In Our Time - The Egyptian Book of the Dead

Episode Date: April 27, 2017

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the text and context of The Book of the Dead, also known as the Book of Coming Forth by Day, the ancient Egyptian collections of spells which were intended to help the recently deceased navigate the underworld. They flourished under the New Kingdom from C16th BC until the end of the Ptolemaic era in C1st BC, and drew on much earlier traditions from the walls of pyramids and on coffin cases. Almost 200 spells survive, though no one collection contains all of them, and one of the best known surrounds the weighing of the heart, the gods' final judgement of the deceased's life.With John Taylor Curator at the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British MuseumKate Spence Senior Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at Cambridge University and Fellow of Emmanuel Collegeand Richard Parkinson Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of the Queen's CollegeProducer: Simon Tillotson.

This is the BBC. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, the Book of the Dead helped ancient Egyptians through their afterlife for over a thousand years, after the building of the Great Pyramids and before Cleopatra. The Egyptians expected the gods to judge them,

when their hearts would be weighed against an ostrich feather. If the hearts were too heavy and impure, they would be devoured by a demon that was part lion, part crocodile and part hippopotamus. Those who had understood the book of the dead knew how to make their hearts light and how to answer the God's questions and which passwords to give to open the doors to the afterlife. With me to discuss the Egyptian Book of the Dead are John Talia, curator at the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum. Kate Spence, Senior Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology, in Egyptian archaeology, at Cambridge University and fellow of Emmanuel. College and Richard Parkinson, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of the Queen's College. Kate Spence, I said between the Great Pyramids and Clear Path, it's quite a stretch. Have you any closer definition of when this got going, these books of the dead?

Well, they appear shortly before the New Kingdom. So we're dealing with, they initially appear around 1700 BC and by about 1430 BC they're appearing on rolls of papyrus. So Egyptian culture is already old by this period. They're drawing on a lot of tradition, but because they appear at a period where there isn't strong centralised control shortly before the New Kingdom started, there was a lot of scope for innovation. And these spells appear with some new texts,

but they're also drawing on older traditions of mortuary literature, such as the pyramid texts and the coffin texts. Yes, literature associated. That's rather good, isn't it? Mucher literature, yes. Well, the Egyptians had a lot of it and a large part of our preserved corpus does relate to spells or literature

associated with the afterlife in some way. And initially with the pyramid texts and the coffin texts, these spells were written usually around the body so they were written on the walls of burial chambers or on the insides of coffins so that the body of the deceased was actually surrounded by a sort of cocoon

of ritualised words that might help with the afterlife. And initially, the Book of the Dead was written on coffins and shrouds, but then by around 1,400, 1450 BC, it was actually appearing on papyrus rolls in the form that we call the Book of the Dead. So we can assume that quite a bit before 1700 BC, these spells were around, these ideas were around,

these practices were being observed to some extent or other, but I believe in all that is fortified when we start getting their roles. Yes, I mean, The ideas, many of the ideas are very old, but also there are always new ideas coming in, particularly from sort of the priestly sphere, from priestly practices, which we then see being added to this tradition in the Book of the Dead. Where did we find, these were hidden away from, let's call it, well, most of it, everybody, not just Western, but the world, until quite recently the late 18th, 19th century. Where did, where were they found these roads, this massive store of roles?

The reason these have survived is because they're usually placed in tombs, and because tombs are usually out in the desert and it's quite dry, as long as the burials are away from termites, they tend to survive fairly well. The tradition seems to have developed at Thebes, which is modern Luxor, and it seems to retain quite a strong series of traditions associated with that place throughout,

although they are found in other places as well. So it's very much a burial tradition. They're found in tombs, often close to the body or actually on the body or inside a coffin and they've been found sort of throughout the last few hundred years in burials in these sorts of locations. One distinguishing thing about them as I've read from your notes is that they're found often in extraordinary good condition.

One of you said as good as when they were first written but you had to be careful when you rolled them out. Otherwise they were pristine. Yes. John may be able to tell us a little more about that later, but they are, some of them are extraordinary because the conditions are so dry in the Egyptian tombs that they've preserved both the papyrus material and the colour incredibly well, but they do become quite brittle, so it's actually unrolling them can be quite a dangerous procedure and it has to be undertaken under very careful conditions with lots of conservators. Unfortunately,

in the past when they were found, this didn't always happen and there are also very, very many little tiny fragments of bits of the book of the dead in many collections around the world. But we are talking about a massive amount of material from the ancient world, given that usually we're talking about fragments in the ocean, not usually, but very often. So this enormous number of scrolls,

some competing, some contradicting, but a huge booty of insight into a civilisation. Yes, absolutely. Because it isn't just talking about the dead, it gives us an insight into a great number of other things that were happening. John Taylor, so tell us what? Let's stay with their papyrus.

Papyrus. And what do they look like? Well, papyrus is the ancient Egyptian equivalent of paper. And papyrus books are essentially... What's you made of then? It's made from the stem of the papyrus plant, which grew abundantly in Egypt in ancient times. So the stem is cut into strips, and these strips are...

What's good about the papyrus plant? Why do they choose that? It's flexible and it's very durable when it's dry. and so you can make layered sheets, effectively of paper from this material, which is very strong and yet flexible enough to roll, so you can conveniently carry it. And it takes ink and paint very well as also. So it's an ideal medium for condensing a lot of information into a short space.

Papyrus was used extensively from about 3,000 BC onwards in ancient. ancient Egypt, and it's very much used for religious texts. So when you unroll a book of the dead papyrus, what you generally see is columns, vertical columns of hieroglyphic text written in black ink, with ruled lines separating the columns. You also see some words in red, titles of spells, special words, names of certain deities. And also, and this is very distinctive of the book of the Dead, there are a lot of illustrations as well. In the earlier texts, like the pyramid

texts, there are no illustrations. It's just vertical columns of hieroglyphs. But in the Book of the Dead, the magic, the magical power of these compositions is partly in words and partly an image because both the written word and

the image held magical power for the Egyptians. The neatness and the scholarship book goes into these suggests a very high level of literacy, even though it might be more of very few people. Certainly there was a literate class,

the scribal class, who would be very familiar with texts and the copying and reproduction of texts, but we are talking about a very narrow band of the population. We're probably only thinking of one or two percent, perhaps, of the population who were literate.

We're not to give us the remains of a great civilization. Indeed, yes. But of course, this also means that we're getting quite a biased view. This elite did not... They tended to perpetuate a material culture which spoke to that elite. So we're not necessarily understanding from this

what the mass of the population would believe in terms of what happened to them after death. Are they all the same, these roles? Well, there are certain standard features. So there is a limited pool, a kind of repertoire of space. which can go into a book of the dead. Generally speaking, we'd say between about 200 and 250 separate spells are known.

These are spells, we'll talk about it. These are spells to get you into the afterlife. That's effectively what they do. Yes, they are a kind of guide, a passport, books of knowledge to get you into the next world safely. On any particular book of the dead, there can be from just three or four spells on a very short one to perhaps 150, 160 on an extensive document. So some of these books of the day are extremely long, 20, 30, even 40 metres in length.

What do you, can't turn to you now, Richard, Richard Parkinson. Was there any one way in which the Egyptians imagined the afterlife? No. In a word. The Egyptians, one text says nobody comes back to tell us, how they're doing in the afterlife. And a lot of the texts and images, you're aware they are trying to imagine something

that is beyond the boundaries of human knowledge. So it's a world that's populated by strange demons with animal heads. Why do you have the animal heads? Let's talk about these illustrations. John has referred to these illustrations, and we're all fascinated when we go and see the Egyptians different animal heads, human bodies, these mixes. Do they come from the book of the dead?

They come from... And what's it all about? Egyptian religion, in the sense if a god has certain powers and abilities, they're often treated metaphorically as, say, belonging to a lion, belonging to a crocodile. So a god who is very virile and fertile is imagined to have bull-like characteristics, and so he might have the head of a bull. and it works as a visual language

as a way of showing the gods have abilities that go beyond the normal human they have powers that are parts of the cosmos and the natural world so the sun god is like a falcon who can fly in the sky he has a picture of the sun on his head and that's the sort of imagery

you find in most religious scenes and also in the book of the dead illustrations And what are they saying specifically in the Book of the Dead? They give you the names of a lot of these strange beings. And a lot of them, although they're strange, they do, they sort of relate to known human life. The other world is conceived of as a strange place, but also it's an image of human society.

So there's a king of the dead, and you have to get through the very, various portals to enter his following, to enter his house. And so you have strange demon gatekeepers, but presumably that's exactly how you would enter the court of the human king. So the other world is very much conceived of as a strange supernatural version of Egypt. And the other world you find by, as it were, going underground. Going under the course of the sun, the sun seems to disappear underground,

then comes up the next morning and goes across the sky. You want to become eternal, and to become eternal you want to join with the cosmic forces like the sun, like the vegetation, which can be reborn. And going into the underworld with the sun is one of the great metaphors for ensuring that you'll become as stable, as eternal as the sun god. How does mummification help? You have a sense of identity in ancient Egypt which isn't mind versus body. and you want to try and preserve everything about a person. Why is that? The body is, you don't want to lose anything, I think.

There's a great fear in Egypt of losing identity, of the body decaying in death, losing your heart, which, as in the weighing of the heart, is the essence of a person. It's not abstract, it's very much part of your body. So the body has to stay there in order to get. get the spirit, the soul, the what? There's no Egyptian word for soul. There is a word...

So what's being got through to the afterlife? The whole parcel in a way. The body stays in the tomb and then parts of the individual enter the world of the gods and the thing that's often translated soul is a word bar which is represented as a little human-headed bird.

And that's an embodiment of the dead person that can go out into the world, bring light, food, offerings back to the person in the tomb. You can see how it's complicated that are lots of different metaphors, different aspects of a personality.

But they're all to one aim, which is to get this to the next place. And to get the person as that person, a named person, into the afterlife as an individual. Okay, Richard has given us an introduction to the mumification. Then,

but when we see there's all this stuff, isn't there around, there's these objects, paintings and so on. Can you just elaborate that a little and tell us what's going on there? With the, well, one thing that has to be said is all of these ideas are sort of associated with burial practice, but actually things like mummification in the Book of the Dead are very rare because, as John said earlier, this is a very, very elite practice. So basically what we tend to find when we actually excavate in Egypt,

is bodies placed in pits very rarely mummified at the end of the day and with objects placed with them which presumably helped them with some form of the afterlife. Is this utensils and stuff? Yes. I mean what we tend to forget is the vast majority of Egyptians are buried with almost nothing. So there seem to be absolute key things which you need to have which is basically some form of wrapping for the body

which is about protection again. So most people aren't mummified but they're wrapped in a mat or shan. shroud or something or skin occasionally, which helps to preserve the body, which again, the body may not be completely mummified, but as long as some things there, people seem to think they can get to the afterlife somehow. And then some form of pots, which are presumably looking at the text that we find from Egyptian tombs, are associated with the ability to eat and the need for offerings to sustain someone during the afterlife. So we tend to find a body with a few pots would be the basic sort of kit.

And then as burials become more elaborate and people are wealthier and have more things in the tomb, we then find additional bits and pieces, like amulets are very, very important, which again assist with the process of transformation. Why do amulets assist? Because they're magical and they have magical. Why is the thought of magical?

Well, for example, Rich has already talked about the heart as fundamentally important to the Egyptian sense of identity. and it's really quite common in Egyptian tombs to find a heart amulet which is an amulet made of greenstone which is placed on the heart to assist with the process of getting through the judgment of the dead

so that there's a magical power associated with that amulet in the transformative process because again what all Egyptians seem to have hoped is that they're somehow reanimated after death and again it's very difficult to give a precise idea of how this happens

because there are very many different versions of this but the basic things seems to have been that the Egyptians didn't want this sort of idea that you might end up in the afterlife completely unable to do anything was not what they were after so there's an idea they actually want to be able to breathe they want to be able to speak, eat, drink, move

all of this sort of sentient afterlife where you have agency to do things and to speak is very, very important and all of the things we find in tombs seem to be aiming towards that sort of idea. John Taylor, can you develop the idea of spells and the role of magic? I said in the introduction that the Egyptians weren't faced with the challenge turned to magic. What does that mean? Well, magic pervaded ancient Egyptian religion.

And for them it was a very positive force. So it's rather different to the way we in Western societies imagine magic. as something rather shady, a little bit discreditable, perhaps. For the ancient Egyptians, you used magic in your everyday life and also after death. What are the examples you could give about using magic in your everyday life? Facing any kind of life challenge, such as the dangers that surround childbirth, any kind of sickness, illness. So what magic would you use? Let's take childbirth.

It's an easy one to concentrate on. What magic would you use at that stage? There are all kinds of spells and charms that can be used. Basically, magic practice in ancient Egypt involves reciting certain prescribed words, performing certain actions, and often using particular objects or substances which are felt to have magical power inherent in them. So a mother who is about to give birth will be visited perhaps by someone from the community or village who knows these particular rituals and will perform. them in the chamber where birth is about to take place.

And they invoke gods and goddesses. They particularly are concerned with sanctifying the space where this event is taking place, with making sure that this space is pure and no evil influence can enter that chamber. And the same thing, the same ideas then are taken to face death. Death is the biggest challenge of all, of course. And so the same general principles apply. You need to know the words of spells, the actions that accompany those spells,

and the objects and the substances, which will help to make them efficacious. So this is where a priesthood came in, is it? Priests perform these kind of actions, certainly, yes. And also there are particular priests who are concerned with the cult of the dead and who perform rituals at the tombs of dead people. very much these rituals are concerned with the kind of thing Kate was just mentioning

the need for sustenance and the need for integrity of the body because without those things you can't enter the afterlife. Was this the biggest thing about the Egyptian person's life, the biggest spectacle, the getting ready for death, the preparation for death? It certainly was a big spectacle. It was something that you would have in your mind from an age at which you could to collect material or resources for death. I don't think it's right to say they're obsessed with death,

which you often read, because we know that they're very much enamoured of life. Their afterlife is very much a return to the earthly life and eternal one, which they're hoping for. But they're very, very concerned that when they reach this challenge of death, they're not going to be turned away by the gods. There's a lot in the Book of the Dead about passing,

through gateways, Richard mentioned this. And you don't want to get to these gateways and find you don't have the correct knowledge to pass to the next world. There's been mention of gods, Richard, along the Richard Parkings, along the way. There's, and the king of the underworld is Osiris, under realm, let's call it the underworld realm. Can you give us some idea of the main gods and what influence they were thought to have? The god that's most easily recognized is the jackal-headed god of embalming, who is the god who receives the body into the tomb. Presumably it's a priest with a jackal mask on.

The centre of the underworld, though, is, as you say, Osiris, the rule of the dead. And he's so important because he is one of the children of the Creator God who rules Egypt and who is killed by... his brother. And he is in a way the first person who is mummified and resurrected. His wife, ISIS with her sister, Nephysmumify him, protect him, reanimate him enough for him to get his wife pregnant to ensure that he has a son who then fights with the murderer of his father to get the kingship of Egypt. And this is sort of the pattern that every individual. Egyptian hopes to emulate. They hope to be mummified like Osiris, and when they are mummified,

they are known as the Osiris of, and then their name. And they also hope to be judged to a voice vindicated in a legal case, which is a bit like the legal case that is involved with Osiris being vindicated and having his heir put on the throne of Egypt. So that is really the centre of all the deities in the underworld. To be embarrassingly obvious, but here we go, Richard. We see these coffins, which Kate is referred to. Was there any sense that they were shipped away to an underground place put into the earth? Now, clearly it wasn't because we've still got them here.

So what was shipped away? In terms of being buried in it. Who's going on this journey and what's going on this journey underground? The key thing, as Kate said, is the body. that is placed in the tomb and it stays in the tomb. And throughout eternity, what you want is through the spells and the rituals of the funeral of the Book of the Dead, you want to emerge from the tomb into the daylight.

And so one of the titles of the Book of the Dead are the spells for going forth by day. So they're waiting? They're waiting. So their underworld is where they are? It's where the body is, but at the same time they are participating. in the court of Osiris.

Following the sun god across the sky, they are also working in the fields, in the underworld. They are also merged with the circumpolar stars. There's lots of different metaphors for what you're doing. They're all over the place in a good way. Kate, the most famous spells,

as I take it, relates to the weighing of the heart. Now, why were they weighing their heart and how did they do it? Because you have contradictory urbans here. from himself, from Richard. In your notes, you say, the judgment was carried out by taking a dead person's heart,

placing it on a large set of scales and weighing it against a feather. Lower down the same page, Pakistan. You say the heart was the essence of a person's identity, emotions, intellect. It was one organ that was not removed from the corpse. So where does that leave us? Right. As with every other aspect of the...

texts. There isn't one narrative version of what's going on. There are many different ideas playing together. What is represented is the heart of the individual being weighed against a feather which represents my art, which is either the idea of

right truth, the right way of behaviour and the right way of doing things, or a goddess which is a personification of that idea. Now there are two things there we really need to talk about. Firstly, the heart. The heart, as Richard said, is actually physically left in the body, and it's not taken

out as some of the other organs are during mummification, basically because the heart is all muscle, so it doesn't decay, so it can be left in the body. But the heart is thought to be the seat of the intellect, of memory, of mind, intelligence, whereas we think of a lot of that going on in the brain. The Egyptians think of that being in the heart. The heart remembers what you've done during your life. And so it therefore is it's sort of taken out of the body as a sort of snapshot of everything the individual has done and that's being judged against the idea of Ma'art.

Now Ma'at is this idea of the Egyptian's idea of the right way of doing things, a morally correct way of acting. And so the idea is that these should be weighed against each other in a set of scales and the heart should not be heavier than the idea of right order because it hasn't done anything wrong. I think Richard should come into it.

I'm having a ruthless attack. I've never done that before, I didn't mean to drip you up. I've had an enormous suspect of you, but it was a bit of a contradiction. It's now being an expression. So what is weighed against what? I'm really a terrible literalist.

You've got the scales. You've got a... It's a metaphor. What's on one side and one of this? All right, I can do metaphors. But they're so positive about this weighing. Who does the weighing and with what? The weighing's done by the god of embalming.

And sometimes you see the dead man walking towards the scales holding his heart where it is in his body. I mean, his hands crossed across his heart. No, literally holding his heart against his chest. And then it's one of the fun things about the heart amulet is it's got a spell on it, which is basically designed to tell the heart not to blab in the trial, not to stand up and bear witness to anything wrong. And it's super ethical, but you also feel the Egyptians sort of know everybody's got something they want to hide. And so not only are they saying, I was wonderful, I was ethical, I can survive the metaphorical weighing of my heart,

but I've also got a spell to make sure the heart doesn't sneak on me and say things against me. It's lots of different insurance policies. Is it a metaphorical fella? It's a metaphorical ther for Mark. So it's a picture of it, isn't it? I mean, somebody decides this is going to be, I don't mean there'd be a rude way, but it's a ritual, and the outcome of the ritual depends on evidence gathered beforehand. Yes.

It doesn't depend on the actual weighing of the what and the what. So we'll get that out of the way. Right. Do you want to come in, John? What about this, what they're trying to find out is, is this body worth going forward? And have they committed any crime? So the weighing of the heart is that we've been soundly told as a metaphor.

What do you have to add to that? In addition to the weighing of the heart, there's another important element of the judgment. And this is called the Declaration of Innocence. And when the dead person enters the hall of judgment, he has to speak first to Osiris and then to 42 judges, 42 assessors who are gods around this hall. To each of them, he has to make a statement, that he is innocent of a particular misdemeanor during his life. And these things are, they include fairly obvious things like,

I've not killed anyone, I've not stolen, I've not told lies. There are also statements about daily life, correct behaviour. So he's not blocked up a watercourse in a field, which might cause problems for his neighbour. He's not tampered with weights and measures. that kind of thing. And then there are other declarations which relate more to religious matters. So he's not blasphemed, he's not killed a sacred animal,

stolen offerings from the God's temple or anything of that kind. Now these declarations amount to a kind of moral code in a way by which we think the Egyptians tried to live their lives. One of the big questions for us as Egyptologists is, did people read the book of the dead during their lives and try to live according to those principles or was it something that they only had accessible in the tomb? Unfortunately, we don't have writings from people made in their lifetimes

that answer that question clearly. There is an interesting inscription though in the tomb of a man called Baki, lived about 14th century BC, where he says that he tried to live according to the principles of the whole of judgment and that he never did evil to any man or did anything that the gods would blame him for.

So if we can take that literally, then it seems as though they were aware of these sins that they had to avoid and tried to live accordingly. Richard, Richard Parkland, how did the Book of Dead use images to clarify what to expect in the future? Well, the weighing of the heart is one of the great icons of the Book of the Dead, and that really exists as a picture of this imagined otherworldly scene and event with captions.

The earlier versions of the rituals for the dead, the pyramid texts and the coffin texts, don't really have many images, apart from the odd map in the coffin texts, which shows the ways you can get to the underworld, and the layout of the fields of the Blessed Dead. And it seems that when the spells were moved onto Papyrus as the main means of transmission,

people developed the possibility of adding illustrations. Sometimes they simply illustrate what the spell is about. So if you have a spell for transforming yourself into a swallow, so you can fly, you then have a picture of a swallow, if it is a prayer to a set of gods, you will see pictures of the gods, but sometimes you have a sense they give extra information. They show you what the doorkeepers of the house of Osiris actually look like.

What do they look like? Strange animal-headed deities, all sorts of dwarves with knives, serpents with legs. There's a whole range of information that's captured in these illustrations. And slightly later, you find the illustrations take on a life of their own. The spells that they're illustrating aren't copied on the walls of tombs around 1,200.

It's mostly the pictures. And we know from when people are manufacturing the Book of the Dead, it looks as if people were concentrating on the pictures. I think when you bought a Book of the Dead, you probably weren't checking how good the text was, manuscript you were looking at the pictures. John? Yes, and this leads us to quite an interesting thing

about the creation of these images. They are tremendously varied. Although, clearly there has to be a certain canonical element to a book of the dead image, they're not the same from one papyrus to another. And the people who are making these images,

the artist, the painters, obviously have a certain amount of liberty granted to them to be inventive and to put in different elements. And clearly they have considerable religious knowledge in order to make perhaps small allusions to particular mythological narratives as they create these images.

And some of these images can work on several levels. You can combine two or three different Book of the Dead images into one, which will then serve for each of those particular spells, but also the final image then can acquire another meaning on top of that, greater than the sum of its parts. So these images are very fluid in the way that they can be manipulated by the painters. Kate, as I understand it, when the Book of the Dead didn't suit, John's referred to it, didn't suit the way the elites had lived their life,

they moved to another one or they fabricated another one or something. Is there a sense in which it could be evaded, it could be, cheated on, the book of the dead itself? What we seem to find with the book of the dead is it's a sort of guide and it's a help for when things don't go quite right or where there's something to hide. So, for example, with the idea, which is already mentioned, the heart, and you're very worried that your heart might actually tell tales on you in the afterlife, which might actually prevent you getting through this judgment.

So it actually has sort of, it has this spell on it which says, you know, don't tell lies against me. This great line, do not make my name stink in front of the entourage. Where does that line occur? That occurs in spell 30B, which is actually, and it's written on the heart scarab, which is placed on the body even in tombs that often don't have the book of the dead. So this idea is very fundamental. And also with the negative confession or the declaration of innocence that just, John's referred to, there's this worry presumably that you might forget something,

and the Book of the Dead then acts as a way of reminding you what you need to remember, and remembering all the names of the strange gods who have really, really peculiar names, and all of those sort of extra bits of information can help you get through to the afterlife if something has gone wrong or if you've forgotten something. I'm sorry, did that actually answer the question, um? It was very interesting. Richard, it's sometimes said, but I must have been one of you said it or maybe I read it somewhere else,

that the book of the democratised death in some way, did it? No, not at all. It says one book. Yeah, there's this phenomenon, it's an Egyptological myth called the democratisation of the hereafter. And because the first spells to beatify the dead are found in the pyramids of the old kingdom. And in the subsequent period,

they are found no longer in royal burials, but in the burials of local governors on the coffins, the coffin texts. People imagine that the ability to enter the afterlife was originally a royal prerogative, and then it trickled down through society. And it's really just an illusion created by where the spells and the rituals were written down,

and where they've been preserved. So the trickle-down effect didn't trickle very far? It never trickled very far. It's always the top 1% who have the texts in a preserved form. Presumably, though, more people would have had the rituals performed at their funerals than could afford to have an elaborate book of the dead. And as Kate said, you'd then get the bargain basement version of all these rituals when you simply wrapped a relative, put them in a pit in the desert,

and made the key thing of offerings of food. But the basic notion was still the same, even if you wrapped a poor person in a shroud and put... As far as we can tell, yes. I mean, the fact that there are those pots for food suggests it's basically the same ideas, the basic ideas. The Book of the Dead is the Rose Royce style of burial. Everything else is much, much less accessible.

I'm sure Rose Royce would love. to be associated with burial. Kate, over to you. Yes, the issue with the democratisation idea is the fact that it derives from a period when Egyptology was very textually focused. And so it puts a huge amount of emphasis on text as opposed to the archaeology, whereas actually if we look at Egyptian burials, we've got burial goods being placed in tombs for hundreds of years before we ever get any mortuary texts. And the mortuary text may be an elaborated version, but they obviously emerge from the same sort of

set of beliefs and practices which actually go right back before the invention of writing in Egypt. So they're much older ideas but they just get elaborated in particularly complex or esoteric ways in some of the text that we have available.

And then are preserved in certain contexts and it varies. John Taylor, about when and why did the Book of the Deadfall are abuse? Well it continued in use right down to the end of the Ferronic period, the time of Ferronic government.

Which would be a one? Well, basically Egypt became part of the Roman Empire in 30 BC. So as long as that. And that really marks the end of the government by the Ferronic system. By that time, by the first century BC, the Book of the Dead, is beginning to decline

in popularity. And within about 100 years, it's completely gone. And with it has gone quite a large part of the traditional paraphernalia of death. And there are a number of reasons why this is happening. One is that Egyptian society is changing

during these centuries. Egypt is becoming more multicultural. We've got the Greeks governing Egypt and then the Romans and a greater influx of people from outside. So beliefs are changing. Patterns of attitude to the afterlife. the changing. And it may also be that in these later centuries, there were no longer the scribes

who had the full knowledge of these old texts to keep copying from one manuscript to another. We have to remember, of course, that although we are in the privileged position now of having thousands of these manuscripts which have been taken out of tombs to study, by the end of Egyptian civilization, most of these things were underground and were not accessible. and if the copies that survived in temple libraries, let's say, were lost or damaged, then there was a real chance that there would be a break in that tradition. Richard, buried in a great number of ways. As John's just indicated, the Greeks came in, the Romans came in,

overlaid their ideas, which are related to lots of ways, but that's a different programme, but overlaid their ideas. And the Egyptian, a lot of what you three have been talking about, really did disappear, went underground, partly to do with the language, and so we'd lose it, as it were, for 2,000 more years? Yes, really, really until the decipherment of hieroglyphs in sort of 1820s, and that's when this modern study of the Book of the Dead really begins. So we've got this whole civilisation slumbering over there,

which was it working through into the rest that was going on to the Romans, the Greeks and so on and so forth? The classical world looks to Egypt as sort of the origins of wisdom and philosophy in a lot of ways, and people have tried to trace sort of ideas and practices. But I think the Egyptians were always aware that their burial practices, the mummification, were very characteristically Egyptian. I think it was always conceived of as part of national identity, almost. In the tale of Sinojah, when he comes back home, what he wants is a good standard Egyptian funeral. that's part of what being at home, an eternal home, really means for him.

So I think they felt these were very much part of their cultural identity. So to be crude, perhaps, when the Greeks moved in, the Egyptians moved out of any developing sense of a civilisation. I think that's probably going too far. There's still a lot of development going on, but it's happening under a different system of government, under a slightly different social structure as well. So in some ways, the older Egyptian traditions are becoming diluted

and changed by outside influence. And what we have, of course, depends on the wealth of the people doing those practices. So as the money is taken away from the traditional temples, the strongholds of Egyptian culture, inevitably their ability to produce and reproduce fades. Well, thank you very much. And thank you, especially, Richard, for explaining the hard. and the further which has been bothering me for days with this terrible literalist tendency.

Thank you very much. You and to John Taylor and Kate Spence. Next week we'll be discussing the Battle of Lincoln, 1217, two dynasties, Anglo-French and French against each other. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What significantly did we miss out?

I think the thing that I always think is fun is the fact the Book of the Dead are very often off the peg. So people buy a wonderful scroll that is meant to have their name on it and there's just blank places. And so you buy your Book of the Dead and you have your name copied in.

And we know from even some of the most famous ones in the British Museum, the owner can never have read the papyrus because there's gaps where his name should be or it's written twice or there's mistakes. And also there are, are lots of copies where there's corruptions in the text, where bits have been missed out or words are misspelled,

or the scribe clearly doesn't even really understand what he's copying. So you have to assume that these spells wouldn't have worked because the wording is very important. And at the same time, there are lots of variants of spells. And some of these variants might represent different traditions, different local sources being used. But also, it could be that the scribes, again, like with the images, they have some freedom to alter and interpret the text themselves as they're going along.

Yeah, there's also the illustrations of the funeral are really fantastic in the Book of the Dead. And they give us information about Egyptian sort of ritual practices associated with the funeral that we'd have had no idea about it really otherwise. Yes, yes they do. And I mentioned in the text of that spell. It gives supplementary information. And the paintings are just like Indian miniatures. in some ways. They are wonderful works of art.

Some of them are very tiny, like the one of the funeral. One question I wanted to ask in the world. How much does it tell us about the life of Egyptians is distinct from getting ready for the death of the Egyptians? Not much, because the negative confession says a lot about a particular set of ethical issues. But we've got literary texts that talk about morality in a much more general way,

that are much more handbooks of ethics rather than these slightly ritual prescriptions. So it's very focused on ritual practices for the next life. I think with the judgment, particularly, it's important to say that they didn't expect that people live blameless lives. And they're not trying to fool the gods into believing that either.

But as long as you possess the correct ritual words to say at the judgment, then that purifies you from whatever you've done. In fact, in that spell, it says, it's entitled, purifying the deceased from all the evil he has done. So it's not really a judgment in the sense that you have evil to be blamed and punished for. It's more that you're setting aside the evil that you've done and purifying yourself in front of the gods. And in Egyptian society, the end of a court case was sort of reconciliation.

The aim was to get the two opponents to leave the court content. And so there's a sense that the balancing act is exactly that. It's a way of reconciling your life with the expectations of the gods. So you will be able to enter the gods entourage and survive through eternity. I mean, in a way it can be taken too far in that there is a very, definite sense of wrong and punishment and things. So I think it does sort of maybe allow people to get through things at some level, but it's not that the Egyptians just thought you could do anything and get away with it.

So there is a balance in there. I think also freedom of movement is a principle that's very important in the book of the dead, indeed to the whole of Egyptian afterlife religion. They're very much concerned that they're not going to be confined to the darkness of the tomb forever. And this is why the bar that Richard mentioned, this human-headed bird idea, is important because the title of the Book of the Dead is the book of going forth by day. And what they want is the bar, the spirit element of the person, to leave the body and come into the sunlight, life-giving rays of the sun. I think we're being visited by a producer. I'll be to offer you to your coffee before you go forth.

Love a coffee, please. There are many more religion and discussion programmes from Radio 4 to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.ukau.uk slash radio four.