Who Read the Book of the Dead?
http://projects.vassar.edu/bookofthedead/
In this era of Kindle and PDFs we hardly need to be reminded that a “book” is not necessarily a book. If we turn our gaze to earlier eras we find something similar. “Book” became the catch-all word to describe written texts of any kind, but many of these texts aren’t really books at all. An example is the Egyptian “Book of the Dead,” a collection of spells and other magical texts often buried with an ancient Egyptian. If you click on this link you will see a gorgeously reproduced copy of the Book of the Dead. It scrolls from left to right along your screen, and you catch something of why the Internet is a fantastic tool for understanding past ways of thinking. This long continuous view of a single papyrus roll would be impossible in book form.
This coming term I will be teaching Religion in Ancient Egypt again, and I am expending my treatment of the Book of the Dead. That addition will be evident on the blog as I work out my thoughts on it. One characteristic to immediately notice from the above link is how effectively the words and text complement each other. As time passes there some scrolls will ditch words altogether and just employ images. It’s as if those images served as mnemonic devices for the knowledge needed by the dead. But this gets at exactly the problem with understanding the Book of the Dead: was it a “living” book for Egyptians, or an unknown object placed in tombs. How was the book used? Were its spells memorized and well known, or arcane knowledge that the dead would work through only when they woke up in the grave?
Barry Kemp, author of the classic Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, has written a brief book on the Book of the Dead. At several points he comes round to the question of who read this text and when. He is on the whole a proponent of a Book of the Dead that was widely known. One of the clearest points of evidence is in Spell 17 when the result of a spell is explained: “As for anyone who shall read it daily for his own benefit, it means being hale on earth” (17). He points to Spell 135 as well, where “the one who knows [the spell] on earth” is contrasted with one who knows the spell in the afterlife. The implication of both passages is that some people knew these spells during their lifetimes.. likely by memory. That could be countered by pointing out that these texts were (perhaps) fixed centuries before Books of the Dead came into being, so it is possible that once well known spells had lost any real cultural currency by the later centuries. But I find it inherently doubtful that a book with such longstanding cultural cache—which could even be converted into just visual signs—was an unknown and uncared for text.
Things get interesting again when Kemp discusses the possibility of performance. A number of the spells describe quite concrete actions, such as this one:
To be inscribed upon a scarab made from nephrite, mounted in fine gold, with a silver ring, and placed at the throat of the deceased. [Spell 156]
When I have read spells like this in the past, I’ve always assumed quite literal descriptions of funerary practice. Egyptians were buried with multiple amulets placed at specific points of their body, and often wrapped in the mummy shrouds. (This, by the way, turned out to be detrimental to preserving their bodies, since robbers knew they had to unwrap the mummy shrouds to find the sometime precious amulets, guaranteeing rough handling.) Kemp points to the undisturbed private tomb of Yuya and Tuyu, father and mother of the chief wife of a New Kingdom king. Unfortunately there does not seem to be a strong correlation between the burial and the things that should be there according to a literal reading of the spells. There are a couple of direct links between items and spells from the Book of the Dead, but those spells are not present in the text of the Book of the Dead placed in their tomb! It’s a puzzling disconnect between text and actual burial practices. Kemp concludes: “It seems that it was not necessary to follow very exact burial instructions” (76).
I can immediately think of several ways to explain this. For example, the text may describe an idealized version of the burial, but surely not everyone could afford a “scarab made from nephrite, mounted in fine gold, with a silver ring.” In that case we could expect cheaper substitutes.. or perhaps the priest at burial would have these objects and place them symbolically before taking them back up. If we could have been there, maybe the seeming disconnect would fade away. Nevertheless it’s intriguing to entertain the notion put forward by Kemp: “So much that is in the Book of the Dead was held in the imagination, however, that it is probably not necessary to interpret all passages literally” (78). This would place the Book of the Dead firmly in the realm of imaginative literature. It would become a fiction that imagistically presented the idea of death and burial to the ancient Egyptians, although with a kind of mixed voice and point of view that we now find difficult to follow.
