Death And Salvation In Ancient Egypt

Introductionall—other areas of ancient Egyptian culture. A comprehensive treatmentof the theme of death can thus constitute an introduction to the essenceof all of ancient Egyptian culture. And this is indeed the second matter ofconcern that I associate with my intention here. I want to reach beyondthe world of tombs, funerary rituals, and funerary texts and into otherareas of Egyptian thought, action, and conduct, such as ethics, historicalconsciousness, cosmology, conceptions of the divine, and so forth andinquire to what extent these areas were stamped by the typically Egyptianpreoccupation with the theme of death.This task leads to the third area of concern: the question of the extentto which ancient Egypt offers us insights into the relationship betweendeath and culture. My interest here lies not in ancient Egypt for its ownsake, but rather in what we can learn about the essence of culture moregenerally through the study of this extremely early, long lived, and richlydocumented culture, one linked to our own through various avenues oftransmission. I feel that one—and not the least important—task of Egyptology is to contribute to general cultural theory. I thus pose, in the senseof a working hypothesis, the question of whether and in what sense deathand the way a culture articulates it, treats it, and copes with it mightperhaps not constitute the center of the consciousness of that culture andthus of culture generally speaking. In what follows, I intend further tosubstantiate this third area of concern.1. Death as Culture GeneratorCulture, it is said, is man’s second nature, which he needs because hisfirst nature insufficiently provides him with the competencies andinstincts he requires to survive as a living being. This negative anthropology, which defines man, along with other living beings, as defective,needing to compensate for his natural defect through cultural achievements, goes back to classical antiquity, for instance, Plato’s Protagoras; inthe eighteenth century of our own era, it was represented especially byHerder, was taken up in the nineteenth by Nietzsche, and then in thetwentieth constituted the fundamental principle of various thinkers andresearchers, such as Martin Heidegger, Helmuth Plessner, and ArnoldGehlen. Anyone who defines man as defective understands the functionof culture as a project of supplementary and compensatory amendment.Man lacks the instinctive, assured reactions of animals; instead, he has thefreedom to invent himself through culture. Thus, from necessity springsvirtue, and from lack comes advantage. In place of the integration intothe order of nature that he lacks, man attains a freedom that is withheldfrom other living beings. Instead of the optimal environmental adapta2

Death and Culturetion that plants and animals enjoy, he has the freedom to shape the worldand himself.In some ancient Near Eastern myths, we encounter another picture ofman. Here, too, it is a matter of knowledge and freedom. They are not,however, compensation for a lack; rather, they represent a human surplusthat stems from the world of the gods and alienates man from the worldof living beings. Here, man is seen not as the being capable of too little,but rather the one who knows too much.At the center of this surplus, divine, alienating, and thus problematicknowledge stands death. Death and the necessity of dying is the commonheritage of all earthly beings, shared by man with animals and plants. Butanimals and plants know nothing of this destiny. They make no advanceprovisions, they know no mortuary cult. They live for the day, they reactonly to actual stimuli and dangers, and they do not trouble themselveswith overarching intellectual cares. This is the ideal amount of knowledgefor beings that must make do with a limited lifetime. The immortal gods,however, need much more, they must know everything. Indeed, they mustnot die. Thus, they know the great intellectual correlations, which aresummarized in the biblical myth as “the knowledge of good and evil,” aswell as cosmic correlations, which are summarized in the Babylonian mythas “the secrets of sky and earth.”The Babylonian myth is a story about Adapa, the son of Ea, god ofwisdom.1 Ea could bequeath wisdom, but not immortality, to his son. Oneday, the south wind snatched the net from Adapa while he was fishing.Adapa cursed the south wind, and since he possessed divine knowledge,his curse was so mighty that it broke the wings of the wind god. The situation was obviously intolerable: a mortal being possessed the knowledgeof the gods but was no god. Adapa was summoned before the throne ofAnu, king of the gods. On the way, Ea advised him not to touch any nourishment that the gods offered him, for it could be the food of death.Adapa thus refused the food that was offered to him. But in truth, it wasthe nourishment of life, for the gods wished to end the intolerable situation by making Adapa into a god. And so, for all time, there remainedthis precarious relationship between knowledge and death. It must benoted that in this myth, it is not the case that Adapa knew about his ownmortality and could not live with this knowledge, but rather that he hadthe knowledge of the gods, which was not fitting for a man.It is another Babylonian myth, the famous Epic of Gilgamesh,2 thatcenters on knowledge of the necessity of death and the unbearable natureof this knowledge. Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, acquired this surplus knowledge that throws man off course and out of balance because he loved hisfriend Enkidu too much. He thus reacted to his death too intensely, withthe result that the natural boundaries of his knowledge gave way in the3

Introductionface of this truly traumatic experience, and he became conscious of hisown mortality. The story goes on to depict the path of learning andsuffering he had to travel to overcome this shock and cope with thisknowledge.Gilgamesh for Enkidu, his friend,Weeps bitterly and roams over the desert.“When I die, shall I not be like unto Enkidu?Sorrow has entered my heart.I am afraid of death and roam over the desert.3His fear in the face of death and his search for immortality finally leadGilgamesh to the mountain range at the edge of the world, where the sunrises and sets. There he meets Siduri, the divine barmaid. He tells her histroubles and pleads, “May I not see death, which I dread.”Siduri then sings him a song like those sung by Egyptian harpers at banquets and by the Preacher in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes:Gilgamesh, whither runnest thou?The life which thou seekest thou wilt not find;(For) when the gods created mankind,They allotted death to mankind,(But) life they retained in their keeping.Thou, O Gilgamesh, let thy belly be full;Day and night be thou merry;Make every day (a day of) rejoicing.Day and night do thou dance and play.Let thy raiment be clean,Thy head be washed, (and) thyself be bathed in water.Cherish the little one holding thy hand,(And) let thy wife rejoice in thy bosom!This is the lot of [mankind . . .].4Here, Siduri acts as spokesperson for a point of view that was widespreadthroughout the ancient world, one that closely linked death and merriment. In the Bible, we hear these notes in the book of Ecclesiastes,5 as wedo also in the harpers’ songs from Egypt:Gladden your heart, let your heart forget!it is good for you to follow your heart as long as you exist.Put myrrh on your head,clothe yourself in white linen,anoint yourself with genuine oil of the divine cult,increase your happiness, let your heart not weary of it!4

Death and CultureFollow your heart in the company of your beauty,do your things on earth, do not upset your heart,until that day of mourning comes to you.The “weary of heart” does not hear their cries,and their mourning does not bring the heart of a man back from thenetherworld.6These are songs that were sung in Egypt during festive banquets. Nor wasthe goddess Siduri a barmaid by chance. In the Jewish religion, the bookof Ecclesiastes is read during the Feast of Tabernacles, which furnishes asimilarly festive framework in which the convivial drinking of wine playsa role.7 Wine, woman, and song are means of diverting man from careabout death and restoring his inner balance. The advice and the admonition of these festive songs aim at forgetting. Man’s surplus knowledgedoes him no good. He must find his happiness in what is granted him,not in what is forever withheld from him. Gilgamesh is unable to acceptthis advice to resign himself to his fate, and eventually, he finds Utnapishtim, the Mesopotamian Noah, the only man who survived the Flood, andnot only that, who was also accepted into the circle of the immortals. FromUtnapishtim, Gilgamesh receives a rejuvenating plant, which is stolenfrom him by a serpent on his journey home. Thus, even here, thereremained the human dilemma of knowing too much and living toobriefly.The biblical myth of the Fall has Adam and Eve eat from the tree ofknowledge, thereby becoming knowing, “like God.” Here, just as in theAdapa myth, the surplus knowledge not provided by nature is expresslydesignated as divine knowledge. It was withheld from man, like all othermortal beings for good reason: it was not, as Nietzsche put it, “knowledgeuseful to life.” It did little good for man to become “like God.” They wouldthen have had to eat of the tree of life, whose fruit would have providedthem with immortality, which belonged necessarily to this knowledge, andwhich stood not far from the tree of knowledge. They did not, however,have the opportunity. Before they could eat of this tree, they wereexpelled from Paradise.All these myths deal with the theme of too much knowledge and toolittle life. In the Adapa myth, it is a matter of cosmic-magical knowledge,the secrets of sky and earth, while in the Bible, it is one of practical discernment, the knowledge of good and evil, that is, of the useful and theharmful, of the beneficial and the injurious;8 but in both cases, it is aknowledge tha

rendering of ancient Egyptian and modern Arabic personal and place names. Most of the names mentioned in this book occur in a standard reference work, John Baines and Jaromír Málek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt (New York, 1980), and the renderings here follow those in that volume. The principa