LEFT Anubis weighs the heart of the dead person, watched by the terrifying Ammit, who will devour those found wanting.
BELOW Osiris, seated, with Isis behind him wearing the horned crown of Hathor, from the inner wall of the temple to Osiris at Abydos, Egypt.
C ompared with the ancient Greek and Roman myths, ancient Egyptian myths, though often equally colourful and sometimes as entertaining, are fragmentary, confusing, amoral, and remote from
Perhaps the most accessible and celebrated is the Egyptian day of the modern reader, with only a few exceptions. judgement for the deceased, commonly depicted in the various crouches ready to devour the heart if Osiris’s verdict proves to be unfavourable—thereby condemning the unfortunate individual to a second, and perpetual, death. Hence the importance of the stone amulets known as ‘heart scarabs’ placed over the heart in mummification, which were supposed to prevent the heart from revealing to Osiris its owner’s wrongdoings during his or her lifetime.
versions of the Book of the Dead.
Here, the dead individual looks on as his or her heart is weighed Garry Shaw, author of The Egyptian Myths , is a professional on a balance against the feather of maat (truth) in the presence of the enthroned god Osiris, depicted as a tightly wrapped mummy, the jackal-‐headed god Anubis, who controls the balance, the ibis-‐headed god Thoth, who writes down the verdict on his scribal palette, and the fearsome Ammit, a beast with the head of a crocodile, the torso of a leopard/lion and the hindparts of a hippopotamus, which
Egyptologist with a doctorate from the University of Liverpool who teaches at the Egypt Exploration Society in London. He strives to bring to life the full range of myths without oversimplifying their complexity or underplaying their weirdness: ancient Egypt was a culture, after all, which recommended placing a clay image of a rearing cobra (a uraeus) with fire in its mouth in each corner of
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Towards the end, for example, in a chapter discussing the afterlife, the author dramatises the post-‐mortem period for the believing ancient Egyptian:
You close your eyes. You breathe your last breath. The world descends into darkness. Your heart stops beating. You open your eyes. You are no longer lying in bed, surrounded by weeping loved ones, but standing in a vast desert before a tall gateway. You are now in the
Duat, a word often translated as Netherworld or Underworld, but which, in reality, referred to a place that was just as much a part of the created world as anywhere you might visit when alive; it was just simply out of reach of the living. From consulting your Book of the
Dead, buried with you in your tomb during your funeral and now magically accessible, you know this to be the start of an adventure, rife with challenges, which could quite possibly end with your own second death—your obliteration from existence. To the Egyptians, physical death was not true death, just a change of circumstances; true death occurred in the Duat at the hands of demons or was ordered by Osiris for those who had lived an unrighteous life.
Then, with the Book of the Dead metaphorically in hand as a crucial guide, Shaw takes us through the many frightening and awkward challenges that faced deceased persons in journeying through the hostile Duat before they might be permitted to attain the hall of judgement. They had to pass through either seven or 21 gates (depending on which Book of the Dead they were following), each guarded by armed demons. They also had to negotiate with the celestial ferryman, Mahaf, who would be certain to create difficulty by arguing that his ferry had no mast for sailing in windy weather.
The correct response was to instruct Mahaf that the phallus of the god
Babi, an aggressive baboon, would make an admirable mast!
Bizarre as Egyptian myths can be, and ridiculed as they were by certain Greeks and Romans (such as the poet Juvenal), they nevertheless had a powerful influence on the Classical writers, who imputed highly esoteric philosophy to the hieroglyphic script, which none of them could read. The Greeks and Romans came in direct contact with the myths as rulers of Egypt in the Ptolemaic
Period (332-‐30 BC) and the Roman Period (30 BC-‐AD 395). Shaw lists some of the many Egyptian gods and goddesses who were given
Greek equivalents: Amun = Zeus, Thoth = Hephaistus or sometimes
Hermes, Osiris = Dionysos, Isis = Demeter, Seth = Typhon, Horus =
Apollo, Hathor = Aphrodite. Imhotep, the historical architect of the
BELOW Could the depiction of the goddess Isis with her young son Horus have influenced later Christian imagery of Mary with the baby Jesus?
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ABOVE LEFT The right eye of Horus that represents the sun. This representation was found with the mummy of Tamut, a high-ranking priest’s daughter, now at the British
Museum.
ABOVE The mummy of Tamut, part of the British Museum's Ancient Lives exhibition, which has shown through use of CT scans the amulets placed with the dead to ensure their wellbeing in the afterlife. The winged amulet on her throat is believed to represent Nut, the winged sky goddess and eternal mother figure for the dead.
first ancient Egyptian pyramid (c. 2650 BC), was in due course deified and prayed to for healing; the Greeks therefore associated Imhotep with their own god of medicine and healing, Asclepius (he of the snake-‐entwined staff that still stands for healing). Moreover, certain
Egyptian cult centres acquired Greek names, such as the cult centre of
Thoth, ancient Khnum, which the Greeks called Hermopolis.
With the advent of Christianity in the Roman empire in the 4th century AD, the ancient Egyptian mythological influence continued.
Statues and depictions of the goddess Isis holding or suckling the child Horus had become familiar throughout the Mediterranean as a result of the cult of Isis. According to Shaw, they may have served as an inspiration for the iconography of the Madonna and Child. More speculatively, images of the god Horus harpooning Seth in the form of a hippopotamus or crocodile (or images of Seth slaying the serpent
Apophis)—which symbolised the defeat of disorder—were popular in the Roman Period, and might have inspired icons of St George slaying the dragon.
Much later, in Renaissance Rome, the Borgia Pope Alexander VI even claimed an ancestral connection with Isis and Osiris, on the grounds that Osiris had brought the wisdom of Egypt to Italy during his journey around the world. A bull in the Borgia family coat of arms was reinterpreted as a depiction of the sacred Apis bull. In the 1490s, frescoes were painted by Pinturicchio in the private apartments at the Vatican showing winged sphinxes, the myth of Osiris and the Apis bull.
As Shaw stresses throughout the book, 'What is now mythology, was once explanation.’ In other words, myths were the ancient
Egyptians’ attempts to answer the questions raised by their natural environment, their physical health and their psychology.
What was the cause of the River Nile’s annual inundation? Why did people fall sick? How should dreams be understood? The ancient Egyptian mythological explanation for the constant shape of the sun as opposed to the varying shape of the moon was typical of their approach. The prevalent view was that the sun was
Horus’s strong right eye, whereas the moon was his weakened left eye. The latter had been damaged by Seth, who was said to have torn it into six pieces, and then been repaired by Thoth, using his fingers or by spitting on it. During each lunar month, the eye repaired itself as the moon waxed, until it was fully repaired at full moon; but the process had to be repeated each month.
Why do we die, and what happens to us after we die? Death and the afterlife were, of course, the ultimate obsessions of ancient Egyptian mythology, epitomised by mummification and the Books of the
Dead. That said, ancient Egyptians preferred not to confront death directly. Astonishingly, as Shaw observes, there is only ‘one known depiction of death personified’ in all of ancient Egyptian art and literature. It appears in the British Museum’s fairly late Papyrus of
Henuttawy (dated to the 3rd Intermediate Period, c.1069-‐664 BC), where Death is shown as a winged, four-‐legged snake, with the head of a man and a tail terminating in a jackal’s head—as illustrated in
The Egyptian Myths . Moreover, when Queen Nefertari plays the game
Senet against death, symbolically defeating it—a scene also shown in the book—her deadly opponent is invisible. Nor is the seminal destruction of Osiris at the hands of his brother Seth ever described in any detail by the ancient Egyptians, because to do so would have offended against decorum.
Yet, Egyptian myths accepted that not even the gods were immortal. In the long run, the infinite waters of the Nun, which created the world, would reclaim that original world. However, two gods would remain in the inert waters: Atum, embodying all of physical creation, and Osiris, embodying the force of regeneration.
‘Like a great cliffhanger ending,’ writes Shaw, ‘at the end of time the potential for new life would remain.’
Andrew Robinson is the author of Cracking the Egyptian Code: The
Revolutionary Life of Jean-‐François Champollion.
ABOVE From the Papyrus of Henuttawy, 3rd Intermediate Period of Egypt, showing Dath as a winged, four-legged snake, with the head of a man and a tail terminating in a jackal’s head.
ISBN 978-0500251980
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