Yearning for Immortality
The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife
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- £24.99
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- £24.99
Publisher Description
How our understanding of the ancient Egyptian afterlife was shaped by Christianity.
Many of us are familiar with the ancient Egyptians’ obsession with immortality and the great efforts they made to secure the quality of their afterlife. But, as Rune Nyord shows, even today, our understanding of the Egyptian afterlife has been formulated to a striking extent in Christian terms. Nyord argues that this is no accident, but rather the result of a long history of Europeans systematically retelling the religion of ancient Egypt to fit the framework of Christianity. The idea of ancient Egyptians believing in postmortem judgment with rewards and punishments in the afterlife was developed during the early modern period through biased interpretations that were construed without any detailed knowledge of ancient Egyptian religion, hieroglyphs, and sources.
As a growing number of Egyptian images and texts became available through the nineteenth century, these materials tended to be incorporated into existing narratives rather than being used to question them. Against this historical background, Nyord argues that we need to return to the indigenous sources and shake off the Christian expectations that continue to shape scholarly and popular thinking about the ancient Egyptian afterlife.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Art historian Nyord (Seeing Perfection) provides an intricate account of how Egyptian mortuary practices have been transformed in the Western imagination to fit Christian archetypes. According to the author, early European scholars selectively mined the works of classical writers such as Diodorus and Servius to explain what ancient visitors to Egypt observed, including mummified bodies, obelisks, and tombs. In the 18th and 19th centuries, scholars attempted to interpret Egyptian practices within a cross-cultural context, but continued to overidentify Judeo-Christian parallels (for example, by using terms like "body and soul" and "eternity" that carried Christian connotations). The translation of the Book of the Dead in 1842 cemented European scholars' convictions that postmortem judgments (whereby the gods evaluated the "ethical and religious merits" of deceased souls) were central to the Egyptians, and marginalized such concepts as metempsychosis, or the migration of souls, that helped distinguish Egyptian funerary practices from Christian ones. Exploring why Western misinterpretations of ancient Egyptian death practices persist, the author points to an enduring "universal human longing for transcendent, eternal life," as well as documentaries, film exhibits, and books that reinforce entrenched ideas about the Egyptian quest for immortality. Dense and methodical, Nyord's history meticulously probes the challenges of cultural transmission. Serious Egyptologists will be edified.
