The ancient Egyptians were not great travel enthusiasts. Rather, they can be called couch potatoes. But all their lives they have been preparing for the main Journey, which will have to be made not for entertainment or for educational purposes, but due to the inexorable course of human life - a journey to another world.
The Egyptians perceived the posthumous existence precisely as a journey associated with countless dangers and traps that must be overcome in order to save their soul and meet with deceased relatives and friends …
It is now quite widely believed that the Egyptians dedicated their entire earthly path to the coming death. This is far from the case. They loved life, and they called death “empty-eyed”, “noseless”, “enemy”. At the same time, according to Egyptian ideas, it was considered a natural continuation of life, since death in our world meant birth in the world of the dead.
Therefore, among the funeral rituals, such an important place was occupied by the ritual of "opening the mouth and eyes": the priest waved a ritual knife over the lips, eyes and ears of the deceased so that he could eat the food of the other world, see its inhabitants, hear their voices. There was no one to ask, however, how to get along the roads of another world. It is true that the priests of the funeral cult come into contact with the world of the dead by the nature of their activity, but they are not helpers either, since they only see off the deceased, and do not go with him.
And yet there was something that could help the deceased escape the dangers of the afterlife. These are spells and magical texts, which were attributed to divine origin and believed that they contained the secrets of travel through the "other" world. The main "maps" of the Egyptians, their "guides" were the "Texts of the Pyramids", "Texts of the Sarcophagi", "The Book of Two Paths" and "The Book of the Dead", describing the afterlife, showing a safe route along it and telling about its inhabitants.
Moreover, some of them end with the words "written off sign for sign, word for word from the gates of the Duat", which suggests the possibility of traveling across another world and for a living person who possessed sacred knowledge.
What was the other world of the Egyptians like? Duat - this is how the Egyptians called and wrote it in hieroglyphics - are known from the "Book of Two Ways". These are images of the other world, placed on the bottoms of sarcophagi and provided with comments similar to today's maps. The "Book of Two Ways" marks the roads of another world and shows the gods and demons that inhabit it.
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The image of the Duat clearly shows: the Egyptians considered the Duat to be a "looped" space formed by the body of Osiris, the first of the living to be overtaken by death. The last scene of the "Book of Gates". Sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I. 19 dynasty (c. 1290-1279 BC).
The road to another world begins with a tunnel, a corridor - Ra-Setau (Dragging Door). He connects our world with the world of the dead. In ancient Egyptian tombs, a relief was always carved on the plane of the wall, depicting the entrance to this corridor. This is just an image - this door cannot be opened, but it is through it that the soul of the deceased enters the Ra-Setau corridor. On it the deceased goes to Duat.
There, two roads open up in front of him - water and land. These are winding paths, separated in the middle by a lake of fire. On the map next to his image it is written: "do not go there!" On the way of the deceased, various dangers lie in wait. For example, demons and monsters, armed with knives, block the road. Their names sound today either as mysterious nonsense, or as something creepy: "Embracing the flame", "Swallowing shadows", "Breaking bones", "Seeing what he took away." The deceased can pass by the demons only if he knows their secret names and the necessary spells.
This fragment of the Book of the Dead shows the process of weighing the heart in the Duat.
The fragment shows a person who has just died, trapped in a place located between the Earth and the kingdom of the dead. He stands next to the scales, and now he will be tried for his past deeds on Earth. The whole ceremony is run by the god Anubis, who carefully weighs the human heart on one scale and the ostrich feather of truth on the other. The heart, not the head, represented the embodiment of the conscience of the human soul for the ancient Egyptians.
God is the "Master of the Universe", surrounded by the coiled Serpent rings, guarding the Solar Barge during its journey to another world. The Serpent's rings form a tunnel through which the deceased comes to the creator god, who gives him the opportunity to resurrect. Painting of the end wall of the Sepi sarcophagus. Dynasty 12 (c. 1994-1781 BC). Cairo Museum.
Stele of Nemtiemkhet. In the middle part of the composition, it is clearly seen that the deceased, sitting at the sacrificial table, and the servants serving him food, are made using the technique of convex relief - they are in another world, only "showing through" in our space on the plane of the tomb wall. But the list of sacrificial gifts, together with the images of the sacrificers and the false door, are made in relief, since the victims are “sent” to another world from us, the people who remained on this side of the border of the worlds. Abydos. Middle Kingdom (c. 1994-1650 BC)
The Egyptians identified the journey of the deceased along these roads with the journey of the Sun. It is to Duat that the god Ra, that is, the Sun, leaves every night after the star disappears behind the horizon in our world. Ra travels in the underworld on his solar boat and fights with the demons of the afterlife, and after defeating enemies, in the morning he rises again in the east. Earthly fates depend on victory or defeat in this night battle, because the Sun must successfully pass along the roads of another world in order to rise again in the morning on the eastern side of the sky. Likewise, the deceased, acquitted at the trial, is resurrected and leaves the tomb into our world.
The Duat, judging by the descriptions and images of the Book of Two Ways, is a kind of world that is parallel to ours and at the same time is the antithesis of the world of living people, therefore, in the image from the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Seti I (1290-1279 BC), the body of Osiris, rolled up into a ring, forming a Duat, turned upside down. On a large territory of the "kingdom of the dead", as in our world, there are channels, caves and hills, but they are guarded by demons and evil gods. The entire afterlife is divided into sections - yat, each of which can be accessed through a special gate.
Distance in the Duat is not measured in kilometers, but in hours. Each yat, for example, is 1 hour long. In terms of area, the space of the other world is many times larger than earthly Egypt, but the worlds intersect - both in Egypt and in the Duat there is the city of Abydos, the city of Heliopolis and other sacred cities where these zones merge. It was at the points of their intersection, where another world touches the earthly, that the Egyptians built their temples. In another world, its own laws operate, the "right" and "left" are reversed, therefore the text written for a deceased person was created in accordance with the laws of the world of the dead.
So the "Book of the Dead", which describes the other world and is intended for the deceased, was written using the "reverse direction of writing." The Egyptians could write both from right to left and from left to right, arranging hieroglyphs either in horizontal lines or in vertical columns. You can understand from which side the text is read by looking at where the characters of the hieroglyphs are facing. The Book of the Dead was read from right to left, but modern research shows that every single character is written from left to right.
The reliefs in the tombs were also important. According to Egyptian ideas, each of them served as a door to another world. The Egyptians themselves called the tomb images - "seba", that is, "door". Wow, it is quite logical, because the tomb is a place that belongs to our and another world at the same time. On the one hand, this is a physically existing structure created by people, on the other hand, the path to another world begins here and the Ka of the deceased lives here, that is, a double of a person living in his images.
Therefore, the tomb images were also intended to enable the deceased to eat. His nature is not flesh and blood, like that of the living, therefore he cannot eat our food, but images of food are quite acceptable for him. This, by the way, explains the riddle, which has been incomprehensible to scientists for a long time, - why the sacrificial food brought to the tomb was eaten by the priests of the funeral cult immediately after it was solemnly laid one by one on all the altars of the tomb.
The sarcophagus, where the mummified body of the deceased was placed after all the rituals, was considered by the Egyptians a model of the otherworldly kingdom. Therefore, the lid of the sarcophagus was painted from the inside like the sky. It depicted the goddess of the sky Nut, and on the bottom of the sarcophagus there was a map of another world, which helped the deceased get to the Hall of Two Truths, where the afterlife trial took place over the deceased.
The images of this court are widely known: Anubis weighs the heart of the deceased, and incorruptible judges - 42 gods - decide his fate in the presence of Osiris. After the judgment, the righteous person goes to the "fields of Hotep" - to the Egyptian paradise. True, today we would not call the afterlife of the deceased paradise - the one who was acquitted at the trial of Osiris had to sow, grow and reap wheat in human height, intended for bread for the gods.
Hell, according to ancient Egyptian ideas, did not exist: a person whose heart was weighed down by sins was simply devoured by a monster, and he could no longer be resurrected. The "Book of the Dead", or rather, a papyrus scroll, was placed in a sarcophagus under the head of the deceased for the same purpose: so that the deceased would not get lost in another world and successfully pass the judgment of Osiris.
Paradoxically, The Book of the Dead is a European title. The ancient Egyptians referred to these scrolls as "Daily Exit Sayings." Indeed, such texts speak not so much about death as about resurrection after death, about the love of life: “Oh, namerek, alive, renewed, rejuvenated! There is no evil in the place where you are. You go out in the day, you enjoy its rays … ".
