Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, British Museum, review

A new show at the British Museum brings us face to face with our darkest imaginings, says Richard Dorment.
By Richard Dorment
Most of us learnt about Egyptian burial practices at school – how the mummified corpse was entombed along with food, wine, furniture, bowls and eating utensils to stave off hunger, thirst, and boredom in the afterlife. I have to admit that even as a 12-year-old I found the Egyptian practice of taking everyday objects with them into the hereafter lacking imagination. If you need the same stuff in the next world as you do in this, I reasoned, death must have all the awe and mystery of a camping trip: wherever you might end up, you might as well make yourself comfortable along the way.
Now I know better. As you’ll discover in the British Museum’s autumn blockbuster, packing the celestial rucksack was only the start of the adventure.
For as well as the mummy cases, funerary statuettes, amulets and scarabs found in the pyramids, archaeologists also discovered “pyramid texts” provided for the use of the dead on their journey into the unknown. Written with reed pens on papyrus and often enclosed in wooden containers, or else inscribed on the walls of tombs or painted on the covers of coffins, these writings are known collectively as the Book of the Dead. Whereas the household utensils unearthed in Egyptian tombs are essentially banal, these rich texts draw us deep into the realms of the unconscious, where we come face to face with the ancient world’s darkest, strangest, and most fearful imaginings.
Once mummification was completed and the mummy placed in the sarcophagus, a priest used an adze ritualistically to “open” the dead man’s mouth and enable his winged soul (ba) to enter and leave the mortal remains at will.
Now the real journey could begin.
The Book of the Dead is not a single volume, like the Bible, but a collection of 200 magic spells and incantations which were believed to protect the dead person from evil and to guide him on his passage through a kingdom of the dead. Each spell was intended to be used in a specific situation the dead person might encounter on the tortuous path to eternal bliss.
Just as today you can order a bespoke funeral, so an Egyptian of high status could ask to be buried with his or her own particular selection of spells – say, number 154 (for not letting the body corrupt) and spell 9 (for allowing the soul to leave the tomb and move freely though the afterlife). Other spells enabled the deceased to turn himself into a snake or crocodile at will, or to assume the form of a god.
The dead needed magic protection because their courage would be tested by encounters with terrifying monsters (think Pamina and Tamino in Mozart’s The Magic Flute). In some of the most vigorously written incantations, the dead man addresses by name the frightening animal-headed demons that guard the portals of the hereafter. For example, one spell tells the monster named He who Lives on Snakes that the man protected by the spell is greater than he because “you have eaten a mouse, which Ra detests, and you have chewed the bones of a putrid cat.” Clearly the Egyptians figured that your best chance of being allowed to pass into the Elysian Fields was to stand tall and give lip.
At last admitted to the hall of judgment where the guardian gods interrogate them, the dead protest their innocence by reciting spell 125: “I have done no falsehood, I have not robbed, I have not stolen, I have not killed men, and I have not told lies,” and so forth. And finally their hearts are weighed on the scales of judgment, so that the good they did in life can be balanced against the bad. This is a crucial moment, for Egyptians believed that our humanity – that is, our ability to feel and to think – was located not in the brain but in the heart. Though all other internal organs were removed during mummification, the heart was left in the breast.
Inconveniently, it was also believed that after death the heart had the ability to speak, and in speaking to say things the deceased would prefer the gods not know about their conduct. So of course they had a spell (30B) asking the heart to shut up. When the gods have taken the measure of their lives, the guilty were devoured and the virtuous rewarded with the beatific vision of the sun god Ra or ecstatic union with the ruler of the underworld, Osiris.
No exhibit so vividly brings home the humanity of these ancient people than the Book of the Dead of Queen Nodjmet, who in life had been responsible for the murder of two political opponents, an act that would certainly have merited damnation. And yet here she is, standing by the scales of justice, apparently expecting a favourable outcome.
The organisation of the show is straightforward. We follow the funerary rituals from the moment breath leaves the body to the burial of the mummified corpse in the tomb. Many spells used at this early stage in the soul’s journey are illustrated with vignettes depicting real life in ancient Egypt.
The most perfect example in this show is the painted papyrus of c1275 BC showing the funeral procession of a man named Ani, with a frieze of wailing women led by the dead man’s sobbing wife. But the heart of the show is really what happens next – when the soul goes to where the wild things are in its search for immortality.
So far, I haven’t talked much about art. That’s because the show is more about what we can learn from hieroglyphic texts than it is about draughtsmanship or carving. To be sure, there are some enchanting paintings – of Ani and his wife Tutu playing the board game senet against a field of brilliant yellow, or a delightful satirical papyrus illustration showing a lion and a gazelle playing the same game, where the lion’s joy at the move he’s just made is infectious.
Here, too, is the spectacular gilded mummy mask of Satdejehuty with her flesh of gold and her hair of lapis lazuli. There is a bronze staff in the form of a serpent that might have been made by a 20th-century sculptor and subtly coloured linear drawings of high quality.
But nothing here bowled me over in the way that I am by the magnificent wall paintings from the tomb-chapel of Nebamun, upstairs in the British Museum, or the colossal polished stone head of Amenhotep III in one of the ground floor galleries, where the soft modelling in the flesh is contrasted to the rougher texture of lips, eyebrows, crown, beard strap and head band.
Remarkably, all but a few of the 160 works in this show belong to the British Museum, though the fragility of papyrus means that they can rarely be shown at all, let along displayed and lit as sensitively as they are here.
In terms of scholarship, the exhibition is a tour de force, but you will have a much greater grasp of what you are looking at if you can first read the magisterial catalogue by curator John H Taylor, the best of the year.
The telegraph