In a week that saw the first release by Hammer Productions for 34 years, the British Museum in London staged its own blockbuster investigation into the terrors of life after death.
Let Me In, which features vampires, may be scarier, but the Book of the Dead, which features mummies, indisputably has the better title. It also has a better poster — a vignette showing the burial of a 19th-dynasty scribe called Hunefer.
The manuscript from which it comes — providing us, as it does, with the earliest known example of a funerary papyrus to have been stashed away inside the statuette of a god — is an artefact not without historical significance.
But it is also something more — the perfect pandering to all our most half-baked prejudices about the land of the pharaohs and a calculated pointer to why, despite having failed to offer up blood sacrifices in the manner of the Aztecs, or raise pyramids of skulls in the manner of Genghis Khan, ancient Egypt has always been the horror buff’s favourite exotic civilisation. Spells, creepy gods with animal heads and corpses wrapped in sheets — Hunefer’s mummification has them all.
Not that the image of mummies in popular culture can simply be reduced to the spooky. Ever since the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the aura of the sinister that supposedly did for Lord Carnarvon has been counter pointed by a distinctly aureate glamour.
Once visitors to the British Museum’s exhibition have made their way down a long and aptly sepulchral corridor, the first object they are likely to see is a gilded funerary mask.
It may not be solid gold, like Tutankhamun’s, but it is from the same dynastic period — it is unnervingly beautiful and it is precisely the kind of object that visitors to the museum have usually most wanted to see.
It is surely no coincidence that Neil MacGregor, the museum’s director, should have begun his recent BBC radio series, A History of the World in 100 Objects, with a mummy case.
Luring in
For all the fascination of the coins and pot shards that he would go on to feature in subsequent episodes, he knew, as all showmen do, that punters, if they are to be brought to appreciate what is being laid on for them, first have to be lured in through the doors.
That is presumably why the exhibition was not titled the Book of Coming Forth by Day, the name by which the Egyptians themselves knew the corpus of funerary texts that we call the Book of the Dead.
Our modern title was coined back in 1842, by the great German Egyptologist Richard Lepsius, and reflected fantasies about the character of Egyptian civilisation that reached back a very long way indeed.
Greek intellectuals such as Plato, who combined a total ignorance of hieroglyphics with awed admiration for a state that appeared to have existed for ever, took for granted that the theocratic conservatism of Egypt was founded on an inheritance of primordial and superhuman wisdom.
Such a presumption was inherited by Renaissance Europe, which cast the Egyptian priests as occultists, and by the Enlightenment, which cast them as philosophers.
When Jean-Francois Champollion, in the early 19th century, finally succeeded in deciphering the hieroglyphs, scholars were naturally filled with excitement at the prospect of the immemorial learning that they now anticipated being theirs to read. In particular, they fell with excitement upon a whole jumble of papyrus rolls that had been uncovered in tombs across Egypt.
Tellingly, the title given by Lepsius to these various manuscripts served to imply the existence of a single and stable text: a kind of Bible, but more thrillingly ancient and esoteric. To this day, the reputation of the Book of the Dead as a repository of arcane spiritual truths ensures that it is probably the most widely available of all works of pharaonic literature.
Timeless mystique
Some 2500 years on from Plato, its presence in bookshops next to volumes on the I Ching or Atlantis helps the priests of ancient Egypt to maintain their timeless mystique.
In fact, practised party-poopers that they are, Egyptologists have long appreciated that the Book of the Dead has all the spirituality of a guide to negotiating passport control at an international airport. Death, in the opinion of the Egyptians, was the start of a peculiarly purgatorial journey.
Although the ultimate prospect was of arriving safe and sound in paradise, the way there, so the Egyptians believed, was arduous and primed with any number of booby traps.
Only if voyagers through the afterlife were armed with a sufficient quantity of spells and incantations could they hope to negotiate these perils — and that was where the Book of the Dead came in.
Placed next to a mummy, rather like a guidebook inside a holidaymaker’s hand luggage, it provided the deceased with a detailed and invaluable guide to what the Egyptians called the duat, the landscape of the underworld.
As with the taking of an airplane, however, so with travel after death — there had been a time when the entire business was altogether more exclusive. Although the earliest versions of the Book of the Dead date only from about 1700BC, more than a millennium after the founding of the pharaonic state, many of the presumptions about death that they express were far older than that.
The afterlife
Pyramid-building, which reached its peak in about 2500BC, had served as a particular trendsetter — a nationalised project of resurrection-machine construction, designed to set those laid to rest inside them on the pathway to the gods. “A staircase to heaven is built for the pharaoh, that he may ascend to heaven thereby.”
This prospect, of attaining divinity in the afterlife, had been, under the megalomaniacal rule of Egypt’s first dynasties, a wholly royal prerogative. When, two centuries after the construction of the Great Pyramid, a pharaoh named Unas had the walls of his own burial chamber decorated with a profuse array of spells, it never crossed his mind that these same spells might end up being widely produced.
That, however, following the implosion of the Old Kingdom in about 2100BC, is precisely what happened. First on coffins, and ultimately on rolls of papyrus, resurrection spells began to appear in the tombs of relative nobodies.
By the time of the New Kingdom, when Egyptian power attained its swaggering peak, their popularity was assured. Whether wedged under a mummy’s arm, placed under its head, or stuffed, as in Hunefer’s tomb, inside the statuette, these compendia of prayers and incantations had become a must-have feature of the Egyptian way of death.
That is not to say that paradise had remotely been democratised. The afterlife remained a privilege that came very expensive indeed.
The funerary scrolls themselves, as the examples on display at the British Museum serve to demonstrate, were often exquisitely decorated, and might be written almost on the scale of a novel — the so-called Greenfield papyrus, for instance, which is the longest Book of the Dead yet discovered and which provides the exhibition with its climactic coup de theatre, clocks in at a whopping 37 metres.
Nor was a funerary scroll the only investment required to reach paradise. Spells would serve no purpose without effective mummification and a tomb. For the vast majority of the Egyptian population, who could hope at best for burial in the arid desert sands alongside a humble pot or two, a Book of the Dead was an extravagance beyond their wildest dreams.
The prospects
Only the elite — the priests, the scribes and the court apparatchiks — could hope to afford them. The journey to join the gods would have been a feasible prospect for, at most, one Egyptian in 10.
Quite what form that journey would have taken, however, was a question to which they never gave a consistent answer. Traditionally, two pathways had been imagined. The first, and more venerable, required the soul of the deceased, the ba, to fly out every morning to be united with the sun god, and then, every evening, as the sun sank back into the underworld, to return for shelter to the mummy in its tomb.
“Coming forth by day,” the Egyptians termed this process — the phrase that provided them with their collective name for the funerary scrolls.
Sunset, however, did not have to see the deceased wholly confined to their tombs. If the ba had little option at night but to twiddle its thumbs and wait for dawn, then the ka, the eternal spirit of a person, could embark on a journey of its own, following the sun on its night-time journey through the duat, travelling from the west, the realm of darkness, towards the east, the realm of dawn and of resurrection.
This was the journey that the Book of the Dead — and the British Museum’s exhibition — most compellingly illustrates. As in a dream, so in the duat, the topography is never something constant. Rather, its contours and dimensions vary deliriously from scroll to scroll. Nevertheless, there are recurrent themes.
Gates feature with a particular prominence, guarded by animal-headed deities, who are invariably armed with knives and prone to hacking up corpses, dancing in blood and eating hearts. Snakes loom large as well, often coiled round giant mountains, and with an unsettling taste for eating “the bones of putrid cats”. The gods themselves, like celestial fishermen, sometimes rig the firmament with nets, or else turn it upside down, and oblige the deceased to consume their own excrement.
All these horrors, and more, were only to be avoided by the utterance of the requisite spells. “May I have power in my heart,” as one incantation puts it. “May I have power in my arms, may I have power in my legs, may I have power in my mouth, may I have power in my every member.”
The past and the present
If all this makes the Book of the Dead sound more Dungeons and Dragons than The Divine Comedy, that is probably fair enough. The Egyptians, it would seem, were no great enthusiasts for moral philosophy.
Although they were certainly not oblivious to the notion that the fate of one’s soul in the afterlife might depend upon what one had done while still alive, the spin they gave it was hardly one that Dante would have recognised.
Come the moment of truth for a soul after its lengthy journey through the duat, when its heart would be weighed on a set of scales against a feather, all that was required to stop the heart from sinking and being swallowed by a terrifying monster (a crocodile-headed compound of a lion and a hippopotamus named the Devourer) was the requisite magic.
A human-headed scarab placed over the heart of the mummy would prevent the organ from piping up at the moment of judgment and spilling any inconvenient truths.
Likewise, a written profession of innocence would readily be accepted by the gods as a more than adequate substitute for any authentic lack of moral blemish. Virtue was virtue only if it appeared on a strip of paper. In death as in life, pharaonic Egypt was irredeemably a realm of bureaucrats.
The strangeness of all this, it goes without saying, only adds to its fascination. Nowhere in the world, perhaps, is better than the British Museum at forcing on its visitors a recognition of how every culture in every period has shared a common humanity. But the converse is also true.
An exhibition such as this one serves to remind us of something no less profound, and perhaps more unsettling: that ancient peoples lived under circumstances – emotional, spiritual and intellectual — immeasurably different from our own. Death and taxes may be the only constants in existence but the interpretation of death has certainly never stayed the same. —