egyptbkdead (original) (raw)

These are magnificently illuminated in some of the rolls, which are filled with representations, as well, of the lotus and the papyrus. As later, the words of the gods are written in red, rubricated, amidst the black ink. They date from the fifteenth century before Christ, but represent a tradition that goes back even a thousand years earlier, as can be seen in the hieroglyphs sculpted on rock monuments.

Important in these texts is the legend of Osiris and Isis, the dead person being identified with Osiris whose wife brings him back to life from death, their son being Horus. Apuleius would give us the most information about that tale in hisGolden Ass, which Elizabeth Barrett Browning would partly translate. Thus husband and wife are represented together in these Books as if Osiris and Isis. Together they are represented as carrying out agriculture, sowing and reaping flax and barley, in the Field of Reeds, with its fertile waterways. The dead would inhabit the circumpolar stars as an akh, be restricted in the tomb as a ka, but also visiting the living, inhabiting the Elysian Fields, and travelling across the skies and the Underworld, as a ba, the human headed bird. Essential for the return of the ba to its akh and ka was the name and the portrait on the tomb and in the Book.

In the Judgement scenes in the papyri, the dead person appears before Anubis who balances his evil against an ostrich feather, while Thoth writes down the result and Ammit, the monster dog, waits to swallow up any soul enveloped in sin. Husband and wife are judged for their equal fidelity to the other and for their generosity to the poor, their truthfulness, their piety, their refusal to destroy what has been made or to cause suffering to others.

Parallel to the great Egyptian treasures in London are those in Paris and in Florence. For Napoleon encouraged the study of Egyptology with his conquest of that land. Champollion deciphered the hieroglyphs, discovering that they were phonetic. Then he and Rosellini from Pisa were sent by the Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany to visit Egypt and Nubia in 1828. Florence's 'English' Cemetery had been founded in 1827 by the Swiss Evangelical Church, who purchased its land from that same Grand Duke. For this reason we find countless examples amongst our tombs and even on our building, which has the closed lotus flowers, of Egyptian motifs, which this past year were catalogued and exhibited by Florence's Museo Archeologico Nazionale where half the treasures brought back by Champollion and Rosellini are housed.