1 - Egypt

Ancient Egypt, known for its abundance of pyramids and mummies, was obsessed with the afterlife. When the Hebrews departed Egypt for Canaan after a 400-year sojourn (events described in the Book of Exodus) Egyptian polytheistic views on eternal life were excluded from their cultural baggage. The culture of the Canaanites overcome by the Hebrews, however, was hevily indebted to that of their Egyptian overlords. Egypt, ancient land of wealth and wisdom, exerted a similar influence upon the Greeks, the de facto founders of Western Civilization 

Egypt’s stability and prosperity was based on sun and soil. The annual flooding of the Nile deposited rich alluvial soil along its banks which could be irrigated with water from the adjacent river. This cycle commenced in August when the sun ended its eclipse of Sirius, which the Egyptians regarded as the goddess Sothis, harbinger of the rejuvenating fall and winter floods. When the flood waters receded, silt left behind was available for planting crops. After the harvest, the fertile land born of the river dried up and was windblown into the surrounding desert.

The unremitting Egyptian sun was newborn every morning then perished at sunset. Ridged mountain ranges along the eastern shore of the Nile enabled astronomers to determine precisely what day of the solar year the position of a risen sun indicated. The annual procession of sunrises from south to north and north to south was significant for the Egyptians and every other ancient culture. The solar disc was represented by the Egyptian god Aten who was later supplanted by the more all-encompassing god Ra. Analogous to the cyclical floods and seasons is the birth and death of human beings. All three of these cycles formed the basis of Egyptian conceptions of the afterlife.

The Egyptian term for their well-ordered realm was Ankh, symbolized by a feather or a young goddess wearing a feather. Disruptions to the life-sustaining cycles could and did occur. These could be minimized by maintaining justice and order, concepts described by the term ma’at. Sustaining ma’at depended upon every Egyptian but was preeminently the responsibility of the Pharoah whose waking hours were dedicated to a continual round of god-appeasing rituals. A bewildering array of deities, typically represented by animals, populate the Egyptian pantheon. The names of each of these minor, local gods were modified by appending a variant of the auspicious and venerable name of Ra. The sun god, Atum, was thus properly designated Atum-Re. Inconsistencies in Egyptian mythology can irritate outsiders but were embraced and accepted by the Egyptians themselves.

Egyptians were the first civilization to associate immortality with a heaven. Eternal life was originally reserved for the Pharoah, who alone could afford to erect a massive pyramid regarded as being indispensable for the ascent to heaven. Osirus-Isis mythology was central to Egyptian conceptions of the afterlife. Osirus, a beneficent king is married to his sister Isis. After Osirus is tricked into entering a chest (a prototypical sarcophagus) by his evil brother Seth, Isus discovers the chest and frees her husband/brother. Seth then chops Osirus into fourteen parts and scatters them. Isis recovers and buries every body part except the penis, which has been thrown into the Nile so she provides the reassembled corpse with an artificial penis. Isis is subsequently supernaturally impregnated and gives birth to Horus, son of Osirus. Osirus becomes god of the underworld. Horus remains aboveground to eventually vanquish his evil uncle Seth, the ruler of chaos. The reigning Pharoah, ruler of the living, was identified with Horus. A dead Pharoah was ritually transformed into Osirus, ruler of the dead. A stable and intact pharaonic tomb ensured a perpetual connection between the realms of the living and the dead.

Atum-Re attempted to broker peace in the destabilizing war between Horus and Seth. Seth invites Horus to his house for a banquet where he later attempts to sexually dominate his uncle. Horus catches Seth’s semen in his hands and conveys it to his mother Isis. Isis cuts off her son’s hands and throws them into the Nile but furnishes Horus with a new pair of hands. The Nile absorbs the power of Horus. Isis establishes a decentralized funerary cult based on the various parts of her late husband’s dismembered body. This decentralization contributed to the unification of Egypt by assigning roles in the rituals of the cult of Osirus to scattered locales. These rituals were concerned not only with the state of the dead, but also with the fertility of the land. An effigy of Osirus comprised of soil and seed was created each spring which toured Egypt while its seed germinated. This effigy commemorated the renewed fertility of the land as well as the reunification of the dismembered body of Osirus. The cyclical death and rebirth and rebirth of vegetation is central to cultural myths describing the afterlife not only in Egypt, but throughout the world.

Rather than becoming condemned or saved, Egyptians distinguished between becoming an akh, a transfigured person privileged to enjoy the pleasures of the afterlife and the only possible alternative, becoming a mut, or corpse. Similarly, some Christian theologians dismiss the concept of eternal punishment in hell as the only alternative to eternal life passed in a new heaven and earth. Sacred hieroglyphics and continual postmortem rituals expedited the various stages marking the passage of potential akh from death to resurrection and eternal life. 

Egyptians described the afterlife with the term Duat. Those enroute to eternity were obliged to traverse the sky by boat assisted by ferrymen and servants. The puzzling Osirus myth furnished a narrative structure for the process, and the hieroglyph representing Osirus was appended to the name of a deceased Pharoah. Intercession by the living was essential. Artists who created sacred artifacts required to resurrect the dead were called sankh, or givers of life. The ritual that employed these objects was designated heka, which can be loosely translated as magic or religion or more accurately as power. The eventual dissolution of central authority opened access to the costly rituals that secure eternal life not only to the nobility and royal bureaucrats, but to any Egyptian who could afford to pay for them.

Based on the relationship between earthbound son Horus and eternal father Osirus, sustaining the afterlife required continual interaction between the living and the newly resurrected dead. This codependent relationship is referred to as ka, which is symbolized by a hieroglyph depicting two outstretched arms raised for worship or an embrace. It was believed that only a son could reach into the world of the dead to enable a father to successfully cross the threshold of death. A terrestrial image of the dead was regarded as the physical embodiment of the deceased and could receive offerings. The Egyptian term for statue is shesep which originally meant receiver. An additional force, the ba, was associated with funerary rites, which travelled an otherworldly analogue of the Nile every day, returning to its point of origin to retrace its journey at sunrise.

The author notes that ancient Egyptians possessed no real sense of individuality, of self. Life was ordered through the fulfillment of venerable roles and ritual obligations. Judgements associated with the journey to the afterlife emphasized the core values of Egyptian culture. Self-actualization was, perhaps, a byproduct of an individual’s desire to live forever. The condition of an Egyptian in the afterlife was dependent on correct behavior while living in addition to possessing substance sufficient to pay for mummies, monuments, and the perpetual maintenance of a mortuary cult. 

As the list of afterlife-eligible Egyptians expanded, judgement of the soul in the underworld became the criteria that allowed non-royal persons to live forever. Judgement scenes began to appear in Egyptian literature. The god Re weighed the good and bad deeds, the ma’at of a soul in his balance. The Pharoah was exempted from judgement, but his subjects were constrained to live moral lives if they were to enter afterlife.

The brief ascendancy of Amenhotep IV, or Akhenaten, temporarily disrupted this enduring order. Akhenaten championed the cult of a single deity, the sun disk god Aten. This reform redirected worship from the dark, netherworld realm of Osirus into the light of day. Tombs formerly oriented toward western sunsets were now constructed facing the eastern sunrise. In his imaginative booklet Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud anachronistically hypothesized that the monotheism which was ascendent in Egypt during the reign of Akhenaten was absorbed by the Hebrews and carried back with them to Canaan. The Book of Genesis and the timing of Akhenaten’s revolution both contradict Freud’s theory.

Upon Amenhotep IV’s death, his son Tutankhamon (aka King Tut) restored the cult of Osirus and purged the land of every vestige of his father’s bold foray into monotheism. As was the case with the Counterreformation, the aftermath of this anomaly introduced a new zealousness to the custodians of traditional religion. A New Kingdom era compilation of old material, The Egyptian Book of the Dead (more properly The Book of Going Forth by Day) was produced as the Hebrews departed Egypt for Canaan. Chapters 30 and 125 of this book focus on the judgement of the dead. Chapter 125 contains a noted confession:

I have not done that which the gods abominate.

I have not defamed a slave to his superior.

I have not made anyone sick.

I have not made anyone weep.

I have not killed.

I have given no order to a killer.

I have not caused anyone suffering.

I have not cut down on the food income in the temples.

I have not damaged the bread of the gods.

I have not taken the loaves of the blessed dead.

I have not had sexual relations with a boy.

The democratization of access to the afterlife motivated non-royal Egyptians to struggle to lead moral lives. The concept that we are going to be judged, and that our eternal destiny hinges on the outcome of this judgement is an effective spur to leading a moral life. This is an individual, rather than a collective endeavor. Egyptians who were not historically obliged to develop a sense of self were now forced to lead lives of piety and service to the state, a personal initiative. Success would lead to Ankh. Failures would become insensible, nonexistent muts 

The Assyrians briefly conquered Egypt in 671 BCE. The Persians inaugurated a more sustained occupation in 525 BCE and Egypt, like Israel, became another province of the Persian Empire. In 332 BCE the Greeks under Alexander ousted the Persians, assumed the august name of Horus, and inaugurated the construction of the famed seaport city Alexandria. Ten years later Alexander died. His general Ptolemy became the newest Pharoah in 305 BCE. Rather than “Hellenize” the Egyptians, the Ptolemies grafted a Greek-speaking bureaucracy atop the longstanding Egyptian status quo. Egyptian priests undertook to explain their traditions to a Greek-speaking readership and later created variants of their cults that became popular (particularly, the mystery cult of Isis) throughout the Roman Empire. The Roman conquest and governance of Egypt followed the pattern established by the Persians and continued by the Ptolemies. Roman rule transitioned into Byzantine rule followed by ten years of Sassanid (Neo-Persian) rule early in the 7th century. From 649 to 642 the Islamic caliphate under Muslim Arab direction invaded and conquered Egypt. The melding of Islamic and traditional Egyptian religion resulted in Sufism, a mystical variation on mainstream Islam.

It is conjectured that the Christian figure of a Madonna and child is based on similar of Isis and her son Horus that are central to the cult of Isis. Some believe that the symbol of Christianity, the cross, is derived from the Egyptian symbol for Ankh. Egyptian influences on Judaic conceptions of the afterlife are not evident until the Hellenistic period through the filter of a generalized mystical sensibility spread throughout those portions of the world once conquered by Alexander the Great. The transformed, angelic state of inhabitants of the hereafter, originally an Egyptian concept, grudgingly influenced Hebraic theology but was warmly embraced by the writers of the New Testament.