The Book of the Dead: Control and Entropy in Ancient Egypt

Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2021
Images from the Internet

 The Book of the Dead:
Control and Entropy in Ancient Egypt

In 1993, while going for my Master’s in Media Ecology at New York University, I took an independent course which took place in Egypt, titled “Communication and Culture in Ancient Egypt,” led by Dr. Terence P. Moran. We visited the Giza Pyramids and Sphinx, the tombs of Im-Ho-Tep (architect of the Pyramids) and Tutankhamun, the Valley of the Kings and Queens, Karnak, and many other monuments. This is the paper I wrote as my final project, about the religion of Osiris, and how the Ancient Egyptians looked at the technology of textual communication regarding life, and especially death. I have included the notes written by Dr. Moran.

* * *

Socrates was apprehensive of the written word and the harm to society that may arise from its use. Quoted by Plato, in Phaedrus, Socrates stated [Moran: speaking as Amun]:

“The discovery of [the written word] will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves… You give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth; they will be heroes of many things, and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing.”

Plato wrote down this statement during the third century BCE.

Scribe

Nearly four millennia before Socrates expressed his conviction, writing had already been in wide use in Egypt in the form of hieroglyphics, or word-pictures (from the Greek hieros, “sacred,” and gluptein, “to carve in stone) [Quirke and Spencer, p. 121]. An entire caste of society was trained as scribes. Through years of training, a scribe would know as many as seven hundred hieroglyphs. Nearly every statue, temple, tomb and wall were inscribed with stories of the artists, or the pharaoh, or with religious legends of mythology. Meticulously carved into stone, or painted on wood or sheets of papyrus, the scribes’ work survived over the centuries to describe like during this flourishing period of Egyptian History. [Moran’s comment: It is worth noting that all the Pharaoh’s family were also taught how to read and write. Then, as now, communication meant control.].

Many of the surviving texts of this civilization describe invoices of textiles, livestock and other goods. There also remain texts of poetry, daily religious prayers and magical incantations, ceremonies and beliefs, histories of gods, the origin of the universe, and a large quantity of information on the afterlife of the dead. The latter has been collected into what is commonly known as The Book of the Dead, or Pert em hru, literally translated as Chapters of the Coming Forth by Day [Hope, p. 17] [Moran: Note the differences between these two titles; the original one tells so much about how the Egyptians viewed life and death].

Thoth and Ammit

The Book of the Dead, which dates from the early New Kingdom (c. 1567-1320 BCE) [Armour, p. 10], is a primer for the recently deceased, a guide to understanding how to protect oneself from the dangers of the afterlife, how to get servants to do the required labor for the basic necessities (food, shelter, clothing), and especially how to behave and converse with the gods when one meets them (including Thoth, Anubis, Horus, and especially Osiris, the Lord of the Dead) as, for instance having to avoid the devouring of one’s heart by the demon goddess Ammit (whose body was part lion and hippopotamus, with the head of a crocodile).

The origin of The Book of the Dead, a compilation of numerous texts collected from fragments of papyri, is unknown and may be older than the Egyptian culture itself. The beliefs were possibly brought by immigrants or invaders. For the Egyptians, The Book of the Dead dealt with the realm of the mystic, and was controlled by the clergy.

Saqqara

The earliest known recorded versions of these passages and stories are usually referred to as the Pyramid Texts, beginning approximately 2345 BCE. The texts were taken from hieroglyphic inscriptions on the walls of various pyramids and tombs as ancient as the V and VI Dynasties in Saqqara (Memphis).

The Pyramid Texts, also known as the Heliopolitan Recension, were made up of 714 “utterances,” which had a number of functions, including “a funeral ritual and a ritual of mortuary offerings at the tomb, magical charms, very ancient rituals of worship, ancient religious hymns, fragments of old myths, and prayers and petitions on behalf of the dead king” [Breasted, 71]. The oldest texts are based on the dominant belief in the sun-god Ra (or Re). There is no mention of death in the early Pyramid Texts except in reference to the unworthy or a foe. The pharaoh did not die, bur rather went to join Ra and other gods in the celestial hereafter, becoming an equal with the gods.

Pyramid Texts

In the religious tradition of the solar faith [Breasted, pp. 65-93], there was no heaven or hell, but a heaven-like celestial place which the dead follower shared wit the gods, as one of their members. Osiris, on the other hand, “represented the realm and the dominion of death, to which the follower of Re was not delivered up” [Breasted, p. 93]. Osiris’ acceptance rose later in Egyptian mythology.

The tradition of Osiris as the king of the netherworld, which grew more popular with the collective community, originated in the Delta region of Northern Egypt (e.g., Alexandria) and “migrated up the Nile” [Breasted, p. 107]. This belief came in direct conflict with the State’s official religion of a celestial afterlife for the pharaoh and Ra. In much of the early Pyramid Texts, there was an open hostility towards the Osiris netherworld by the celestial hereafter, including some exorcisms to keep Osiris and his family (e.g., Isis, Horus, Set, Nephthys) from entering the solar tomb of the pyramid. Diametrically opposed, Ra ruled the afterlife of the sky and Osiris ruled the underground netherworld. In time, the popularity of the netherworld would overcome that of the celestial sun-god. Part of this acceptance was the belief in a resurrection by Osiris from death. As with Christianity, the possibility of a life-after-death meant a hard life might have its rewards (as well as punishments) in the next “world,” even if it meant as a servant to the pharaoh and his god companions.

Osiris and Maat

Also rising out of the Osiris myth was the Maat (the concept of truth and ethics, as she is the goddess of truth who judged the deceased and was the daughter of Ra; sometimes known as Ma’at) [Armour, pp. 161-162]. This trial increased the possibility of resurrection and regeneration if the heart of the deceased is lighter than the feather (or total obliteration in the jaws of Ammit, the “devouress,” if the heart outweighs the feather).

Through the found fragments in the pyramids at Saqqara and Heliopolis, it has become evident that as “the Pyramid Texts were eventually Osirianisied” [Breasted, p. 109], which included some editing of the Pyramid Texts by priests following each successive pharaoh, found throughout the chiseled hieroglyphics in a series of five pyramids.

The mortuary passages of this period were excavated exclusively in the royal tombs and were meant only for the kings and gods, and especially Ra. The Pyramid Texts were mostly absent in the tombs of the nobles [Breasted, p. 72].

The information encased within the Pyramid Texts were held closely by the priests of the Solar religion. What information they “published” was chiseled into tombs that were sealed, never to be opened or seen, thereby creating a cybernetic system to control the contents of knowledge that was the privilege of the priests, pharaohs, and gods. The priests and scribes were not permitted to use the information for their own “souls” to guide them to the celestial grounds.

Ra

The purpose of any cybernetic system is to effect control, and any system is vulnerable to entropy, including information. Over time – in this example, hundred of years – as the religion itself changed from a Ra-based center to the overwhelmingly popular Osiris-based center, as explained above, belief in Osiris became egalitarian: everyone dies. It is the favourability of the possibility of resurrection through Osiris that became the religious equalizing factor, among the peasant classes, though the nobles were the first to employ the mortuary texts [Moran: Note how writing was used to control death (entropy), first by the pharaohs, the by the nobles, later by everyone].

Through the centuries, as the priests slowly lost their thrall-like grip on the funerary texts, it became common to find sections of what has been collectively known as the Pyramid Texts painted on the many layers of the sarcophagi of nobles, who could afford to hire the priests to prepare the texts, and the highly trained scribes to do the writing and art work needed to prepare the to meet Thoth, on the path to join Osiris. At this stage the funerary texts are known as the Coffin Texts because of the location of their inscriptions. The time frame for this function is the Middle Kingdom, or XI to XIII Dynasties [Hope, 186].

Coffin Text

This period, approximately 2080 to 1650 BCE, saw the reunion of the Two Lands (North and South), private burials in mastabas and rock tombs, and the appearance of human-shaped sarcophagi. It was on these multi-layered anthropoid inner (wooden) and outer (stone) casings that the Coffin Texts began to appear.

There were still differences between the pharaoh’s burials and those of lower classes in the elaborateness of the ceremonies and the size of the burial place, and in the hearing of the priests to recite prayers and magic spells. However, the texts and rituals – and the resurrection – were shared by all. These texts were similar to the later Pyramid Texts, serving the same functions, but having been appropriated and adopted by the middle and official classes, they included the addition of “unofficial” popular mortuary literature. In theory, even the lowest class of peasants could be allowed to purchase the possibility of deification, but they could not afford the fee [Wilson, p. 117].

The influence of the previous Ra-based celestial religion was a strong foundation on which the beliefs were raised, so there was a coalescing of the celestial and netherworld afterlives. James Breasted states that “in the Pyramid Texts Osiris was lifted skyward, while in the Coffin Texts and The Book of the Dead, Re was dragged earthward” [Breasted, p. 237].

Much of the funerary literature of the time consisted of charms to protect the deceased from various dangers, such as having one’s head removed or the body decaying in the netherworld. As the priests found the selling of these charms quite lucrative, they became more creative about the possible dangers in the hereafter, continually writing new charms and spells that became part of the increasing Coffin Texts.

Due to the desegregation of the funerary texts to numerous classes of people, a need arose for a more substantial number of coffins to have the information inscribed upon them. No longer needing to be carefully chiseled on the stone walls of pyramids, stelas and tombs, as they had been for royal personages, the Coffin Texts, carved and written with pen-and-ink onto wood, were often copied from previous texts with “carelessness and inaccuracy, the effort being to fill up the planks with writing as fast as possible” [Breasted, p. 236]. Often the same chapters were rewritten a number of times for this purpose.

Whereas redundancy tends to defeat entropy, in this case the repetition did not overcome this process due to the lack of consistency in the information. This produced a text that proved more erratic and less understood, rather than clarified by repetition. The information, rather than evolving into precision, becomes superfluous due to the dissimilarities in story and detail. At the early stages of the texts, much of the content was dogmatic rhetoric not wholly understood by most who used it; as it was copied more and more inaccurately, it was increasingly misunderstood and communicated by rote. It is this lack of concordant detail that proves the entropic character of the textual information.

The final stage of the funerary text, the aforementioned The Book of the Dead, was made possible by the rise of the use of papyrus paper which was relatively inexpensive and, more importantly, portable. As the centuries passed, it was becoming more impractical for nobles to have large tombs built, especially for those of the lower classes and of lesser wealth. As the population grew, space became more precious and less affordable, both economically and geographically.

Book of the Dead: Anubis weighs heart and feather, 
while Thoth and Ammit watch and wait to left,
with negative confession judges above

One of the inclusions to the funerary texts of this period is a higher sense of moral vision to achieve divine recognition and a joyous afterlife. Besides Thoth, Anubis and other principal gods of judgment, there were now forty-two additional judges who had names such as “Bone Breaker that Came out of Hierakonpolis” and “Blood Eater that Came out of the Place of Execution” [Breasted, p. 257]. For these gods arose what became known as the negative confession, in which the deceased must state one confession to each of the forty-two judges (e.g., “I did not rob,” “I did not make falsehoods in the place of truth”) [Breasted, p 257]. The newly departed must know the names of each of the gods verbatim, and chapters of The Book of the Dead were produced by the priests to guide the deceased’s progress through these trials.

The term “Book of the Dead” is actually a misnomer, as the “guide” is not actually a “book” but a collection of random chapters to prepare the deceased for the next world, as well as religious invocations and ceremonial prayers.  Written on papyrus scrolls ranging from 20 to 90 feet in length, 14 to 18 inches in width, and containing from 75 to well over 100 chapters [Budge, p. xxx], the scrolls were usually placed between the legs of the deceased before mummification.

The popularity of the papyrus invocations was so widespread that priests and scribes pre-prepared scrolls and later filled in the names of the deceased, such as with the most complete copy of The Book of the Dead presently known, called The Papyri of Ani, which is housed in the British Museum. Dating from the XVIII Dynasty (1500-1400 BCE), it was found at Thebes in the 19th Century CE.

As with the Pyramid and Coffin Texts, there is no fixed order for the vignettes; it was up to the scribes or priests to choose which selections would be included and in which order. The amount of money paid determined how many chapters would comprise a particular roll (The Papyri of Ani contained 186 chapters and was 78 feet long [Budge, pp. cxliii-clii]).

Due again to economics, one of the major changes in the evolution of the Pyramid texts to The Book of the Dead was the addition of the ceremonial chapters.  Previously, priests and mourners would be hired to sing prayers and hymns for the deceased. Through the entropic necessity of catering to a mass population, the texts became more common, less specified, and less complex. Much of the ceremonial texts were eventually removed. What remained of the highly ritualistic mortuary texts were the prayers and chants to be said by the deceased themselves in the netherworld [Budge, p. xxx].

As well as the religious significance of The Book of the Dead, the technological aspects leading up to the mass use affected is “time binding.” [McLuhan, p. 37] [Moran: McLuhan is here using a concept he learned from Harold Innis’ The Bias of Communication], inherently cybernetic due to its resistance to modification, as well as low accessibility to the general population, resulting from its lack of mobility. A high degree of skill, artistic endeavor, and training (“technic”) were necessary to become a scribe who worked with a stone medium. This was especially true concerning the funeral carvings, which were located inside sealed tombs. Even in many temples, the inner chambers were sealed to all but a hierarchy of priests, with only a solitary high priest(ess) allowed into the core cell.

Although McLuhan refers to the hieroglyphic form of writing as a cool medium, the use of papyri caused its “hotting up,” thereby “unifying spaces horizontally, both in political and entertainment empires” [McLuhan, p. 37]. This is also true for religious – as well as funerary – texts. As the information pluralized, the knowledge of the texts centralized a larger portion of the civilization. The accessibility of the papyri medium resulted in a speeding up of communication technique, enabling the religious authority a means to extend further throughout the kingdom [McLuhan, p. 96].

In this case, a hotter medium, or technology, can dominate over an older, cooler one. Through the rise of the use of papyri, the spread of the information of the possibility of a life-after-death as presented in The Book of the Dead was no exception. Despite this outgrowth, the Egyptian culture managed to survive for many centuries beyond the introduction of the revolutionary process of recording and transporting information on a portable medium. Partially, this was due to the need for the development of transportable culture [Ellul, p. 116]. As the Egyptian civilization crept upriver on the Nile, further from the Delta and toward Aswan and beyond, the stories of the gods and an Osirian netherworld came with it.

Despite the flexibility of content imparted by the copied text, which exposes the communication method to an entropic loss of information, part of the reason why the culture remained strong for so many millennia, was the older, cooler medium of “writing” hieroglyphics on stone. Since some information was chiseled in rock, some consistency was preserved in the stories that remained throughout most of the texts. This was solidified more after the rise of the Osiris myth since it was not until after Ra was superseded that the texts were preserved in more public places (e.g., obelisks, or stelas), rather than in the sealed tombs.

Through the long history of Egypt’s fascination with the soul (ba) after death, the leading cause of change in the stages of culture pertaining to the mortuary texts was not the advancement of hieroglyphic writing, but the technological advancement of the medium upon which it was stored. Starting on static stone, moving to painted and cared wood, and then to transportable papyrus, the dissemination of information, which started from the aloof royalty alone, was able to reach the mass population. Paradoxically, despite the many changes, growth, and “hotting up” of this culture, it was able to maintain some level of consistency, somewhat holding at bay the ever-raging tides of entropy, by having at its core a heart of stone.

Bibliography

Armour, Robert A. (1986). Gods and Myths of Ancient Egypt. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.

Breasted, James Henry (1933). The Dawn of Consciousness. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Budge, E.A. Wallis (1967). The Book of the Dead… The Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum: The Egyptian Text with Interlinear Transliteration and Translation, a Running Translation, Introduction, Etc. New York: Dover Publications (Reproduction of 1895 edition).

Campbell, Jeremy (1982). Grammatical Man: Information, Entropy, Language, and Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc.

DeFleur, Melvin L. and Sandra Ball-Rokeach (1966). Theories of Mass Communication. New York: David McKay Company, Inc.

Ellul, Jacques (1964). The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books.

Hope, Murray (1984). Practical Egyptian Magic. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Ions, Veronica (1982). Library of the World’s Myths and Legends: Egyptian Mythology. New York: Peter Bedrick Books.

McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Penguin Books.

Quirke, Stephen and Jeffrey Spencer, Eds. (1992). The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt. New York: Thames and Hudson.

Wilson, John A. (1951). The Burden of Egypt: An Interpretation of Ancient Egyptian Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.