Why did Ancient Egyptian mummify the dead?
The living world mirrored the world of the dead. The mummified body was the anchor between two worlds, allowing the dead person to exist in the afterlife. Rituals and performances in this world could affect the dead.
A person’s body consisted of physical parts and also immaterial parts. After death, part of the deceased went to the gods in the sky, and part of the deceased went to the ‘Fields of Reeds’, an underworld which was like a pleasant life on earth, while the physical body was preserved in the tomb.
The loss of a person’s name or mummy threatened their soul’s survival after death. If your name was forgotten in this world, then you would disappear from the underworld too. If someone’s mummy was destroyed, or if they could not be mummified because their body was missing, they were also in danger of vanishing from the afterlife. Thus it was important to make offerings to the dead and to repeat their names in the world of the living.
In considering the ethics of putting Ta-Kheru’s remains on display, we should remember that she would have feared being completely forgotten, and would have wanted her name and her mummy to survive. She is remembered 2700 years after her death, longer than most of her contemporaries. We have invoked her name deliberately in this exhibition.
The judgement of the dead
Before the soul could go to the ‘Fields of Reeds’, the deceased person’s heart would be weighed by the gods to see if they had lived a good life and kept to the ethical norms known as ma’at. This papyrus shows Osiris, god of the underworld, as the judge presiding over a jury of gods. Ammit, the Devourer of the Dead, waits to devour the dead person’s soul if the judgement is unfavourable. Ammit is a creature combining aspects of a crocodile, a hippopotamus and a lion.
Papyrus of Osiris
From the collections of the University of Aberdeen
Gallery
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The four sons of the falcon-headed god Horus, son of Isis and Osiris, guarded the internal organs placed in canopic jars: stomach, intestines, lungs and liver. This jar contained a mummified person’s liver and is watched over by Amset, the human-headed son of Horus.
Amulets placed in the tomb or inside mummy wrappings protected the dead in the afterlife. These amulets are of the goddess Nephthys, who with her twin sister Isis protects the dead, and her son Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death.
Amulets placed in the tomb or inside mummy wrappings protected the dead in the afterlife. These amulets are of the goddess Nephthys, who with her twin sister Isis protects the dead, and her son Anubis, the jackal-headed god of death.