All civilizations faced the problem of death in different ways. But, in the case of egyptiansthe development of the theme describes your civilization more than any other feature.
It is not that the Egyptian answer to the question of death immutable: depending on the places, the social media and the times, the egyptians They reacted very differently.
But, on the whole, the development of thought about death It had the necessary coherence so that a picture can be outlined. Let’s see what this is about.
The conception of death
Metaphysically, the egyptians They always had the concept that the living man is a compound of material and immaterial principles, indispensable to each other, to the point that not only the body, but also the spiritual principles themselves are doomed to disappear if the union is broken.
The importance of the procedures of conservation of the corpse is then explained, whose embalming was the surest way, and funerary rites, such as the opening of the mouth, by which the spiritual principles were returned to the embalmed body.
When dying, the subject was since then a new Osirisbecause he participated in the rites whose benefits had been the god Osiris the first to experiment.
The dead man again had his ba and of his ka. The ba it represented the vegetative soul, the animating principle of the organism that could travel far from the body in the form of a bird with a human head.
The kaor the double of the body, was like the immaterial reflection of the individual, the equivalent of his personality.
Such conceptions were elaborated by the same Pharaoh. Little by little they spread among those around him, relatives and noblemen of his court.
For him a solar survival was imagined: the Pharaoh dead he returned to the gods to whom he belonged by nature, and boarding the solar barque, he could eternally bless Egyptwho had ruled.
But there were other representations of survival. Coming from the depths of the ages, the idea of survival in the grave itself was never lost, and the egyptians They designated the tombs with a very expressive term: “dwellings of eternity”.
With the development of the cycle of the Osiriac legends, and of the rites inspired by the cult of Osiris (the lord of the world of the dead), was attributed to the dead a posthumous dominion: the very kingdom of Osirisunderground, mysterious, where the Deceased they found all aspects of earthly life again, but free from disease and decrepitude, eternally refreshed by breezes and oceans.
They were the fields Ialuthe western kingdom, which the Greeks later called the Elysian Fields.
Over time, the position of the Egyptians before the death experienced some changes. The benefit of different modes of survival after death gradually spread to all layers of society.
There is sometimes talk of a democratization of funerary rites and conceptions. But it cannot be thought that the lower classes were included in this ultraterrestrial paradisiacal conception.
Other changes that were appearing were the conditions. To the paradises they imagined, the egyptians conditions of access were assumed. Among the conditions, the most essential was the practice of good in this world.
Access to the world of the gods, presided over first by Raand later by Osiriswas determined only at the end of a trial whose reality was soon determined by the sages egyptians.
In the New Kingdom, the sarcophagi were provided with scrolls that carried the redemptive formulas capable of saving the soul from all dangers: the Book of the Dead.
In it, the stages of the journey to the afterlife, the tests that await the deceased, and especially the famous judgment during which each one must defend themselves to reach a favorable sentence.
The best known moment is that of the negative confession, made up of fragments of the teachings of the sages, of theological appeals and magical practices:
“I have not committed injustice against men, I have not mistreated animals, I have not done harm instead of justice, I have not blasphemed my god, I have not impoverished a poor person, I have not made them suffer, I have not made them cry, I have not I have killed, I have not falsified the weight of the scale… I am pure, pure, pure, no harm will happen to me in this country, in this courtroom of double justice, because I know the name of the gods”.
The tombs
To ensure the eternity of deadThese were to be buried in graves that they would preserve the body at the same time that ceremonies and rites were practiced to ensure the conservation of the “resurrected”.
Therefore, funerary architecture created works that are among the most beautiful and grandiose of antiquity.
Mastabas, royal pyramids, hypogea, were monuments of the rich, of the sovereigns who sought security in those imposing “houses of eternity”.
But the tomb did not exclusively house the corpse; the mastaba it was a funerary monument in a place of worship; the sense of pyramid and the hypogeum They can only be understood if one takes into account their relationship with the funerary temples where the dead received the prayers and the stipulated offerings.
The representations of the dead were joined, in addition to funeral furniture that had always accompanied the deceased, statuettes whose name Egyptian it meant “the substitutes”: they were small servants of wood or clay whom the efficacy of magic formulas turned into workers, employees, real servants, who would allow the rich, arrived in the other world, to lead the life they had always led.
Because the dead person represented a new being: the soul was reintegrated into the body when the funeral specialists carried out the rites on the previously mummified corpse.
Related Posts: