the word of the living. Their mommy rests in the inaccessible burial chamber. And the accessible part of the tomb accommodate the cult, and the inscriptions in which the tomb owner communicates with the living, later generations. He or she inhabits the tomb and communicates for the living in the form of his or her ka, an invisible dapper, who is able to cross the fault stone separating and linking the two spheres of the visible and the invisible, the accessible and the in accessible in order to animate his representation, to seeing if the offerings and protect the tomb. Also the king has a ka being the son of the sun god and of his biological father, who after death has become Osiris. But in addition to his ka, he also has a ba, in the form of which she is able to fly up to heaven, and to move freely in the spheres of heaven, Earth and underworld. The immortalization of the king, however, was not conceived as an automatic process, but as a result of a very elaborate set of spells and rituals, of which we are extremely when and form through the Pyramid texts, the oldest corpus of religious literature in the history of mankind. But the last king of the fifth dynasty Unas, the Egyptian started to inscribe the burial chambers of the pyramids with 100s of ritual texts. And these rituals were called the Akh, that really turning the dead into an Akh, a transfigured spirit, and consisted mainly of the recitations describing the king's ascend to heaven, his reception by the gods and his union with the sun god, his father. They also comprised of a sequence of spells where Ra plays no role in and the center on the myth of Osiris, and these were perhaps performed by night, and very closely related to the last act of mummification, the incoffinment. The myth of Osiris provided the model of the passage from death to immortality. These myths went like this, Osiris, a god and the king of Egypt has been killed by his brother and rival Seth who moreover tore his body apart and scattered his limbs all over Egypt. Isis, a sister and wife of Osiris traverse Egypt and searched of the member, the sector of her brother, reassembling them into the shape of a body. Together with her sister Nephthys she bewails the body and long songs of lamentation, using the power of speech as a means of reanimation, and was so successful, that she was able to receive a child from the reanimated body of Osiris, and this is the first step towards restitution and transformation. The appearance of Horus, the son and the heir of Osiris marks the second scene of the myth and initiate the second phase of transformative restitution. In the same way as Isis and Nephthys occupy, this is restoring the body, Horus is occupied with restoring the social personality of Osiris. We meet here with a very pronounced gender differentiation. The restoration of the body is a female preoccupation. The means which come to bear on this respect, a lamentation, morning, effective language, expressions of desire and longing. Everything in this female part of the ritual aims at recollecting the scattered limbs and restoring the dismembered body. Female morning is concentrated on the bodily sphere of the dead. The restoration of the social sphere of the dead on the other hand, the status, dignity, honor and prestige is constructed as a male preoccupation and the task of the son. Bodily restoration overcomes the dismemberment of the body. Social restoration overcomes the isolation and dishonor of the victim and turns it into a situation of highest status, general recognition, honor, prestige, respect and majesty. The efforts of Horus culminate in his success of bringing Seth, the murderer, to court, where he will be declared guilty and Osiris justified, and this is the decisive step by which was Osiris, the dead is separated from death, personified in Seth, and restored to life through justification. Justified Maat-heru becomes the term for what in Jewish and Christian tradition is expressed by words, by phrases like of blessed memory, and the like. And this form of decomposing the complex experience of death seems to me one of the particular achievements of the mythic modeling of reality by personifying death in the figure of Seth, death is made treatable, it can be brought to court, accused and condemned. The Justice, which has been violated by the murder committed by Seth can be restored in the view of this mythology, there is no natural death. Every death is a crime that must be vindicated, and the ritual treatment of death culminates in the enactment of this vindication. There's guilt behind every death, and this guilt has to be removed in order to restore the deceased , to status and position in society. Every death is murder and injustice. Therefore, it can be healed in a way by punishing the murderer and restoring justice. Osiris has defeated Seth, which means that he has vanquished death. He cannot be restored to life upon Earth, but he has given eternal life in the other world, he is reintegrated into cosmic existence. The mythical Osiris was made ruler of the netherworld and King of the dead. The dead king follows his example, he is called Osiris and takes place on his throne in order to rule the dead and the spirit, while the son Horus takes place on his former throne among the living. The term justification is an unmistakable Christian Pauline reign. I do not think this is a mere coincidence, but quit go even further and use the term resurrection for this concept of transformative restoration. Because the dead king is constantly summoned to rise, raise yourself, which is to, is the typically address to the deceased. And that means not only to get up but to ascend to heaven. And this is the meaning of resurrection in the Old Kingdom it is the lose of privilege of the Pharaoh. The myth of Osiris is at least as far as Krong meaning is concerned, not about the cycles of nature. The seed that is buried in order to sprout again, the waxing and waning moon rising and the falling inundation, but about kingship. Osiris is a king in the first place. The lawsuit with Seth is about the throne of Egypt. The myth of Osiris is first of all about rulership, in the second place about death and resurrection, and only in a rather peripheral and associative way, about nature and cyclical time. It is the Egyptian myth of the state. And the Pyramid Ttxts of the Old Kingdom, the daunt of Osiris and how those are played, by the deceased king and his successor, this constellation of father and son run in the hereafter, run in the world of the living is one of the most fundamental elements of ancient Egyptian culture. The funerary cult is based on the idea that only the son is capable of reaching into the world of the dead and of entering a constellation with his dead father, that bridges the threshold of death and that is mutually supportive and life giving and this is what this meant by the Egypt chambered Akh, a widespread sentence says, "Akh" is a father for his son, "akh" is a son for his father. And this originally more twirly constellation provides the model not only for the mortuary cult, but for cult in general. Pharaoh, the only living being on Earth capable of entering into communication to the divine world approaches the gods as their son. In cult, he plays the role of the living son visa vis his dead fathers and mothers. Filial piety is the basic religious attitude towards God. And this is also the point where the royal ka comes into play. The ka is the principle of diagnostic and genealogical continuity, uniting fathers and sons, and running through the sequence of generations. The ba forms a pair of the body and maybe termed the corporeal soul. The ka supports the constellation of dead father and surviving son and may be turned the social soul. Its symbol and hieroglyph is a pair of arms that reach out not up there as in adoration, but horizontally in an embrace. The signs and Bala symbolizes the mystic embrace that unites a deceased father and a surviving son. Every human being has ka, also the king, being the son of the sun god and of his biological father, who after death has become Osiris but in addition to this currently also has a ba and there is that very much difference between the royal form of afterlife, which is one of divine immortality in the heavenly sphere, and the afterlife of normal mortals who go down to the realm of Osiris and stay in their tombs on Earth, communicating with posterity by means of their inscriptions and the mortuary cult. The distanciation of the royal hereafter from the destiny of non-royal beings forms the central theme of the Pyramid texts. The Elysium therefore, was originally a political concept. It surpass the world of the dead in the same way as the figure of the pharaoh always surpassed the word of the living. In order to understand this categorical distinction in the social dimension between kings and mortars, it is important to realize that the Pharaoh only stayed as it emerged around 3000 BC, out of a group of rivaling chiefdoms was the first big territory state in human history, stretching from the shore of the Mediterranean to the first cataract. Mesopotamia, as a political organization is as old as Egypt, perhaps even older. It did, however, not constitute a big territorial state in the way Egypt did, but took the form of a network of competitive and cooperative city states. Accordingly in Egypt, the position of the ruler was immensely more elevated above the sphere of his subjects than in Mesopotamia. And since the early states were first of all sacred institutions, whose most important task was to establish a context that the divine world, the Egyptians went so far as the see in their king, a god on Earth, and even the incarnation of the highest god, the sun god. He wore the title Horus and Horus at that time, and until latest time at the place of his old century and ate food, the prehistoric capital from via the process of unification started Horus worship as a sun god. Horus is a falcon that's associated with the sky, on the one hand, and with the predatory, aggressive character of swift violence on the other hand. The name means the foul line derived from a verb hori to be far within the sign for heaven or sky. The earliest representation of Horus starting from the time of unification shows him as a falcon in a boat sailing over the sky, was presented by a pair of wings. Above another falcon sitting on the palace for Sade, the Serekh that encloses the name of the king Serpent. While the lower falcon functions as a royal title and represents the king, the upper falcon can only refer to this son. The whole it's a remarkable visualization of the Egyptian idea of kingship, as the terrestrial representation of solar power and cosmogonic energy. Who was the fal one? Expresses distance, not only in the spatial, but also in the social sense, meaning superiority, lordship, and this is the obvious meaning of the name as a royal title. An iconic representation of Horus as sun god shows him as a sun disc with wings. And this icon became from a certain time to a dynasty about 2750 onwards the official heraldic emblem or coat of arms, so to speak, of Pharaonic Egypt. It was later taken over by Assyria and Persia, and might have inspired other on the thermographic imperial emblem such as the eagles and double eagles of Rome and his successors and Germany, Austria, Russia and the USA. At the time, when Horus was chosen as the royal titer. This god was without any doubt, but worship as the highest god of the Egyptian Pantheon, both as the god of the sun and as a god of the state. In old stages of Egyptian history, the roles of sun god and state god went together. And were always played by the highest god of Egypt. It is that's the name of the highest god that served as a title for the king, who was there by identified with this god as his terrestrial incarnation or deputy or avatar. With the end of the third millennium and the collapse of the Old Kingdom, the texts that are codified to the royal ideas about this left sphere afterlife, in the word of the gods became accessible to the literate elite, at least to its most prominent members. We cannot tell how far these beliefs and ideas penetrated downwards into larger parts of Egyptian society. Our notions of the Egyptian beliefs are based on texts and monuments, and the generalizability of these observations remains an open question. The concept of ba however, became anthropologist that is believed to be the property of every human being. Now, everybody and again, we cannot tell whether everybody means every member of a certain elite, or every Egyptian, saw him or herself presented with two ways to save him or her from vanishing and perishing, the way of terrestrial monumental duration and the way of celestial immortality. The criterion for reaching immortality or ever had to be redefined, it could no longer be a question of royalty or non-royalty, and became redefined as a question of morality, that is of good and bad in the moral sense. Not divine quality of Pharaonic office but the virtue and justice of a deceased person, by now believed to be the conditions and pre-life positions of resurrection and immortality. Therefore, the lawsuit and the idea of justification changed their meaning in a very fundamental way, the dead had no longer to be justified against death as a murderer, but before a divine tribunal, and the guilt, which is inherent in death, is no longer externalized in form of escape goat Seth, but it's interpreted as the deceased own guilt, which he has accumulated during his life on Earth. The earliest texts deal with the concept of justification and the closest possible association that ideas related to empowerment and mummification. Guilt, accusation, enmity, and so on they're treated as forms of impurity and pollution, as immaterial pollutants as it were, that must be eliminated in order to bring the deceased into a state of purity that resists putrefaction and decomposition. Justification is moral mummification. When the embalmers work on the body is finished, the priest take over and extend the work of purification and preservation onto the whole person. The Egyptian word from mommy also means dignity or nobility. At the last stage of mummification, the deceased passes to the post mortem judgment and is assigned the nobility of a follower of Osiris in the netherworld. He is justified against all accusations and purified from every guilt, every sin that might have obstructed his passage into the other world. Even from the soloistisms of early childhood. After the cleansing and immortalization of the body, the embalmment and ramification which returns in its last stage, so this social self. The judgment is nothing other but a purging of the soul from guilt. The idea of a general judgment post mortem develops during the Middle Kingdom at the beginning of the second millennium BC. It is clearly expressed in a wisdom text dating from that time. The court that judge the wretch, you know they are not lenient, on the day of judging the miserable in the hour of doing that task. It is painful when the accuser has knowledge. Do not trust the length of years. They view lifetime in an hour. When a man remains over after death, his deeds are set beside him as a sum Being yonder lasts forever. A fool is he who does not, who does what they reprove. He who reaches them without having done wrong, will exist there like a god, free-striding like lords of eternity. This is what immortality means, in the context of ancient Egyptian through funerary beliefs to exist in an Elysium hereafter like a god, free striding like the lords of eternity. With the rise of the new kingdom, and of this engine of the Book of the Dead, the rules of admission enter the other world had become codified, and form the 125th chapter of the Book of the Dead. The mythical model of a lawsuit between Osiris and Seth has disappeared altogether. The whole procedure has assembled now more on examination and an initiation, the deceased had to present himself before Osiris, the president of the court, and before a jury of 42 judges. He knew the accusations beforehand and had to declare his innocence. All of the possible crimes and violations, which could constitute an obstacle for passing the exam had been spent out and laid down in two lists, one of 40 and the other of 42 entries. The deceased had to recite these lists and explicitly to declare his or her innocence in each individual item. During this reciter the heart of the candidate was weighed on the balance against the figure of truth. Every lie that make sink the scale that the heart that the deeper, in case of a heart being found too heavy and irredeemably charged with guilt and lies a monster, which has always shown close to the balance and watching the weighing, would swallow the heart of the sinner and annihilate his or her person. By reciting these lists of negations, I did not do this, I did not do that, that the thief purged himself from all possible charges that could constitute immaterial pollutants, causing his final destruction. He does enter the other word in the state of imperishable purity. The spell and the Book of the Dead is entitled purging a person of all the evil which he has done and beholding the faces of the gods. Again, there's no question of innocence. Nobody is innocent. What matters is whether a person is able or not to get purged of his or her sins, and the title of chapter 125. The ideas of moral purity and immediate vision of the gods are brought into close relationship. According to Egyptian convictions, nobody except perhaps the king was able during lifetime to see the gods to have a vision and to enter the divine world in a trance, or meditation or so, there are no traces of shamanism, profitism or mysticism in Egypt, before the Greco Roman period. All forms of immediate contact with the divine world are referred to the life after death and resurrection. All the gods that you have served on Earth, you will confront face-to-face. Be arraigned in an Harper song in one of these tombs. From this text and countlessly others, we learn that the Egyptian Elysium was the same as the world of the gods. That there to prove worthy of being justified before the divine tribuna was emitted into the divine world and was permitted to confront the gods face-to-face. The world of the gods did not form a fourth world besides the other three, but contains the Elysium. The Egyptian cosmology therefore showed the same tripartite structure as all the other cosmologies of the ancient world, Heaven, Earth and under word or world of the gods, world of the living and world of the dead. But the main exception that the dead were believed to be capable of managing the passage from the world of the dead to the word of the gods. If they proved innocent or at least justifiable, in the judgment of the dead. For our categories of logical thinking, the two forms of surviving death, the monumental way of lithic duration, and the moral way of justification and immortality would exclude each other. Why built an expensive monumental tomb and provide for the even more expensive mortuary cult, if one passes into transcendent realms to live among the gods? Free striding like the lords of eternity. For the Egyptians, however, the two concepts of afterlife complement each other. Even after adopting the ideas of justification, Elysium and immortality, they continue to mummify their corpses, build monumental tombs and establish a cult as an interface the world of the living, a place worship, sacrificial communication and autobiographical self representation. Building a tomb remained the most important life project, the teaching of Hordjedef, that they fed back to the Old Kingdom, we read the exhortation, "To build one self or tomb and to magnificently "equip ones home of eternity." Here it is also stressed that man should build ones tomb not only for oneself, but above all, for ones son, who has to perform the mortuary cult to take ones place in the world of the living, and to bridge the gap that divides the two worlds of here and there. Build a house for your son, then the place will be created for you in which you will be. Richly equip your house in the realm of the dead and effectively outfit your place in the West. In the instruction for miracle re, the ancient maxim of Hordjedef became modernized. That is moralized as follows, and this is perhaps 400 years later, they have a duty to richly equip your house in the realm of the dead and effectively outfit your place in the West. This is a quotation from the teaching of Hordjedef. But now it's continuous by being applied by doing justice, upon which man's heart may rely. A tomb is not built by stone alone, but by being upright and doing justice. The monumental tomb is but the visual sign of a good that is justifiable life. The secret of redemption from vanishing and perishing is my heart, the Egyptian goddess and personification of justice, order, and truthfulness. Entertainer of the eloquent peasant. It is said that ma takes him who practice her in this life by the hand and accompanies him towards the necropolis justice is for eternity. It enters the graveyard with its doer. When he is buried and Earth enfolds him, his name does not pass from the Earth. He is remembered because of his goodness, that is the rule of the god's command. When Hekataios of Abdera have 1500 years later, visited Egypt and interrogated the inhabitants about the meaning of their sumptuous tomb architecture. He found the same principles still alive. So he writes, and this is at the end of the fourth century BC. The Egyptians regard the time spent in this life as completely worthless, but to be remembered for virtue after one's death, they hold to be of highest value. Indeed they refer to the houses of the living, as inns, katalyseis, since we dwell in them but a short time, while the tombs of the dead they call everlasting houses, aidioi oikoi, since in Hades we remain for an endless span. For this reason, they troubled themselves little about the furnishings of their houses, but betray an excess of ostentation concerning their places of burial. Virtue, never who an Egyptian meaning perfection refers to living according to the rules of my heart. And this is for the ensures endless remembrance and endless duration in man's house of eternity. The vizia ...among ooza, who lived in the first half of the 15th century avows the same principles and benefits inscriptions, again, quoting and modifying the classical maxim of Hordjedef. I built for me an excellent tomb in my city of eternity, I equip magnificently the place of my rock-tomb in the cliffs of everlastingness. My name, May my name endure upon it in the mouth of the living, my memory being perfect with people after the years to come. Just a trifle is the lifespan spent on Earth, but eternity is spend the netherworld. God praises the noble one who acts oneself with regard to the future, who seeks with his heart to find for himself what is wholesome, namely, burying his corpse and making his name live and who considers eternity. We see that the old idea of an afterlife in and by means of a monumental tomb that serves not only as a hiding place of the mummy, but above all have a place of ongoing communication to the living. And the new ideal of passing the judgment of the dead and being admitted to the Elysium of the field of reads, rushes exists side by side. From the beginning of the second millennium on moreover, the tomb is seen not only as a place of cult, but also as a door to the upper world, where the dead by crossing the fault store may go up and see the sun. And this idea of going forth by day becomes in the course of the second millennium, the most important goal of all the various preparations for surviving death. The idea of immortality through justification form the center of Egyptian beliefs, and the strong parallels to Christian ideas of salvation and justification cannot be mere coincidence. Believe forever engenders disbelief, and I think it would be the most astonishing aspect of the Egyptian idea of immortality, that they even manage to give disbelief a voice. One of these voices is a literary texts that cause serious doubts on the sense of tomb building and mortuary cult. The famous dialogue between a man and his ba, dating from about the same time as the teaching from Erie Karin, the Middle Kingdom. Both angel Locutots, the men and his bar agree in their longing for death. The man however, wants to postpone death and the tomb has been built and the survivor has been appointed to perform the funerary and mortuary rituals whereas the ba pleads for an immediate departure from this world, doubting the sense of courage and tomb building. If you think of burial, it is heartbreak. It is bringing tears by saddening a man. It is taking a man from his house casting him in the desert. You will not go up to see the sun. Those who build in granite, who erected halls in excellent tombs of excellent construction, when the builders have become gods, their offerings stones are desolate, like the inert who have died on the riverbank for lack of a survivor. Follow the feast day, forget worry. Another text stating presumably from the same time of transition around to 2000 BC cast doubts not on tomb building in this world, but our life conditions and the other world, and this takes two, is a dialogue. The consequence of some catastrophic events that are not made clear presumably the murder of Osiris by his brother Seth. Our tomb, the creator assigns Osiris to the netherworld where his terrain is lord of the dead. Osiris however, does not view this realm is an Elysium. Oh, Atum how is it that I must travel to the wasteland of the realm of the dead? It has no water, it has no air, it is utterly deep, dark and endless. And Atum respond, "You live there in contentment of heart." But there's no making love there. Atum, "I have granted transfiguration in place of water, "air and making love and contentment of heart "in the place of bread and beer." There is no mention of the tension from death and of reaching an Elysium's fear that Osiris will rule and find eternal satisfaction of his wishes and desires. Instead, Atum says that he will transform these very desires so that Osiris will no longer yarn for water, air, bread, beer and sexual pleasure. He has replaced desires with contentment of heart and human nature this transfiguration. This answer, however, stays in stark contrast to all the descriptions and depictions of the Elysium sphere to which the Egyptians hope to be assigned after their justification before the divine tribunal and must therefore be counted as an expression of disbelief. In this text, the angel Locutors are gods. And this there's no mention of the human sphere. It is about the difference between the divine sphere and the realm of the dead, that Osiris is assigned to. The other dialogue between the men and his ba about life on Earth and in the beyond. So the other is about the human condition in this world. And in the last line, the ba votes from banquet songs, whose message is equally skeptical concerning the hereafter. So this exploitation of making marriage, celebrate the feast and make merry. So this is a quotation from banquet songs. The most famous of these songs occurs in a tomb inscription accompany the figure of a blind Harper and dating from the Amana posts Amana period. It also appears interspersed among left songs in the somewhat later papyrus, entertains like follows. How happy this this good prince. The beautiful fate has come. A generation passes, another stays, since the time of the ancestors. The gods who were before rest and their tombs, their places are gone, what has become of them? I have heard the word of Imhotep and Hordjedef, whose sayings are recited everywhere. What of their places? Their walls have crumbled, their places are gone as though they had never been. None comes from there to tell of their state, to tell of their needs to calm our heart until we go where they have gone. Hence rejoice in your heart. Forgetfulness befits you. Follow your heart as long as you live. Put myrrh on your head, dress in fine linen anoint yourself with oils fit for a god. Heap up your joys, let your heart not sink. Follow your heart and your happiness, do your things on Earth as your heart commands. When there comes to you that day of mourning, the weary-hearted, this is Osiris. Hears not their morning, wailing saves no men from the pit. Make holiday, do not weary of it. Lo, none is allowed to take his good with him, lo, none who departs comes back again. But the skeptic Harpus proclaim belongs to the semantic of the feast that being a typical hetero tope forms an independent universe of meaning within the broader context of general culture. We meet with the same exaltation to remember death, realize the shortness of life and grasp the present festive moment with all the tendency of awareness and enjoyment in the Epic of Gilgamesh. And they act as a divine innkeepers Siduri, who greets Gilgamesh with these words, Gilgamesh, whither are you wandering? Life, which will look for, you will never find For when the gods created man, they let death be his share, and life withheld in their own hands. Gilgamest, fill your belly. Day and night make merry. Let days be full of joy, dance and make music day and night. And wear fresh clothes and wash your head and bathe. Look at the child that is holding your hand, and let your wife delight in your embrace. These things alone are the concern of men. Gilgamesh in his search of immortality has reached the end of the world. Siduri tells him that immortality is not men's lot, but mortality, and that he should make his short stay on Earth as joyful and lively as possible. Men should not spoil the precious moment of earthly existence by worrying about the imaginary hereafter. The relation of this mystery to the fees is given by the fact that Siduri is an innkeeper, pouring wine to the gods. Banquet songs fall into here competency, even in the Bible, we meet with this skeptical view of afterlife and immortality. In chapter nine of Ecclesiastes, we read, Go, eat your food with gladness and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for God has already approved what you do. Always be closed in white, and always anoint your head with oil. Enjoy the life with your wife, whom you love, all the days of this meaningless life that God has given you under the sun, all your meaningless days. For this is your lot in life and in your toilsome labor under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom. There's even the relation of this text to the junk of banquet songs, because the book of Ecclesiastes, Qohelet, is read during the feast of Sukkot, that they spend in booths of branches that much singing and wine drinking. Besides the feast and literature, however, there's still a set place where voice is given to doubt and disbelief. And this is the demiurge the ritual lamentation of the surviving widow, I quote only one example of this Johanne. The house of those in the west is deep and dark. There is no door, no window in it, no light to brighten, no north wind to refresh the heart. The sun does not rise there, they lie forever in sleep, because of the darkness, even in the daytime. Oh, woe, may the dear one be safe and sound breathing air. Or another takes, the one with the booming voice is silent, he does not speak. The self-aware one is unconscious. Those in the West are in difficulty, their condition is bad, how motionless is the one who has gone to them. He cannot describe his condition, he rests in his lonely place and eternity is with him in darkness. There is one very late text and this will be my last example dating from the first century BC. It is a Stela that a high priests Takh set up for his deceased wife, or which he she herself has set up and when she was still alive, in which she addresses her surviving husband. O my brother, my husband, my friend, high priest. Your heart were not weary of drinking and eating of intoxication and lovemaking. Spend a good day, follow your heart day and night. Let no care into your heart. What are years not spend on Earth? The West, it is the land of slumber, a burdensome darkness, the dwelling place of those who are there. Sleep is their occupation . They wake not to see their brothers. They cannot gaze upon their fathers and mothers, their hearts miss their and their children. The water of life, which is the nourishment of every mouth, it is thirst for me. It comes only to the one who is on Earth. I thirst, though there's water beside me. I do not know the place where I am, since I came to this valley. Give me flowing water. Say to me, "May your form not be far from the water." Turn my face to the north wind on the bank of the water. Surely my heart will be cooled in its grief. Death, Come, is his name, whoever he calls to himself, they come immediately, though their hearts shudder in fear of him. No one sees him among gods and men. Great and small alike are in his hand. No one staves off his curse from the one he chooses. He steals the son from his mother, rather than the old man that is drawing nigh to him. All the fearful are placed before him, but he turns not his face to them. He does not come to the one that prays to him, he does not heed the man who praises him, he is not seen, so no gift can be given to him. These skeptical and pessimistic voices, may have been always there, and may have found their expression in the head of a typology of literature, the feast and to lament, even if it took much time to admit them into the canon of tomb inscriptions, that they're eternalizing aspirations. That this was possible, however, that the Egyptians were able to endure the tension between belief and disbelief. And to give disbelief a voice, even in the canon of tomb inscriptions is the best proof of the strength of their belief in immortality. The Egyptians seem to have been by far the first to form a concept of immortality originally advanced a politically motivated concept connected to the institution of sacred kingship, elevating Pharaoh to the rank of the immortal gods. But after the collapse of the Old Kingdom, it was extended to virtually all human beings. The immortality of the soul however, was just one part of the Egyptian concept of immortality, linked to the ba, the judgment and the Elysium. The other part concerned the endless duration of the mummified corpse resting in the monumental tomb in the Earth. This double form of immortality is expressed in innumerable texts. For instance, may your ba exist living in Neheh like Orion in the womb of the goddess of heaven, na. While your corpse may endure in Djet, like the stone of the mountains. If Western Christianity has indeed inherited the Egyptian dream of immortality, it concerns only the first part, the ideas of soul, judgment, justification and paradise. The preservation of the body is the much less important and mummification remains a specificity of ancient Egypt. But Ancient Egypt seems to have been the first civilization to dream the dream of immortality, thank you all. (clapping) - [Man] Well, thank you for this very learned, typical of yourself, learn and lecture. I will try to be brief. I am an Iranist and lament the fact that Iran is little known clearly among scholars in general, apart from Iranistics. My point is that I would say circa 1200 BCE, a poet priest named Zarathustra, whom we know as Zoroaster, let's call him that because of the Nietzschean confusion. Zoroaster not necessarily the same as Zoroastrianism, which is the development of only some of Zoroaster's ideas. My point here is that Zoroaster, conceived of the soul of the righteous realistically opposed to that of the wicked, entering a unification in a sunny paradisiac place with the gods. This was an important doctrine, the chief doctrine of the poems of Zoroaster. And the residue of that even though it went through many changes, how would you assess this parallelism? And how would you also assess the influence in the later phenomenon the more westerly phenomenon of the Persian Empire under which the Jews lived, and for which there are clear, eschatological influences from Iran, how would you assess this in the balance with the learned presentation you gave concerning Egypt? - Yeah, thank you. This is very important question, I think. This is also a question of how to date these Iranian Saracen texts. And if these texts are really last ancient dating from the second millennium BCE, I think we are then confronted, we are dealing with two independent roots. Not one Ancient Egypt but two roots of the idea of immortality then Iranian and an Egyptian. And ancient Israel had access to both. Of course they met with Zoroastrianism in Babylon and then they were ruled by a Persian in the fifth and fourth centuries, so, there were ample occasion for being influenced by Zoroastrianism, but they were also ruled, of course by Egypt in Ptolemaic times and in very early times, which I am not too sure whether they have survived substantial memories until the composition of the biblical texts. But they were in contact with both influences exposed to both influences, so, I see no difficulty in admitting, Zoroastrianism as another sphere where the idea of immortality came up independent of course, if this belongs to the second millennium, I do not believe that they have also Egyptian influence on Iran that's too far away. Of course we see later influences in this iconography of Ahura Mazda, and of course, all, they've got Asura and so the iconographic influence of Egypt on Persia is quite evident. But of course, that much later period. - [Man] I just heard, for those who don't know, ancient Iran is to the east, not where we have it in Persia. - [Woman] Thank you so much we need to give him a chance. Thank you very much. - Yeah, thank you. - [Man] Hello, thank you so much for your stimulating question. I tried to be very brief, I have two precise questions to ask you. First is, in terms of the ontological character of the soul of the king, which would ascend to the heavens, I'd be grateful if you could shed some light on it. Because as you know, the notion of seeking, for example, in Greece, in Plato is not exactly your individualized, personalized soul, which you find in Christianity and which I must must add, following the gentleman who has just asked questions, could have not developed without an Iranian influence, the personalization the soul is something for which Iranian plays an important role. So just what's the ontological status of the soul that ascends to heaven, and joins the gods, is it the personal soul? That's my first question. Second question is, since you made the connection between Mesopotamia and Egypt, if I could borrow a term from the late John Pian Vano, and use the term of ideology of death, desecrating an Egyptian tomb, which obviously have grave consequences in religious terms and ritual terms, just like you would have had in Mesopotamia, what exactly is the similarity of the manner in which more so common mortals would dwell, common mortals would dwell in their tombs because they wouldn't go into the heavens and the way in which for example, the dead of Mesopotamia would be indebted to him. So what exactly in terms of the ideology of death in Egypt and Mesopotamia would be the situation of common men who can't ascend to the heavens? Who cannot have any sort of privileged access to the heavens? So, these are my two questions the exact ontological nature of the soul. And then of course, the manner in which common men would live in their tombs and as you know, of course, in Mesopotamian desecrating them was a huge, huge sin. Thank you. - All right. Well, thank you very much, difficult questions. While the ontological status. - [Man] Personalized soul or is it something else? - Yes, so, I conceive of the Egyptian concept of ba as the force that animates a body from within, so that the spirit of life but closely related to the body, and leaving the body after death, so, the ontological status of the soul before death is part of the person. Very important, spiritual, invisible, life giving animating part of the person and the ontological status after death, well, is still a part of the person, but now free to move in the realms of the universe and no longer bound to the body. But the Egyptian idea and idea of death is that this is no definite separation. So the soul is able to freely move in heaven and underworld but stays in contact with the cults and visit the mommy every night. So by day it is free to move around the world and every night it enters the tomb and rests upon the mummy. And this is also the reason why mummification and tomb building and non-violation of the tomb is so essential for the Egyptians. So the Egyptian idea of surviving death is to what formerly what in life was one unity of the person is now a network of components, ba, the ka, and the tomb and the Elysium, it is a network of communicating elements and the violation of the tomb, but disturb this network, yeah, whereas in Mesopotamia, there is I think there's no idea of an Elysium. This is the land without return and is now. So there is violation of the Mesopotamian tomb is even worse. - Even worse. - [Man] I genuinely enjoyed your presentation. Would you please give a little more detail about the concept of justice and its relationship to my heart and maybly compare it and contrast it with what appeared in Athens with Socrates and Plato dikay and dika yo sanae in the process of justification, do they look similar or different? - Yeah, thank you. Well, the Egyptian content of Maat is justice, but it's justice and truth. So dikay and Alitalia together, this is just one concept in Egypt. Like Asha in Persian. So the Egyptians do not distinguish between what is there and what should be here, yeah. This is the right. And this content of Maat of justice, is also the foundation of permanence. So the unjust that does not correspond to justice is doomed to perish. And so this is the link between being truth and justice known. And I think this is different from the Greek idea of dikay. - [Man] Thank you. - [Man] Hello, thank you. Could you say something about the fate of non-human animals after death in ancient Egypt. - Yes, thank you. Yeah, even the animals were mummified in ancient Egypt, and were in the subject of all these rituals of transfiguration. So even the animals had a soul. The Egyptians were, did not make a very strong distinction between animals and men, even animals and gods, there were the sacred animals and these huge cemeteries of mummified animals that were in a way sacred, even manifestations of the divine in animal, so yeah. - [Woman] Hi, when I was studying in Egypt, some Egyptian scholars were talking about the relationship between the three pyramids in Giza. - Macro fudge. - [Woman] Okay, the three pyramids in Giza with the position of the stars in for example, in the constellation of the belt of Orion. - Well this is a theory, but do not subscribe. - Is that true? Okay, but I was wondering, is there a relation between the building of tombs and stars in any way? 'Cause I know on some days, there's, you know, one day a year light comes into a certain tomb, were they very interested in astronomy and if you could talk about it. - Well, yeah, there's been tomb where this seems to play a role in the temple of Abu Simbel, where the certain time the rays of the sun hit the statues, the back, this does not refer to tombs, but to the temperate of Abu Simbel. And the tombs are I think that they are not also the pyramids of course, are oriented towards the cardinal points. And there is always an opening to the north where the ba of the king can fly up to the Polar Star. But the pattern of the pyramids on Earth, I think this is coincidence that this has something to do with. - Thank you for your questions. Thank you for this magnificent lecture. And let's thank Professor Assmann one more time. (clapping) (upbeat music)
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Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)
Views: 77,023
Rating: 4.7490349 out of 5
Keywords: Egypt, Jan Assmann, Immortality, Egyptology, archeology
Id: 0qjHkxwnRrs
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 79min 25sec (4765 seconds)
Published: Fri Oct 30 2015
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