After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Inside the Egyptian Underworld

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

For the Ancient Egyptians, death marked the beginning of a new chapter: a journey through a shadowy realm of trials, monsters, and divine judgment, ruled by the God Osiris. What does the Ancient Egyptian Underworld, the Duat, tell us about their culture, their society and morality?Our guest for today is Dr. Campbell Price! Campbell is our go-to Ancient Egypt expert, he is Curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum and honorary research fellow at University of Liverpool. His newest book ‘Brief Histories: Ancient Egypt’ is out now.Edited by Hannah Feodorov. Produced by Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer is Freddy Chick.For tickets to see Anthony and Maddy talking about her new book, Hoax, click here: https://www.conwayhall.org.uk/whats-on/event/hoax/Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As night falls, a soul begins its journey to the beyond. Freed from its newly deceased body, they drift into the duat, a realm of darkness, fire, and monsters. Guided by spells from the Book of the Dead, they must make their way across this perilous landscape. Finally, they stand before Osiris, God of the Dead, where they face a test of judgment. If they pass, paradise awaits.

If not, oblivion. This was the path that all ancient Egyptian souls would undertake after death. The ancient Egyptians, one of the most fascinating civilizations of the ancient worlds, devoted to gods obsessed with death and bound by ritual. For them, death marked the beginning of a new chapter, a journey through a shadowy realm of trials, monsters and divine judgment ruled by the god Osiris. They preserved their dead, spoke spells from the book of the dead, and prepared for eternity with extraordinary care. To the Egyptians, survival was not guaranteed.

It had to be earned. So now, from the depths of the ancient Egyptian underworld, welcome to After Dark. Hello there and welcome to After Dark. I am Anthony and if you've been watching for the last few months, you know that Maddie is somewhere in the world at the moment trying to solve that problem with, you know when the caps come off fizzy bottle drinks, but they still attach and it's really annoying. She's just trying to solve that. It's God's work she's doing.

But she will be back very soon. But until then, we are treating you to some incredible After Dark episodes. And today is no different. We are exploring the ancient Egyptian underworld. And who better than friend of the pod to help us through this than Dr. Campbell Price? He is an Egyptologist, as you know, if you've been listening to After Dark before, and is curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool. And he's our go-to ancient Egypt expert.

And he is also an author of a new book, by the way. Well, his newest book, Brief History's Ancient Egypt and a children's book that he's written. with Greg Jenner, which I advise you to go out and get all of those things and get to know Campbell, even better. Campbell, thank you so much for coming back. Thank you, Anthony. What a thrill to be back. Sorry Maddie's not here, but thank you also for the plugs. Oh, listen, plug-de-plug-plug, plug, plug.

We're all out here trying to enlighten the masses to all these different types of history. Now, today we're going to be talking about the ancient Egyptian underworld. Okay, we're going to say that for now. and then we can talk about the nuances to that, yes, as historians so often do. But I have a very big question for you, and you can distill it down as much as you like. What did the ancient Egyptians believe? We do not know what the ancient Egyptians believed, even if you had an ancient Egyptian sat at this table. I don't think, you know, it's the problem of anthropology if you ask the question, you condition the answer.

Ancient Egyptians didn't say, in their own language, they believed, they said they knew, I know my magic, I know my spell. They didn't need to believe in anything they had to know. And we're talking about like a real pantheon of belief. And as you say, like there's so much to pick from, it's hard to know where to settle. Am I right in thinking that we know of at least about 150 gods just just off the bat that are existing? Just off the bat, ones we have names for, and we'll come back to this idea perhaps a cult for. But in terms of entities, so it's really a flexible situation, have a little of some, a little of another.

But we have easily a thousand entities that are identified in some way by the ancient Egyptians as divine. And divine is a sliding scale, Anthony. The king can be divine. The river can be divine. You can meet a divinity in a dream. Rock can be divine. Animals can be divine. So it's a real smorgasbord of encounters with the superhuman.

Encounters is a nice word. I like that. That's doing a lot of work there in a really good way. Now, when you say these divinities or these divines are all over the place, What are they doing? So we talked about the river there. So that says something to me about life giving and water. You talked about different aspects.

I'm assuming they all have slightly different jobs that come together to make a world as they would know it, I suppose, is a better way of putting it. Yes. So exactly, you have a world which is inherently full inhabited with these entities. So you can meet a god, chapter three of my prehistory's book. How do you meet a god? God. You can meet a God in a dream, as I said, which you can kind of imagine you see something you can't explain and that's labeled as a god. You can go out into the marshes next to the river and meet a god there, special gods in the marshes, or in the desert. You can meet a god in a temple.

And this is maybe what we expect with congregational religion. But an ancient Egyptian temple is not like a church or a mosque or a synagogue. It is a place where ritual specialists, the priests, lots of scare quotes, do their work on a regular basis as part of a cult. And by a cult has kind of certain associations now, but Egyptology uses the word cult to mean regular service to a god, giving of offerings, prayers, hymns. So all of these gods inhabit every aspect of the world, every aspect of your life, but not everyone can go into a temple, but you could worship a god in your home. I think that would be across the social spectrum.

Now, this is getting off topic a little bit, but it's just intriguing and I want to explore a little bit more. This is what I love about after dark. Go on. Topics be damned. You said not everybody can go into a temple. Oh gosh, no. So who can go into a temple and who can't? Well, this probably could do an episode on its own. This is a specialist interest of mine.

Who could see ancient Egyptian statues? Because you can go into the British Museum or go on. to a site in Egypt and see them and touch them and get up close with them. You couldn't in ancient times because statues, certainly statues of gods are so inherently divine. They have to be shielded, shrouded, boxed off, put in little cultic cupboards because they're so powerful to look at. So even images of gods on the wall, we have evidence of little curtains. They put curtains over them so that profane eyes or even the eyes of the priests who were going about the regular business couldn't see them

and then if you want to go up and you've got a prayer you've got a problem you've got a dilemma you then focus your dilemma on that part of the wall you reveal the God you're praying to

do your offering and then cover it over again right so I would not be allowed to see it my eyes would be very profane I would imagine unless you're purified sanctified sanctioned

so you're a member of the priesthood male or female in rotation so you're not for most of phronic history you're not born a priest, son of a priest, you are maybe something else probably well to do

and you serve as a priest for every few months maybe. And it's quite a good job because in a non-monetary economy, in a decent-sized temple, the God is getting given food and drink and sides of beef, which the God himself or herself is not eating. So you're getting paid in food.

Through luxurious commodities. Okay. Right, I should watch out for that ad if it ever comes up for that job. But if there's all of these divines and they are overseeing different parts of life, it stands to reason I would imagine that there are others that are seeing, overseeing death and dying. Yes. So talk to me about those specifically. Yes. I would say, and I really would emphasize, the problem, as you know as a historian, is we compare one culture with another maybe inadvisedly.

So we've had the Greeks and the Romans more recently. And so we think, ah, yes, goddess of love and God of war. And it is not that clear. It's not as delineated. Yeah. Clearly it is not that clear for the ancient Egyptians. But you're right in terms of life, birth, having a good time. There are gods associated with those things. But when it comes to the ultimate transition out of life, yes, there are various gods, particularly.

associated with death. And they have functions to fulfill. So let's talk about that process then. Let's talk about the process of the ancient Egyptian soul. Just a slight question for you. There. So I am Putlan along down the road, not feeling great. I drop dead.

I believe that there is an afterlife because that is around me on a daily basis. What do I believe happens to my. soul at that point after the lifetime pootling. Okay. I like the way you framed that. So first of all, it would depend who you are in the social hierarchy. Where you are in Egypt, Egypt's a big place. When are we talking? We've got a 3,000 year span.

So things are quite, although they can be quite regional and dependent on time, there is this overarching umbrella of consistency. And that's what makes ancient Egypt and Egyptology so attractive because it seems like they all think the same because everything's so consistent and so kind of cookie cutter in design. Everything must be conceptually the same. Probably not. So take your average person in the new kingdom. So I'm talking, say, 1,200 BC, almost 3,500 years ago.

You drop dead, as you say, and you're someone fairly high up. I don't think you have this Cartesian division of body and soul it's much more complicated than that so to give you an example you're putling or long and you're aware on a sunny day that there is another entity following you

when it's sunny oh via the sun it's your shadow right I see that is part of you that you need not to lose after you die right So we're really expanding.

Because in the pre-modern world, how do you explain shadows? Yeah. Because you can't see sunlight, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's all of this. There are concepts like the name. Your name is important.

That is kind of a separable part of you. You have, and again, big air quotes here. The soul, which could take different forms or different visualizations or different words. for aspects of the soul. So there is the car spirit and the car is to do with sustenance. And there seems to be some concern that you need to be fed in the afterlife. After death, you need sustenance.

So your car is like your double, your invisible double that is kind of born with you when you are born. It's like an invisible twin. And you need someone, there's a euphemism for death in ancient Egypt, someone who has gone to their car. I see. That's telling you. Someone's passed away. Then there is the bar, and this is something that appears in visual art as a human-headed bird. So this is, you can characterize it as the spirit of mobility.

It comes and goes from the tomb, from the grave, and exists outside. Then there's the arc, and the ark is basically the ancient Egyptian ghost. Oh, because I thought what you were previously describing sounded quite ghost-like in that it's coming and going. But no, this is the ghostlier version. Ghostlier one, because ghosts can do things and can be perceived. The bar can't, the bar can do things, but I think the arc is more the thing that people complain about, you know, great anti. Are they afraid of it?

In some cases, yes, they try and placate it. They write to the arc and say, stop bothering me. What have I done to you? I've given you offerings. I haven't taken up with that woman down the road. So they feel as if, you know, you talked about the shadow being with you, and you talked about this coexistence, even if it's an unseen coexistence. Even after death, there is still an idea that they are coexisting with the Ark or the

bar or whatever iteration of that life force. Yes. Beyond the physical living body. Yes. I mean, whether Egypt told, ancient Egyptians really thought like this, let me tell you what Egyptologists have said. Yeah. So there is a generally accepted notion that you have all of these aspects to yourself,

right? So it's not just body and soul. And then death kind of wrenches these apart and they're cast asunder. And so the ritual of mummification brings them back together. Right. There is one important aspect I missed out there in the list. And one I'm particularly interested in at the moment is the Sakh. Oh, you've mentioned.

mentioned this before. We have talked about it before. Go back and look at After Dark previous episodes, but yes. Go again. Yes. Because this was illuminating for me the last time. So, in brief, the body, the word closest to what we would say mummy or mummified body is Sark, which is like a radiant, wrapped form, the form of a god. And the whole point, and this is really the punchline I want to get to, the whole point of mummification or the hope of any ancient Egyptian is to dwell with the gods who are powerful because they inhabit all these superhuman aspects of the world and that's the only way you're going to be immortal. You have to become one with these god beings, these Netiru,

that's the ancient Egyptian word. So by being a sakh, this is like, it's an ancestor, it's like an effective ancestor and this is the kind of entity you might appeal to. in a temple statue if you're allowed into a temple or maybe you're allowed a bust of one of these individuals in your house in around 1200 BCE in the south of Egypt.

So there are different ways to experience gods and there are different ways to experience the dead. The major qualification for being a god is you can be represented so you can be shown in a painting or carving or a statue. And it is just an observational thing that there are things in this room

that will last longer than we will last. And I think there was an acknowledgement that a statue of someone could far outlast biological life and that was the aim, the kind of the target to which to aspire. So these are complex and nuanced and varied and I think that's really, really important.

I think it's important to remember the time span we're talking about here. And we will touch on specific instances and specific beliefs for the rest of this episode. But I think it is worth bearing that in mind in the back of our minds that we're talking about varied peoples at varied times

with varied belief systems. And I think that helps to enlighten the individual belief systems that we are talking about. And we talked about that physical transformation from life to these more spiritual entities. Let's talk a little bit. And again, we've spoken about this in a previous episode,

but I think it'll be quite useful to remind people or for new listeners who are just joining us about what is physically happening for somebody who has passed away, who is dead. I don't like the term passed away. Go on to your car. But it seems very appropriate in this in a way because it is a passing, isn't it?

So that's why I said it. Journeying, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, so what is happening to the body, let's say the body of that same person that let's stick with that imaginary person that we've said at that time. We said 1200 BCE. Yes.

What then physically happens to that body? He's busy doing whatever he's doing in the afterlife for now. But what are the people in the real world doing with his human reigns? So they are taking him to a specialist, an embalmer, and that group of people probably at some remove from society, you don't go to an undertaker on the high street. They probably have a workshop, understandably, on a hill that gets the breeze.

And that person for 70 days is treated to the ritual of mummification. And I said this before and I will say it again. We have this very morbid fascination, curiosity. It's true throughout history, in the gory details of what happens to the dead. And you see it in all kinds of contexts.

In Egyptology, it's a fascination of the gory procedure of removing organs, brain out the nose, all of that stuff that an eight-year-old can tell you. But actually, the ritual of mummification is about changing the body, not preserving it. So it's not, Granny looks so peaceful.

This concept of granny looking as granny looked. In our armchair is a modern one. Death irrevocably changes the body. And so the ancient Egyptians lean into this and strive towards, if they're striving towards anything, the transformation of the body into a divine form. And I'm choosing my words very carefully here, because in some ways it's objectification.

And I don't mean that to say that they treated people as objects. It's because of the modern disregard for objects and our own very poor, the way in which we view things now is very, is very dismissive of what we might call objects, but in ancient times, as I said, rocks, marshes, special formations in the landscape are all divine. So mummification, much, much, much has been written about this

basically involves dehydrating the body, anointing it with oils and resins and then wrapping it. So these are three things that you would encounter in a temple that you would do to a divine statue. You purify it with salt, a form of sodium compound, called Natron in Egyptology. So you wash it, you dry it in some form. Some people think you do it as a dry kind of pile on some salt.

And then that just takes out the liquid that's in the human body. Some people think it was maybe a bath. There's a great high camp, 1950s film The Mummy. with Christopher Lee in it. Well, it's going to be camp then, isn't it? And in it, the princess is put in this bubble bath

of Natron and she looks very demure. I don't think the reality was quite so demure. Anyway, so you dry the body out, then you fragrance it. Now, this is important. Yes, there's a practical thing

of dead bodies don't smell very nice if they've been left out in the heat, but also smell. incense, in ancient Egyptian, the word for incense, means to cause to be divine. So there is a word association going on there. You apply the unguance, a word I absolutely love, that smell nice. And yes, that has antibacterial properties. It does make the body smell nice, but it also makes them smell like a god.

And then finally you wrap the body and this idea of the sark being a radiant, brilliant, white linen covered, kind of a morph. face shape is the thing again to strive towards. And it's funny because in modern gothic horror recreations of the mummified dead, they tend to be quite dirty and shuffling and they're unraveling. Yeah. Yeah. Falling to pieces. Yes. Yeah. They're all about corruption and decay and contagion. Yes. Whereas the ancient Egyptian idea of this Sark, this one aspect of the person, if you like, is that it's radiant, pure and it's impervious. So that is the point you want to get to

And this takes 70 days Right And once that time is done If you're fairly well off You can afford a coffin And a tomb A space to put the coffin Maybe with some grave goods

But before you go into the grave Your mouth is ritually opened To restore your senses So this ritual of the opening of the mouth Is really pretty pivotal To start you on your After life existence.

And you mentioned journey before in relation to that. And so I want to say a word and then let you wax lyrical on this because it's an interesting journey. And that word is duat. So this is the

beginning of, well, this is the formal beginning of the journey once all of this sacking has been done. Yes. Yes. Sacification. Exactly. So this is a notion a concept that actually we only know for a relatively restricted period of time which is slightly annoying

so we can extrapolate it to an extent to other periods but when we're talking about the duat and what is in the duat and journeying through the duat we're talking about kings from maybe 1400 BCE on for a few centuries and maybe the belief kind of echoes down time

but it doesn't seem necessarily to be something that absolutely everybody does. Maybe they hope to, maybe the non-elites hope to do this. But you're right, the do what, and you use the word at the top of the episode, is the underworld.

Right. But not in a oaky, spooky, freaky way. No. Not how we would understand hell, is what I mean by that. Yes, yes, yes. And thank you for clarifying that. Yeah, so there are modern associations

of, you're good, you go up, you're bad, you go down. No, no. And it's something to do with the geographical situation of Egypt because you're close to the equator. Daytime and nighttime are about the same length. What happens to the sun when you can't see it? That is the observation that I think all this starts with. And so at some point around 1400, the notion is recounted in great and very arcane detail

that the sun is travelling for the 12 hours of the night because the ancient Egyptians invent the 24 hour clock. For the time the sun is not visible, it disappears under the earth. It is swallowed, in a sense, by the sky goddess, although she is above and below and it's all a bit. Don't try to make it make sense. Campbell, just go with this. Right, okay.

That's the danger zone if you try and rationalise it. So, let's say. It's swallowed. It's swallowed. And at dawn, it's birthed, right? So the basic aim, as I said before, is for the dead person to be with the gods or in some sense to become a god, right? Yeah. So if you know you live in ancient Egypt, how do you get around the place?

Not on a cart, really, maybe on a chariot occasionally, on a boat. So the sun is moving across the sky in a boat. The visible sun is moving across that sea of blue above our heads. So when it disappears at night, it must also be travelling in a boat, the bark of the sun god. Hey, there's sense in it. There is sense in it. There is a cosmic. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there is something very practical and rational in a way. So the sun god, because we're personifying the sun, it's not just the sun, it's the sun god. Although all powerful is also vulnerable, that's a very ancient Egyptian thing. Gods can be very vulnerable. They need to be in shrines in these little cultic cupboards. they need to be shrouded and protected and shielded from damage or danger. So the crew of the sun god are basically to protect him as he journeys along, at some point, waterways, at some point he's dragged across the desert and there are constant threats. So the biggest threat is a serpent called Apep Apophis

who's trying to destroy the sun god And so there are various gods Lesser gods you could say than the sun god Who are trying to defend him from these threats And in various hours the 12 hours Some weird and wonderful things happen Where you get the sense that the fate of the deceased is tied with the fate of the sun god.

So each morning it's a pleasant surprise that the sun has not been gotten by the serpent and there's a new day. And there are other civilizations that thought the same, that the sun, it was almost miraculous that the sun reappeared. And that it didn't owe us anything and that you had to,

I'm not talking about the ancient Egyptians here, specifically I'm talking about other civilizations the Aztecs come to mind, for instance, where it was, there were certain things you had to perform duties you had to perform while on earth that could help the sun to reappear. And there seems to be a similar kind of thing there, even if it's not dutied in the same way. But it seems miraculous at the same time that going, oh, it's another day. Okay, great.

We survive. We go again. But what is difficult to connect. I understand what you're saying in terms of the, it's usually, they're not always elite people that are making that sun-like journey. So the sun goes into the underworld at night. The socked iteration of the dead person is at some point joining that journey. Yes. That has loads of peril and all that kind of thing.

In the morning, the sun reemerges. Where's your man? Well. They just left him there. Well, there is a sense in which when the sun comes up at dawn, that's when dead people sleep. Oh, they're just having a nap, okay. So it's an inversion of this world.

Right. So their daytime, so because the sun is going under the underworld and it's the sun, this is something, again, mentioned in a lot of ancient Egyptian texts that you want to feel the sunshine. You want to sit with your beer and chill out. And the sunshine, you know, it's something living people enjoy. So you want that to continue for eternity. And that's expected to happen to the righteous dead.

Uh-huh, yes. Uh-huh. Every night, whereas living people enjoy the sun during what we call the daytime. So when the sun appears in the morning, everyone in the underworld is deprived of the sun, so it's nighttime and they just sleep. I love this. Bear with me when I say this, and we're going to get comments about this, but I've got to say it nonetheless. The idea of mundanity. You know, when we talk about a Christian heaven, nobody ever says,

oh and you'll be so, you'll have a lovely nap. Nobody says that. But this idea that actually, it's a very, it's a mirror, but glorified, deified divine. Yes. For the people who can achieve it. Life. But that will include still sleeping. Yeah.

Still doing the really mundane stuff of life or the afterlife in this case. That's really intriguing. It just feels like you've slipped into another time zone almost. Yes. That's a really nice way to do. describe it because there's a fear definitely earlier than we have the text of the Amdawat, so a thousand years almost before that, there is a fear that imagining it's that reversed world where you can nap as you can in life. The fear is in going into the underworld,

things will literally be upside down. So you'll walk on your head and you'll eat excrement. So there's a real fear of, I want it to be like life, but there's a sense in which it doesn't really it's not that blissful it is a replication of life it doesn't sound very blissful but being amongst the gods must be great and there is something

which just because we might not come back to it there is something about the ark the ghost that in some texts around the same time as the Amdawat is being put on royal tumours the ark is described as associated with the sun god

and it's like I always say to students in Manchester it's like being on a cruise boat with the sun god and just enjoying that time with him being able to if you're an arc and you've made it past these tests and the judgment and whatever you can go into the presence of the gods and you can strike up a conversation at the bar the Kevin Lee cruise boat in the sky we're running with us and you can say

oh my granddaughter's got a problem could you sort it out please? Because clearly the living are writing to the ark saying, hey, can you help me? Because they believe the ark are in the ancient Egyptian word Iker or Aper, which means effective or equipped. So it's not just you are a good person. Who cares if you're a good person?

If you're a good person and you can do something for me, you're useful. You're useful. That, honestly, I think that is the most important concept in the ancient Egyptian afterlife. mummification is meant to create yes, godlike beings that are useful to the living.

That's interesting. I have two names for you before we move on and I'd just like to know a little bit more about them and then we'll talk about something else. But Osiris and Anubis. Yes. They are, what role do they play in any of this? Are they associate, you know, we've talked about

again, we're time spanning here. We've talked about 1,200 BCE, 1400 BCE. Where do they sit in this and what are they doing with these people? Okay, so they are both relatively early. You know, Anubis is around in the Pyramid Age, Osiris

towards the end of the Pyramid Age. So early doors, like 2,500 BCE. And it's funny, it's like a kaleidoscope. Through time and in different regions, you get a different configuration of gods. Okay.

Osiris goes from being quite a regional god to being the king of the underworld and he is ultimately the god to impress. He's the god of rebirth and this myth develops fairly early that he is a good and

wise and rightful king who's murdered by his evil brother, chopped into bits scattered around the country and then brought together by his diligent and very magical wife, ISIS, great magician, great of magic, ISIS. And she

creates the kind of archetype mummified body by wrapping them up. Oh. Yes, Osiris is the original, well, Egyptologists want to say Osiris is the original mummified body when in fact the myth of Osiris probably comes from the practice of mummification. It's slightly the wrong way around. But yes, ISIS is able to conceive with the deceased but briefly reanimated God Osiris, a son. Don't question is fun.

Let's move on. And his name is Horace and he is the legitimate king. right? So Osiris transmogrifies into the ruler of eternity he's yeah the ruler of different types of eternity

they're different types of eternity and so he is the one ultimately in some readings that sits in judgment on the dead whoever you are kings or commoners then anubis is maybe easier

to visualize for people listening What function is he fulfilling here in this context? So he is an early manifestation of a divine power associated with the cemetery. So you can see the connection that might have been made between a cemetery and jackals might be going around in the cemetery. So the iconography, the imagery of this guy, always a man, always male, as Osiris is always male. other gods can be of different forms.

Together they appear in the royal expectations of the afterlife from the pyramid age, so texts that go on the pyramids at the end of the old kingdom, 2,300-ish BCE, you have gods who are not getting worshipped in the home. You're not worshipping Osiris at that period in your home. Okay. Or anubis. They are pretty exclusively associated with death,

the transition into the afterlife. And Anubis is providing some form of guide through duet, is that, or the underworld? Yeah, so he is shown in some scenes, not that many, as what in classical times is called a psychopomp. Oh, yes, yes. So the psychopompom is the one that aids in the transition between this world and the afterworlds. And there was a case with Elizabeth 2nd, actually, where Paddington Bear is the psychopomp. I've just never heard this word before, which is a psychop.

It's a great one for the future use and bamboozlement of students. I feel like Susie Dent would love a psychopath. I'm sure she knows that. But that's a good way of visualising the concept because, you know what happens, in the Roman period. So mummification is still practiced in Egypt and Roman times. So the first couple of centuries ADCE, you get little labels that go on mummified bodies. And you get an Eubis shown as a jackal. On a little label?

On a little label. So far so good. But in Roman times, he's shown with a key around his neck because the ancient Egyptians didn't have keys, but the Romans did. So it's this idea that he holds the key. that is going to let you into the other world. And so an early manifestation of an eubis, this jackal god, is called an ancient Egyptian weptuwa wet. I think I've heard that beforehand.

Webwawet is a jackal, and the name means literally the opener of the ways. And God knows how many Egyptologists have the word weptuil is a password, not the computers. Not you, though. Not me. I wouldn't stay on a radio. If anyone's going to the Museum of Manchester

or to the University of Liverpool, that is not Campbell's password. How do we know this? Because there are nice texts. Okay, yeah. So you can trace iconography on one wall that we know is 2,500 BCE, compared with a Roman period wall.

And there are more detailed texts, versions of what collectively are called the Book of the Dead, which sounds very scary, which go into more detail about this. And when you say the Book of the Dead, what is that? Is that a how-to? Is that a step-by-step sarking manual? What does that encompass the Book of the Dead? I'm just now, again, tangentialer, but still, it's curious. I mean, I think that's very nice to wish Egyptologists would share that a step-by-step sacking manual is great. I will quote you on that.

Do. I'm in no way informed, but go ahead. But that really gets to the heart of it. Basically, so if this sark is this effective ancestor, who's useful to the living, but is in the company of the gods. The Book of the Dead is both in a sense, it's a bit of a cliche. It's a passport into this state, this condition of being after death. It's also a guidebook in a sense because it's got some practical tips. But it's also just a material expression of authority. And if you imagine in the pre-modern world, ancient Egypt certainly,

most people can't read a write, if you have a document that has spells of great magical power, which may have a life outside funerals and tombs, they may be used in temples, if you have this, it's like being given your university degree in your first day of freshers week. Except you're dead. Except you're dead. But you've got that power and that learning, even without doing the work. Okay, okay. So it's almost like osmosized into you or whatever. Yeah, you've got it then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, that's actually fascinating because it's a little bit like TripAdvisor in 1200 BCE where you're like, avoid that thing there. Don't do this.

And then you should be thinking and being very reflective here. That's so interesting. And I like again this idea. One of the things that struck me earlier is the usefulness of the dead. Yes. And this is quite a useful thing again. We're not necessarily talking here in terms of interventions and miracles. And yeah, of course, there's elements of what we would now turn magic to this.

But at the same time, there's really. Practical. Yeah. Stuff going on here. In some way, like you said before, there's an element of the mundane, the practical. You've got a problem. So how are you going to optimize your chances of getting a solution? And I think in some ways, to get back to the general theme of the gods, you know, the god Amun Ra, who's the big one in the New Kingdom period, 1200 BCE,

in some ways he seems quite inaccessible. But if your great aunt Doris was during life quite a redoubtable person after death, she is the more effective person. Sure. You know, she's the go-to. She knows who you are. The god Amun Ra or the deceased Ramesses II might not give a stuff about you. But maybe one of your own family members to whom you are regularly giving offerings because it's always reciprocity. it's always you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. As long as you have this relationship with the dead, then the jobs are good.

Right. I have an image in front of me, and I am going to attempt to describe it, and then you, the expert, are going to tell me what I got woefully wrong. Have you seen this before? I've literally never seen this before. Okay, great. They add in the images at the end. Before your notes, sir.

And then I have to, or when Maddie's around, one or the other of us take turns in sounding ridiculous. and then the expert tells us what the real thing is. So what I am seeing here is, oh my goodness, I am seeing four figures to start with. There is a weighing scale type thing, but it's quite big, between them. Yes. And there's one figure on either side, and then there's two figures kind of down by the middle, central pole. And on each of the weighing scale, oh, I should say, there's two jackals.

Yes. this is where he gets stumped. There is two jackals on the left-hand side as I look at it. On the right-hand side, there is a bird-type figure standing and a lion-slash-alligator type figure. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, okay, now, on the scale things themselves,

it's actually really nicely done this. It's a very finely precise, yeah. Oh, I'm having difficulty seeing. what some of these things are. So that looks to me like, okay, I'm just going to say it as I see it, some kind of a crook or a,

or it looks like a wormy type thing or a feather maybe. Oh, you're right with feather. Okay, feather, okay. And then on the other side, there's a little pot.

Is that a pot? Yes. Okay. Right, Campbell. Save the listeners from having to listen to me and tell me what I'm actually looking at here. You did that really well.

So on the left, have our friend we've just been talking about. Anubis. Yes. Twice. So it's the same figure repeated. I see. So it's not to anubai. No, no. He's meant it's the same person doing the different actions. So

he is, just off the image you're seeing he's actually holding someone's hand. He's psychopumping, a guy called Nether into the I see the hands now, yeah. And actually because it's a living person, he's shown with dark brown flesh but because Anubis is a

God, he's got golden skin and actually his head covering round his jackal head is blue because gods have lapis, lazuli here. Stop! Yes. So that's just the iconography of divinity. You're right, it's a scale.

So the scale is showing you a pretty critical moment it seems in the transition into otherworldliness in which the heart of the deceased is weighed. in that little pot?

In the pot. So conceptually, the heart, the Ebb heart or the Khati heart can be shown as a vessel, literally. Yeah, yeah. In modern medical terms it seems a bit strange, but the ancient Egyptians don't have the kind of love heart concept. Although it is quite heart shaped, isn't it? Like almost more medically heart shaped with handles and a time. Yes. And it's being balanced and it's shown as being appropriately decorously slightly lighter than a feather. Yes. This is conceptual, of course. Obviously hearts are heavier than feathers. Yes. But the feather in ancient Egyptian thinking is synonymous with truth, cosmic balance, justice, rightness, correct behaviour. And it's symbolised by the lady personification at the top of the balance. She is ma'at, the goddess of the

of truth, justice. Oh, up here? Yep. So she is replicated. She's got a feather on her head, a feather kind of weighing the... Oh, I see her now. I didn't see her. I'll post this on social media.

Okay. And then, so the idea is to show that you were a good person. Yeah. Your heart is being balanced and hopefully you'll be fine because you lived a good life. You're also in a different part of the Book of the Dead declaring all the things you didn't do, you didn't steal, you didn't maim, you didn't covet your neighbor's ass. Yeah. But then all of this is being recorded by your man on the right.

Yes. This is the God Thoth, and he is very ostentatiously, as you would, if you could write in ancient Egypt, showing off his writer's palette. Yes, he is. He's holding that up there for everybody. You see, he's got his blue hair and his gold skin as well. So he's showing, okay, the result, which is conceptually because it's been written down in a document, positive. You don't want to create a negative situation. but the threat of negativity and essentially eternal non-existence

if not damnation is implied by that hybrid creature you got pretty right so crocodile lion hind parts of a hippo oh that's what it actually is yeah oh okay so this is ah mutt the devourer

the one who basically swallows your heart if you have done bad things he gets that yeah Oh, that's kind of cool. Yeah. So this is, much is made of this. And I imagine in ancient Egyptian society generally, you know, judgment weighing of goods was important because it was a Bartre economy.

There's no coinage. It's not a monetary economy. So people would be familiar with the idea of value, you know, equivalent value. So the idea that your heart should be weighed as a kind of assessment. of your character of your goodness moral moral uprightness

makes sense one note of caution I would sound here is that in more recent times especially in the Christian tradition there is this idea

of the judgment day and we may back project that slightly so whatever is being shown here is part of what goes on

in this transition to the after world but whether it is absolutely critical in the way of the Christian. I see. Judgment of the dead

were not quite sure. And remind me, what's this, the writer's name? Oh, he's Thoth. Thoth. Thoth. Thoth.

It's a lot of T.Hs for an Irish person. Now, it does look like he's wearing an Apple Watch there. It does. But he's also, what is the bird

of the head of the bird? What's that symbolizing? That's an ibis bird. Okay. So there are a range of birds. You can have raptors or different kinds of birds. The bar bird,

is the inversion, still divine, where it's a human head on a bird's body. So the idea with the ibis bird, pretty lateral thinking again is, I guess you see an ibis bird dipping its beak into the water. Okay, yeah. To get fish or worms or whatever, and it's like a scribe dipping your pen into the ink.

I'll buy it. So, I mean, I don't think that's silly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just an easy explanation. But the implication of what happens if you don't live a good life is never really made clear. Oh, fascinating.

And whereas, you know, Christian theology of certain periods is, you know, brimstone and hellfire, oh, you know, something terrible is going to happen. I'm familiar with us, yes. Probably more so than me. But there is a very interesting reflection on this idea that is unusually

explicit, at the end of pharonic times, so into the time of the Ptolemies leading up to Cleopatra, into the Roman period, the copy I'm thinking of is early Roman in date, there is a text that's part of a cycle of myths, but

they're kind of historically informed myths called Setna Kam Wassa it's written in Demotic, so a very late form of the Egyptian script. And in this, there's a precocious magical little boy called Siosri, who takes his dad into, briefly, temporarily, into the underworld and seize the judgment.

So given the date of this text, it may be influenced by Greek and Roman ideas of what goes on in the underworld. So we can't maybe read it as absolutely typical of what an ancient Egyptian generally would believe, but there are some fascinating and really rather dark details where they go in and they see at this kind of tantalus-like situation where I think it's tantalus where you have

people weaving or plaiting rope only for the rope to be munched by a donkey so you are eternally making the rope or they have food and drinks suspended above them and people are constantly digging at the sand

under your feet so you are never going to reach the food So pretty grim. There are punishment there somewhere. So those entities, those people are undoubtedly not those blessed ones

being lit up by the sun god when he goes through the underworld. But there is one particular scene they see the judgment and it does seem to imply that some value is put on moral rectitude for a judgment

at least at this period because there is a rich man with all of his stuff and a poor man with nothing and the rich man just lived a bad life and so Osiris in judgment sitting at judgment says I'm taking the rich man's stuff and I'm giving it to the poor man

so the poor man can enjoy the radiant sarcification and you know what happens to the rich man the donkey thing no much worse not the food in the sand no worse imagine something really bad oh no go on you're going to tell me

he is punished by having his right eye socket used as a door pivot for eternity. Bloody hell. I would never have guessed that camera. You keep guessing there now. Like, was it the right eye socket used as a door pivot for the rest of eternity? By any chance? Right, bloody hell.

I mean, pretty grim. Pretty grim. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When we were talking with the producer, Tom, about this, he gasped at that and he thought you'd like that. I'll tell you what it is, though, at the same time. Useful. It is useful.

Like, horrendous, of course. But I'm just talking. We're talking about the usefulness of the dead. Yes. And they're making use of him. Yes, that's true. You know, again, I'm not trying to say he had a lovely time. He clearly didn't.

Now, to wrap up, as we talk about any cultures of death, they always inevitably tell us more about the living than they do about the dead. And again, I'm sorry to put this long span question to you because it tells us, realistically, the answers it tells us different things at different times about different people. But what do you think in a very general sense, the ancient disqual sense, the ancient, Egyptian belief system in the underworld, their methods around death and dying. What does it tell us about the living? And how does that shape the day-to-day life of the ancient Egyptian? Great question. Because we have so little actually surviving concerning the life of living, you know, houses don't really generally survive contents of houses. And the people themselves can't tell us. I think you can extrapolate to an extent some of these afterlife beliefs to

recognize the importance of family the importance of lineage the importance of ancestors and useful connections the importance of hierarchy even without the king being the top of the tree clearly there are some people are the village

head man and you know those kind of structures seem to be replicated in the underworld there are consequences it seems given those last examples of doing bad things so that does tell you something about the

socio-moral codes of the ancient Egyptians, I guess, but of course, like any culture, things change through time. What is your favorite window of time in the span of the ancient Egyptians? What is when you're like, I feel most at home here? Well, recently, maybe I'll come

back and talk about it, the reign of the female pharaoh hatch episode, because we have a lot of stuff, not just the temples and the tombs and the tombs and the mummified bodies in some cases, but little sketches and little letters. So you get an insight into what people were really thinking.

It would be her reign. Tom, let's schedule that one in. We need to do that one as well. Well, Cammer, thank you so much. It's always fascinating. And we know the listeners and the viewers now on YouTube are so sucked in by this topic and by your presentation of it as well. And I was just saying to Campbell before we started chatting, I am now living up in West Yorkshire, so I'm nearer to Manchester. So I will be paying a visit to Manchester.

So if you do find yourself up in Manchester, do go along to the museum and see Campbell's work there. And also there's the books we mentioned at the top. We'll put links to those in the description of this episode. Thank you, as ever, for joining us on After Dark to hear these conversations with incredible experts. We are so, so lucky to have people come in and exchange their knowledge with us. If you've enjoyed this episode, go and leave us a five-star review wherever you get us your podcasts. Did you know? We're also on YouTube.

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