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The Horizon of Eternity: Living and Dying in Ancient Egypt Talk by Dr The Horizon of Eternity: Living and Dying in Ancient Egypt Talk by Dr. John Taylor, Assistant Keeper Ancient Egypt; Funerary Archaeology Department: Ancient Egypt and Sudan. British Museum Please note: Due to copyright, not all images shown during Dr Taylor’s presentation were able to be recorded for the web. Transcript: Their culture survived for well over three thousand years and one of the reasons it was able to develop peacefully for so long was that Egypt is naturally protected by these features I have just been pointing out to you; the deserts, and the sea at the top [Image of a map of the river Nile]. Even in Nubia there is a very arid, a very rocky landscape, quite difficult to maintain settlement in. So for the first couple of thousand years the Egyptians were pretty much undisturbed by invasion or major population change. This was one of the factors which allowed their culture to become so strong and so self contained. And of course the river Nile itself is the lifeblood of Egypt. Not only does it provide the main means of communication and source of water, but it is also the basis for agriculture. The Egyptian economy was founded on agriculture. Typical scene there at the bottom from a tomb of about 1250 BC, showing agricultural activities [Image of tomb illustration]. And of course the key to this was the fact that every year the flooding of the Nile brought fertile silt into Egypt and this spread over the fields on either side of the river providing natural fertilization, renewal of the fertilization of the soil. So for most of their three thousand years the Egyptians never had problems with hunger, they could rise above a subsistence economy to produce all the amazing monuments that we can see today. And they considered their lands to be the gift of the gods. To them it was really a kind of paradise an earthly paradise and they saw divine influence in everything around them and you can see this in all of their arts and writings. An Egyptologist recently said about ancient Egypt: “All observable phenomena are potential expressions of the divine”. And there’s a lot of truth in this. Everything that they saw around them was connected in some way with gods and goddesses. Let’s just have a closer look [Image of the stela of Taperet showing the sun-god Re-Horakhty and an image of the constellation of the night sky from the tomb of Sety I, c. 1280 BC]. So the sun of course was the most important god of all. The sun god Ra was the creator of all life. On this painted wooden tablet you see him in the form of a man with a Falcon’s head and the solar disk on top as a headdress. And there you’ve got a woman named Taperet raising her hands in adoration before the god and you’ll notice that from the solar disk you have these rays in the form of flowers coming down to the woman’s face and this is an artist’s convention for the idea of the life giving rays of the sun bathing the human individual. So the sun god is the most important of all the deities. And then we have the stars of course. The Egyptians were actually some of the earliest Astronomers. And the other illustration here is a painting from the tomb of King Sety the first, 1280BC. And on the ceiling of his tomb you have this graphic depiction of the night sky. Now at first glance it looks like a kind of menagerie of typical Egyptian creatures, you know hippopotamus, crocodile and so on. But, if you notice these reddish brown marks here, some of these are actually constellations of stars. If you look here, I don’t know if you can spot this, but we have Ursa Major, the plow. These are the four main stars and the other ones over here. The Egyptians 1 / 11 The Horizon of Eternity webcast transcript.doc actually defined this constellation but they didn’t call it the plow or the great bear they called it the bull. And there you see the bull walking along with a man driving it behind. So some stars, the moon, are all divinities. And of course the river Nile itself was regarded as divine. It was identified with a god called Hapi. There you see two images of him [Image of a carving on stone]. He’s always shown as a rather kind of androgynous figure. He is male but he has almost female breasts and rather pendulous stomach. And this is to show his connection with fertility, the fertility of the land. Now all of these phenomena; the movement of the sun and the stars and the flooding of the Nile, these are cyclical. These are things which repeat themselves. The Nile flooding every year of course, the sun passing across the sky every day. Not surprisingly the Egyptians connected this idea of cycles with human life as well. Now most of them had fairly short lives. If you got to be thirty-five in ancient Egypt then you’d done very well. So they would observe the progress of human life, from birth to death, within a fairly short period of time. I think this helped to give this idea that this was going to be an endless repetition of human existence. So death was not the end it was regarded more as a threshold, a passage from one existence to another one, a crossing of boundaries. And often death is conceived in the form of a door or a gateway that you pass through but you don’t die you carry on living. Here is an image from the papyrus of the scribe Ali, showing him actually moving through a door [Image of an illustration on papyrus]. You see also his spirit in bird form, which we’ll come back to in a few minutes. Now the divine powers were eternal and they dwelt in parts of the universe that were not accessible to mortals. The aim of every ancient Egyptian at death was to cross the boundary into these divine realms. And in order to do that, they had to carry out a lot of ritual activity to get across that, to get over that boundary. They saw this aim of trying to live forever as something which they could achieve within their own concept of the universe. And really we need to understand a little bit more about how they imagined the universe to work. They had a concept called maat, which really means the cosmic order. We could translate it as right or truth or justice, the way things are meant to be. As long as maat was maintained everything would be well for Egypt. She’s often personified as a goddess. You can see this image of her here on the left, a winged figure [Image shown of maat and an image of the king Sety]. She is actually the daughter of the sun god, Ra. The Egyptians imagined Egypt as the center of the world, the place most favoured by the gods. And the king of Egypt, the pharaoh, was responsible for keeping this principle of maat in place, making sure that it wasn’t overturned so that chaos might ensue. And the king was himself semi-divine. He was the son of the gods. There on the right you see an image of king Sety the first of 1280 BC and he is holding up a little image of matt as a small goddess figure. This emphasizes that the king’s role is to be the champion of maat, to make sure that order is always kept. There are various ways in which the king makes this possible. One of them is his role as military leader, to protect Egypt from invasion. And this is why you often see on the temple walls images like this one. The king is a gigantic superhero crushing the heads of great crowds of enemy captives [Image of Tuthmosis the third in ‘ritual smiting’ pose, temple of Karnak c.1450 BC]. And these people that he is defeating are usually shown as Syrians, Palestinians, Nubians, Libyans, in other words the peoples who lived in the areas around Egypt and who might be considered a threat to Egyptian security. The king has to prevent any kind of influx of these people into Egypt. But perhaps more important than that, is the king’s relationship with the gods. In order for the principle of maat to survive the gods must be kept happy, they have to be kept content. And of 2 / 11 course there are thousands of gods; every town and city in Egypt had its own gods. There are gods of the sun and the moon and so on. So that is quite a lot of gods to keep happy. And really the way that you keep them happy is by making them comfortable in human terms. Giving them food and drink and clothing and generally keeping them content in that way. The king is the person who has to look after this particular need. In return for that, the gods will bestow life on humanity. Not only the king, but all other individuals living and dead. So it’s a reciprocal arrangement and you see here how that’s depicted in art [Image of the cosmic order, an ankh symbol and the king making offerings].
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