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- I'm Ron Hendel, I'm
the Norma and Sam Dabby
Professor of Hebrew Bible
and Jewish Studies at Cal
and I'm a member of the
Foerster Lecture Committee.
It's my pleasure to
welcome you here today.
We are pleased along
with the Graduate Council
to present Jan Assmann,
this year's speaker
in the Foerster lecture series.
The series is dedicated to an exploration
of the immortality of the soul
and other kindred subjects.
Among the many distinguished
past lectures in this series,
and you can see the
impressive list of names
in the back of your program.
Professor Assmann will
actually address the main topic
that the lecture series
is in theory dedicated to,
that is to say the
immortality of the soul,
rather than other kindred subjects.
As a condition of this bequest,
we're obligated to tell you
how the endowment supporting
the Foerster lectures
on the immortality of the soul
came to be at UC Berkeley.
In 1928, Edith Zweybruck,
a public school teacher in San Francisco,
established the Foerster
lectureship to honor
the memory of her sister Agnes Foerster
and her husband Constantine Foerster.
He was a lawyer and partner
of Alexander Morrison,
who was one of the most
prominent attorneys
in San Francisco, and the man for whom
our Morrison Memorial Library is named.
In her last days, Edith
Zweybruck expressed her deep
and abiding interest in
spiritual life by creating
this lecture series on the subject,
the immortality of the
soul, and kindred subjects.
Now I turn to our distinguished
lecturer Jan Assmann,
is a name to conjure
with in both Egyptology
and in the wider humanities.
A longtime Professor of Egyptology
at the University of
Heidelberg, and currently
an honorary Professor at
the University Konstanz.
Assmann is a master of
physiological and historical detail,
who has the rare talent
of synthesis of being able
to situate the details
into a sophisticated
scheme of culture, history and philosophy.
He has transcended the
field of Egyptology,
in his pioneering work in
the field of cultural memory,
and in the history of religious
transformations in Western culture.
He has written dozens of books,
many of which have been
translated into other languages.
A selection of my personal favorites
which adorn my bookcase at home,
are "Egyptian Solar
Religion in the New kingdom,
"Re, Amun and the Crisis of Polytheism."
"The Search for God in Ancient Egypt."
"The Mind of Egypt, History and Meaning
"in the Time of the Pharaohs."
His classic, "Moses the Egyptian,
"the Memory of Egypt
in Western Monotheism."
Another classic, "Cultural
Memory and Early Civilization,
"Writing, Remembrance and
Political Imagination."
Various collections of essays
including religion and cultural memory,
recently a book called, "Religio Duplex,
"How the Enlightenment
Reinvented Egyptian Religion"
and many, many more.
He has also written recently
written books on Thomas Mann,
Mozart, Handel, and I
must say, not this Hendel,
but Uncle George Frideric Handle
and the Book of Exodus.
And I'm happily The Book of Exodus is now
being translated, his book on Exodus
is now being translated into English.
I must confess that Assmann
is one of my personal
intellectual heroes, whose
work has inspired me,
and taught me how to think
about ancient religion,
cultural memory, and other
complicated subjects.
Many other scholars of my
generation owe him a similar debt.
It has been a great pleasure
to host him at Berkeley this week.
Since the founding of this
lecture series in 1928,
the Foerster lectures has been delivered
by such distinguished
individuals as Paul Tillich,
Aldous Huxley, and Oliver Sacks.
This evening Jan Assmann
will join that list
with a lecture on Immortality
an Egyptian Dream.
Please join me in welcoming, Jan Assmann.
(clapping)
- Well, ladies and gentlemen,
I am extremely happy
to be here, extremely grateful
to the Foerster Committee
for this invitation, and to
Ron Hendel for his very kind
and warm introduction, and
also to Ron and to Ellen Gobler
for making my stay in Berkeley
so extremely pleasant.
Well, Immortality, an Egyptian Dream.
Immortality was the Egyptian dream,
in the same way as the rise from rags
to riches is or was the American dream.
The ancient Egyptians formed very early
a strong idea of immortality.
And my contention is
that this concept exerted
in the course of time,
an enormous influence
on the other civilizations
of the eastern Mediterranean world.
Immortality is a concept
that involves at least
three dimensions, time,
space, it was obvious
that immortality takes place
in another sphere time.
It obviously implies
the concept of eternity
and the social dimension.
On immortality is
obviously not for everybody
but for heroes, emperors,
artists of outstanding achievements.
Let's start with space.
Well should all the religions
of the ancient world
around the Mediterranean
and in the Near East,
lived in a tripartite world comprising
the realms of the gods,
the living and the dead.
In this respect, Egypt made no exception,
heaven or some other
remote sphere for the gods.
The upper word for the living
and the netherworld for the dead.
Realm of the dead is the
place where human beings
continue the existence of
having lived in the upper world.
They do not live on in
this realm, but are dead.
Being dead, however, does
not mean to disappear
from this world all together,
but to pass from the realm
of the living to the realm of the dead.
There was no way back
to life once the passage
from life to death has been performed.
No way out, was there the
possibility of a second passage
from the realm of the dead
to the world of the gods.
Exceptions such as obvious
attempt to restore you,
raise you to life in the upper
world, or to receive heroes
such as Hercules after
death in the divine world,
only confirm the rule by
their very exceptionality.
The exception that ancient
Egypt did make in the context
of these religions consisted
in the introduction of a space
within the divine world that
under certain conditions
was also accessible for human beings.
Besides the world of the living
and the world of the dead,
they recognized an Elysium sphere,
for which there are many
names and descriptions
in Egyptian texts, such as fear of rashes,
feared of offerings, bulk of millions
House of Osiris and so on.
And this ternary distinction between a,
the world of the living,
b, the word of the dead
and c, the Elysium world, ai
reflected by the distinction
of three classes of
beings, or a mature humans,
moved to the dead and
Akh transfigured spirits
Maat-heru gods, constitute a fourth class
sharing the divine world with the Akh.
And this distinction between
the realm of the dead,
and the Elysium sphere
or move to the dead,
and Akh, transfigured
spirits, marks in my opinion,
the exceptional structure of
ancient Egyptian religion,
and its concept of immortality.
Now to the dimension of time.
The ancient Egyptian concepts of time,
may determine by two central phenomena,
the daily cause of the
Sun and the angular cycles
of the inundation of the
night and the vegetation.
In the Egyptian imagination,
both referred to as transcendence sphere,
the heaven in the case of the sun,
and the netherworld in
the case of the night.
And these two spheres are
dominated and represented
by two gods, Re, the sun god
and Osiris to god of the netherworld.
Re and Osiris sent also for two
aspects of time or eternity.
Neheh for the time of endless
repetition and regeneration
is represented by Re, the sun god,
especially in his morning form of Khepra,
and Djet, the time of endless
duration and continuation
is represented by Osiris,
the lord of the netherworld
and of the dead, especially
in his cock Norman
as an Manafle, he who
endures in perfection.
The two aspects of time
refer to the aspect system
of the Egyptian language,
Neheh, left, on the left side
is time in its imperfective
aspect as an ongoing process.
Djet, on the right is time
in its perfective aspect
as an accomplished
process, whose final result
is unchangeably and forever enduring.
Neheh as time is visualized and symbolized
by the celestial bodies, and
they are cyclical movements,
especially the sun
whose higher lift serves
as a determinative or
classifier of the world,
which you'll see on your left,
the sun between these two Hs.
And Djet is visualized and
symbolized by the stone,
and the word is written with the sign
of the Earth as a classifier.
And these two worlds
complement each other to form
the encompassing concept
both of time and of eternity.
They serve as both denotations
and negations of time.
They negate time as transience by denoting
the endless lists of
repetition and duration.
The ancient Egyptian ideas
and hopes of immortality
are directed towards these two aspects
of endlessness, endless
regeneration in Neheh,
and endless duration in Djet.
The third dimension as
implied in the concept
of immortality is the social dimension.
Who is granted immortality?
In the third millennium, the Old Kingdom,
this was the privilege of the king.
The dead king transformed
himself into Osiris
and partakes of endless
duration in the subterranean
chambers of his monumental
pyramid, and he ascends to heaven
and reunites with the sun god
by means of the sun pyramid,
which is pointing towards heaven,
and oriented to the cardinal points.
Normal mortars, by contrast,
are buried in mastaba tombs,
and instead of ascending
to heaven they dwell
in their tombs, and descend
to the realm of the dead.
The domain of Osiris.
Humans hide, but gods fly up,
we read in the stay of the pyramid takes.
The king being a god flies to heaven.
The humans hide in their tombs
and descend to the realm of Osiris.
Their hopes of an afterlife
are based on duration,
and its medium, the stone and
so far as they have access
to building craft and stone masonry,
which is a monopoly of the state.
They built themselves monumental tombs
in which they can both hide,
and communicate to the word of the living.
Their mommy rests in the
inaccessible burial chamber.
And the accessible part of
the tomb accommodate the cult,
and the inscriptions
in which the tomb owner
communicates with the living,
later generations.
He or she inhabits the tomb
and communicates for the living
in the form of his or her
ka, an invisible dapper,
who is able to cross the fault stone
separating and linking the
two spheres of the visible
and the invisible, the
accessible and the in accessible
in order to animate his representation,
to seeing if the offerings
and protect the tomb.
Also the king has a ka
being the son of the sun god
and of his biological father,
who after death has become Osiris.
But in addition to his
ka, he also has a ba,
in the form of which she is
able to fly up to heaven,
and to move freely in the spheres
of heaven, Earth and underworld.
The immortalization of the king, however,
was not conceived as an automatic process,
but as a result of a very
elaborate set of spells
and rituals, of which we
are extremely when and form
through the Pyramid texts,
the oldest corpus of religious
literature in the history of mankind.
But the last king of
the fifth dynasty Unas,
the Egyptian started to
inscribe the burial chambers
of the pyramids with 100s of ritual texts.
And these rituals were called the Akh,
that really turning the dead into an Akh,
a transfigured spirit,
and consisted mainly
of the recitations describing
the king's ascend to heaven,
his reception by the gods and his union
with the sun god, his father.
They also comprised of
a sequence of spells
where Ra plays no role in
and the center on the myth
of Osiris, and these were
perhaps performed by night,
and very closely related to the last act
of mummification, the incoffinment.
The myth of Osiris provided the model
of the passage from death to immortality.
These myths went like this,
Osiris, a god and the king
of Egypt has been killed by his brother
and rival Seth who moreover
tore his body apart
and scattered his limbs all over Egypt.
Isis, a sister and wife
of Osiris traverse Egypt
and searched of the member,
the sector of her brother,
reassembling them into
the shape of a body.
Together with her sister
Nephthys she bewails the body
and long songs of lamentation,
using the power of speech
as a means of reanimation,
and was so successful,
that she was able to receive
a child from the reanimated
body of Osiris, and this is the first step
towards restitution and transformation.
The appearance of Horus, the
son and the heir of Osiris
marks the second scene
of the myth and initiate
the second phase of
transformative restitution.
In the same way as Isis
and Nephthys occupy,
this is restoring the
body, Horus is occupied
with restoring the social
personality of Osiris.
We meet here with a very
pronounced gender differentiation.
The restoration of the body
is a female preoccupation.
The means which come to
bear on this respect,
a lamentation, morning,
effective language,
expressions of desire and longing.
Everything in this
female part of the ritual
aims at recollecting the scattered limbs
and restoring the dismembered body.
Female morning is concentrated
on the bodily sphere of the dead.
The restoration of the
social sphere of the dead
on the other hand, the status, dignity,
honor and prestige is constructed
as a male preoccupation
and the task of the son.
Bodily restoration overcomes
the dismemberment of the body.
Social restoration overcomes
the isolation and dishonor
of the victim and turns
it into a situation
of highest status, general recognition,
honor, prestige, respect and majesty.
The efforts of Horus
culminate in his success
of bringing Seth, the murderer, to court,
where he will be declared
guilty and Osiris justified,
and this is the decisive
step by which was Osiris,
the dead is separated from
death, personified in Seth,
and restored to life
through justification.
Justified Maat-heru becomes
the term for what in Jewish
and Christian tradition
is expressed by words,
by phrases like of blessed
memory, and the like.
And this form of decomposing
the complex experience of death
seems to me one of the particular
achievements of the mythic
modeling of reality by
personifying death in the figure
of Seth, death is made
treatable, it can be brought
to court, accused and condemned.
The Justice, which has been
violated by the murder committed
by Seth can be restored in
the view of this mythology,
there is no natural death.
Every death is a crime
that must be vindicated,
and the ritual treatment
of death culminates
in the enactment of this vindication.
There's guilt behind every
death, and this guilt
has to be removed in order
to restore the deceased ,
to status and position in society.
Every death is murder and injustice.
Therefore, it can be healed
in a way by punishing
the murderer and restoring justice.
Osiris has defeated Seth,
which means that he has vanquished death.
He cannot be restored to life upon Earth,
but he has given eternal
life in the other world,
he is reintegrated into cosmic existence.
The mythical Osiris was made ruler
of the netherworld and King of the dead.
The dead king follows his
example, he is called Osiris
and takes place on his throne
in order to rule the dead
and the spirit, while
the son Horus takes place
on his former throne among the living.
The term justification is an unmistakable
Christian Pauline reign.
I do not think this is a mere coincidence,
but quit go even further and
use the term resurrection
for this concept of
transformative restoration.
Because the dead king is
constantly summoned to rise,
raise yourself, which is to,
is the typically address to the deceased.
And that means not only to get
up but to ascend to heaven.
And this is the meaning of
resurrection in the Old Kingdom
it is the lose of
privilege of the Pharaoh.
The myth of Osiris is
at least as far as Krong
meaning is concerned, not
about the cycles of nature.
The seed that is buried
in order to sprout again,
the waxing and waning moon rising
and the falling inundation,
but about kingship.
Osiris is a king in the first place.
The lawsuit with Seth is
about the throne of Egypt.
The myth of Osiris is first
of all about rulership,
in the second place about
death and resurrection,
and only in a rather
peripheral and associative way,
about nature and cyclical time.
It is the Egyptian myth of the state.
And the Pyramid Ttxts of the Old Kingdom,
the daunt of Osiris and
how those are played,
by the deceased king and his successor,
this constellation of father
and son run in the hereafter,
run in the world of the
living is one of the most
fundamental elements of
ancient Egyptian culture.
The funerary cult is based
on the idea that only
the son is capable of reaching
into the world of the dead
and of entering a constellation
with his dead father,
that bridges the threshold
of death and that is mutually
supportive and life giving
and this is what this meant
by the Egypt chambered Akh,
a widespread sentence says,
"Akh" is a father for his son,
"akh" is a son for his father.
And this originally more
twirly constellation provides
the model not only for the mortuary cult,
but for cult in general.
Pharaoh, the only living
being on Earth capable
of entering into communication
to the divine world
approaches the gods as their son.
In cult, he plays the
role of the living son
visa vis his dead fathers and mothers.
Filial piety is the basic
religious attitude towards God.
And this is also the point
where the royal ka comes into play.
The ka is the principle of diagnostic
and genealogical continuity,
uniting fathers and sons,
and running through the
sequence of generations.
The ba forms a pair of the body
and maybe termed the corporeal soul.
The ka supports the
constellation of dead father
and surviving son and may
be turned the social soul.
Its symbol and hieroglyph is
a pair of arms that reach out
not up there as in adoration,
but horizontally in an embrace.
The signs and Bala
symbolizes the mystic embrace
that unites a deceased
father and a surviving son.
Every human being has ka,
also the king, being the son
of the sun god and of
his biological father,
who after death has become
Osiris but in addition
to this currently also has
a ba and there is that very
much difference between the
royal form of afterlife,
which is one of divine immortality
in the heavenly sphere,
and the afterlife of
normal mortals who go down
to the realm of Osiris and
stay in their tombs on Earth,
communicating with posterity
by means of their inscriptions
and the mortuary cult.
The distanciation of the royal hereafter
from the destiny of non-royal beings
forms the central theme
of the Pyramid texts.
The Elysium therefore, was
originally a political concept.
It surpass the world of
the dead in the same way
as the figure of the pharaoh
always surpassed the word of the living.
In order to understand this
categorical distinction
in the social dimension
between kings and mortars,
it is important to realize
that the Pharaoh only stayed
as it emerged around 3000 BC,
out of a group of rivaling
chiefdoms was the first
big territory state
in human history,
stretching from the shore
of the Mediterranean
to the first cataract.
Mesopotamia, as a political organization
is as old as Egypt, perhaps even older.
It did, however, not constitute
a big territorial state
in the way Egypt did, but
took the form of a network
of competitive and
cooperative city states.
Accordingly in Egypt,
the position of the ruler
was immensely more
elevated above the sphere
of his subjects than in Mesopotamia.
And since the early
states were first of all
sacred institutions,
whose most important task
was to establish a context
that the divine world,
the Egyptians went so far
as the see in their king,
a god on Earth, and even the incarnation
of the highest god, the sun god.
He wore the title Horus
and Horus at that time,
and until latest time at
the place of his old century
and ate food, the prehistoric
capital from via the process
of unification started
Horus worship as a sun god.
Horus is a falcon that's
associated with the sky,
on the one hand, and with the predatory,
aggressive character of swift
violence on the other hand.
The name means the foul line
derived from a verb hori
to be far within the
sign for heaven or sky.
The earliest representation
of Horus starting
from the time of unification
shows him as a falcon in a boat
sailing over the sky, was
presented by a pair of wings.
Above another falcon sitting
on the palace for Sade,
the Serekh that encloses the
name of the king Serpent.
While the lower falcon functions
as a royal title and represents the king,
the upper falcon can
only refer to this son.
The whole it's a remarkable
visualization of the Egyptian
idea of kingship, as the
terrestrial representation
of solar power and cosmogonic energy.
Who was the fal one?
Expresses distance, not
only in the spatial,
but also in the social
sense, meaning superiority,
lordship, and this is the obvious meaning
of the name as a royal title.
An iconic representation
of Horus as sun god
shows him as a sun disc with wings.
And this icon became from
a certain time to a dynasty
about 2750 onwards the
official heraldic emblem
or coat of arms, so to
speak, of Pharaonic Egypt.
It was later taken over
by Assyria and Persia,
and might have inspired
other on the thermographic
imperial emblem such as the
eagles and double eagles of Rome
and his successors and Germany,
Austria, Russia and the USA.
At the time, when Horus was
chosen as the royal titer.
This god was without any doubt,
but worship as the highest
god of the Egyptian Pantheon,
both as the god of the sun
and as a god of the state.
In old stages of Egyptian history,
the roles of sun god and
state god went together.
And were always played by
the highest god of Egypt.
It is that's the name of
the highest god that served
as a title for the king,
who was there by identified
with this god as his
terrestrial incarnation
or deputy or avatar.
With the end of the third
millennium and the collapse
of the Old Kingdom, the
texts that are codified
to the royal ideas about
this left sphere afterlife,
in the word of the gods became accessible
to the literate elite,
at least to its most prominent members.
We cannot tell how far these
beliefs and ideas penetrated
downwards into larger
parts of Egyptian society.
Our notions of the Egyptian
beliefs are based on texts
and monuments, and the generalizability
of these observations
remains an open question.
The concept of ba however,
became anthropologist
that is believed to be the
property of every human being.
Now, everybody and again, we
cannot tell whether everybody
means every member of a certain
elite, or every Egyptian,
saw him or herself presented
with two ways to save him
or her from vanishing and
perishing, the way of terrestrial
monumental duration and the
way of celestial immortality.
The criterion for reaching
immortality or ever
had to be redefined, it
could no longer be a question
of royalty or non-royalty,
and became redefined
as a question of morality,
that is of good and
bad in the moral sense.
Not divine quality of
Pharaonic office but the virtue
and justice of a deceased
person, by now believed
to be the conditions
and pre-life positions
of resurrection and immortality.
Therefore, the lawsuit and
the idea of justification
changed their meaning in
a very fundamental way,
the dead had no longer to
be justified against death
as a murderer, but before a
divine tribunal, and the guilt,
which is inherent in death,
is no longer externalized
in form of escape goat
Seth, but it's interpreted
as the deceased own guilt,
which he has accumulated
during his life on Earth.
The earliest texts deal with
the concept of justification
and the closest possible
association that ideas related
to empowerment and mummification.
Guilt, accusation, enmity,
and so on they're treated
as forms of impurity and
pollution, as immaterial pollutants
as it were, that must be
eliminated in order to bring
the deceased into a state of purity
that resists putrefaction
and decomposition.
Justification is moral mummification.
When the embalmers work
on the body is finished,
the priest take over and
extend the work of purification
and preservation onto the whole person.
The Egyptian word from mommy
also means dignity or nobility.
At the last stage of
mummification, the deceased passes
to the post mortem judgment
and is assigned the nobility
of a follower of Osiris
in the netherworld.
He is justified against all
accusations and purified
from every guilt, every sin
that might have obstructed
his passage into the other world.
Even from the soloistisms
of early childhood.
After the cleansing and
immortalization of the body,
the embalmment and ramification
which returns in its last
stage, so this social self.
The judgment is nothing other
but a purging of the soul from guilt.
The idea of a general
judgment post mortem develops
during the Middle Kingdom at the beginning
of the second millennium BC.
It is clearly expressed in a wisdom text
dating from that time.
The court that judge the wretch, you know
they are not lenient,
on the day of judging
the miserable in the
hour of doing that task.
It is painful when the
accuser has knowledge.
Do not trust the length of years.
They view lifetime in an hour.
When a man remains over after death,
his deeds are set beside him as a sum
Being yonder lasts forever.
A fool is he who does not,
who does what they reprove.
He who reaches them
without having done wrong,
will exist there like a god,
free-striding like lords of eternity.
This is what immortality means,
in the context of ancient
Egyptian through funerary beliefs to exist
in an Elysium hereafter like a god,
free striding like the lords of eternity.
With the rise of the new
kingdom, and of this engine
of the Book of the Dead,
the rules of admission
enter the other world had become codified,
and form the 125th chapter
of the Book of the Dead.
The mythical model of a
lawsuit between Osiris
and Seth has disappeared altogether.
The whole procedure has
assembled now more on examination
and an initiation, the
deceased had to present himself
before Osiris, the president of the court,
and before a jury of 42 judges.
He knew the accusations beforehand
and had to declare his innocence.
All of the possible crimes and violations,
which could constitute an
obstacle for passing the exam
had been spent out and
laid down in two lists,
one of 40 and the other of 42 entries.
The deceased had to recite
these lists and explicitly
to declare his or her innocence
in each individual item.
During this reciter the heart
of the candidate was weighed
on the balance against
the figure of truth.
Every lie that make sink
the scale that the heart
that the deeper, in case of
a heart being found too heavy
and irredeemably charged with
guilt and lies a monster,
which has always shown close
to the balance and watching
the weighing, would swallow
the heart of the sinner
and annihilate his or her person.
By reciting these lists of
negations, I did not do this,
I did not do that, that
the thief purged himself
from all possible charges
that could constitute
immaterial pollutants,
causing his final destruction.
He does enter the other word
in the state of imperishable purity.
The spell and the Book
of the Dead is entitled
purging a person of all
the evil which he has done
and beholding the faces of the gods.
Again, there's no question of innocence.
Nobody is innocent.
What matters is whether a
person is able or not to get
purged of his or her sins,
and the title of chapter 125.
The ideas of moral purity
and immediate vision
of the gods are brought
into close relationship.
According to Egyptian
convictions, nobody except perhaps
the king was able during
lifetime to see the gods
to have a vision and to enter
the divine world in a trance,
or meditation or so, there
are no traces of shamanism,
profitism or mysticism in Egypt,
before the Greco Roman period.
All forms of immediate
contact with the divine world
are referred to the life
after death and resurrection.
All the gods that you
have served on Earth,
you will confront face-to-face.
Be arraigned in an Harper
song in one of these tombs.
From this text and countlessly others,
we learn that the Egyptian Elysium
was the same as the world of the gods.
That there to prove
worthy of being justified
before the divine tribuna was
emitted into the divine world
and was permitted to confront
the gods face-to-face.
The world of the gods did
not form a fourth world
besides the other three,
but contains the Elysium.
The Egyptian cosmology therefore
showed the same tripartite
structure as all the other
cosmologies of the ancient world,
Heaven, Earth and under
word or world of the gods,
world of the living and world of the dead.
But the main exception
that the dead were believed
to be capable of managing
the passage from the world
of the dead to the word of the gods.
If they proved innocent
or at least justifiable,
in the judgment of the dead.
For our categories of logical thinking,
the two forms of surviving
death, the monumental way
of lithic duration, and the
moral way of justification
and immortality would exclude each other.
Why built an expensive monumental tomb
and provide for the even
more expensive mortuary cult,
if one passes into transcendent realms
to live among the gods?
Free striding like the lords of eternity.
For the Egyptians,
however, the two concepts
of afterlife complement each other.
Even after adopting the
ideas of justification,
Elysium and immortality,
they continue to mummify
their corpses, build
monumental tombs and establish
a cult as an interface
the world of the living,
a place worship, sacrificial communication
and autobiographical self representation.
Building a tomb remained the
most important life project,
the teaching of Hordjedef,
that they fed back
to the Old Kingdom, we
read the exhortation,
"To build one self or
tomb and to magnificently
"equip ones home of eternity."
Here it is also stressed that
man should build ones tomb
not only for oneself, but
above all, for ones son,
who has to perform the mortuary
cult to take ones place
in the world of the living,
and to bridge the gap
that divides the two
worlds of here and there.
Build a house for your son,
then the place will be created
for you in which you will be.
Richly equip your house
in the realm of the dead
and effectively outfit
your place in the West.
In the instruction for miracle re,
the ancient maxim of
Hordjedef became modernized.
That is moralized as
follows, and this is perhaps
400 years later, they have
a duty to richly equip
your house in the realm of the dead
and effectively outfit
your place in the West.
This is a quotation from
the teaching of Hordjedef.
But now it's continuous by
being applied by doing justice,
upon which man's heart may rely.
A tomb is not built by stone alone,
but by being upright and doing justice.
The monumental tomb is but the visual sign
of a good that is justifiable life.
The secret of redemption
from vanishing and perishing
is my heart, the Egyptian
goddess and personification
of justice, order, and truthfulness.
Entertainer of the eloquent peasant.
It is said that ma takes him
who practice her in this life
by the hand and accompanies him towards
the necropolis justice is for eternity.
It enters the graveyard with its doer.
When he is buried and Earth enfolds him,
his name does not pass from the Earth.
He is remembered because of his goodness,
that is the rule of the god's command.
When Hekataios of Abdera
have 1500 years later,
visited Egypt and
interrogated the inhabitants
about the meaning of their
sumptuous tomb architecture.
He found the same principles still alive.
So he writes, and this is at the end
of the fourth century BC.
The Egyptians regard the
time spent in this life
as completely worthless, but
to be remembered for virtue
after one's death, they
hold to be of highest value.
Indeed they refer to the
houses of the living,
as inns, katalyseis,
since we dwell in them
but a short time, while
the tombs of the dead
they call everlasting
houses, aidioi oikoi,
since in Hades we remain
for an endless span.
For this reason, they
troubled themselves little
about the furnishings of their houses,
but betray an excess of ostentation
concerning their places of burial.
Virtue, never who an
Egyptian meaning perfection
refers to living according
to the rules of my heart.
And this is for the
ensures endless remembrance
and endless duration in
man's house of eternity.
The vizia ...among ooza,
who lived in the first half
of the 15th century avows the
same principles and benefits
inscriptions, again, quoting and modifying
the classical maxim of Hordjedef.
I built for me an excellent
tomb in my city of eternity,
I equip magnificently
the place of my rock-tomb
in the cliffs of everlastingness.
My name, May my name
endure upon it in the mouth
of the living, my memory being perfect
with people after the years to come.
Just a trifle is the
lifespan spent on Earth,
but eternity is spend the netherworld.
God praises the noble one
who acts oneself with regard
to the future, who seeks with
his heart to find for himself
what is wholesome,
namely, burying his corpse
and making his name live
and who considers eternity.
We see that the old idea of
an afterlife in and by means
of a monumental tomb that serves
not only as a hiding place
of the mummy, but above all have a place
of ongoing communication to the living.
And the new ideal of passing
the judgment of the dead
and being admitted to
the Elysium of the field
of reads, rushes exists side by side.
From the beginning of the
second millennium on moreover,
the tomb is seen not
only as a place of cult,
but also as a door to the
upper world, where the dead
by crossing the fault store
may go up and see the sun.
And this idea of going forth
by day becomes in the course
of the second millennium,
the most important goal
of all the various preparations
for surviving death.
The idea of immortality
through justification
form the center of Egyptian
beliefs, and the strong
parallels to Christian ideas of salvation
and justification cannot
be mere coincidence.
Believe forever engenders
disbelief, and I think
it would be the most astonishing
aspect of the Egyptian
idea of immortality, that they even manage
to give disbelief a voice.
One of these voices is a
literary texts that cause serious
doubts on the sense of tomb
building and mortuary cult.
The famous dialogue
between a man and his ba,
dating from about the
same time as the teaching
from Erie Karin, the Middle Kingdom.
Both angel Locutots, the
men and his bar agree
in their longing for death.
The man however, wants to postpone death
and the tomb has been
built and the survivor
has been appointed to perform the funerary
and mortuary rituals whereas the ba pleads
for an immediate
departure from this world,
doubting the sense of
courage and tomb building.
If you think of burial, it is heartbreak.
It is bringing tears by saddening a man.
It is taking a man from his
house casting him in the desert.
You will not go up to see the sun.
Those who build in
granite, who erected halls
in excellent tombs of
excellent construction,
when the builders have become gods,
their offerings stones are
desolate, like the inert
who have died on the riverbank
for lack of a survivor.
Follow the feast day, forget worry.
Another text stating
presumably from the same time
of transition around
to 2000 BC cast doubts
not on tomb building in this
world, but our life conditions
and the other world, and this
takes two, is a dialogue.
The consequence of some
catastrophic events
that are not made clear presumably
the murder of Osiris by his brother Seth.
Our tomb, the creator assigns
Osiris to the netherworld
where his terrain is lord of the dead.
Osiris however, does not view
this realm is an Elysium.
Oh, Atum how is it that I must travel
to the wasteland of the realm of the dead?
It has no water, it has no air,
it is utterly deep, dark and endless.
And Atum respond, "You live
there in contentment of heart."
But there's no making love there.
Atum, "I have granted
transfiguration in place of water,
"air and making love
and contentment of heart
"in the place of bread and beer."
There is no mention of
the tension from death
and of reaching an Elysium's
fear that Osiris will rule
and find eternal satisfaction
of his wishes and desires.
Instead, Atum says that he will
transform these very desires
so that Osiris will no
longer yarn for water,
air, bread, beer and sexual pleasure.
He has replaced desires
with contentment of heart
and human nature this transfiguration.
This answer, however, stays
in stark contrast to all
the descriptions and depictions
of the Elysium sphere
to which the Egyptians hope to be assigned
after their justification
before the divine tribunal
and must therefore be counted
as an expression of disbelief.
In this text, the angel Locutors are gods.
And this there's no mention
of the human sphere.
It is about the difference
between the divine sphere
and the realm of the dead,
that Osiris is assigned to.
The other dialogue
between the men and his ba
about life on Earth and in the beyond.
So the other is about the
human condition in this world.
And in the last line, the
ba votes from banquet songs,
whose message is equally skeptical
concerning the hereafter.
So this exploitation of making marriage,
celebrate the feast and make merry.
So this is a quotation from banquet songs.
The most famous of these songs
occurs in a tomb inscription
accompany the figure of a blind Harper
and dating from the
Amana posts Amana period.
It also appears interspersed
among left songs
in the somewhat later papyrus,
entertains like follows.
How happy this this good prince.
The beautiful fate has come.
A generation passes, another stays,
since the time of the ancestors.
The gods who were before
rest and their tombs,
their places are gone,
what has become of them?
I have heard the word of
Imhotep and Hordjedef,
whose sayings are recited everywhere.
What of their places?
Their walls have crumbled,
their places are gone
as though they had never been.
None comes from there
to tell of their state,
to tell of their needs to calm our heart
until we go where they have gone.
Hence rejoice in your heart.
Forgetfulness befits you.
Follow your heart as long as you live.
Put myrrh on your head,
dress in fine linen
anoint yourself with oils fit for a god.
Heap up your joys, let
your heart not sink.
Follow your heart and your happiness,
do your things on Earth
as your heart commands.
When there comes to you
that day of mourning,
the weary-hearted, this is Osiris.
Hears not their morning, wailing
saves no men from the pit.
Make holiday, do not weary of it.
Lo, none is allowed to
take his good with him,
lo, none who departs comes back again.
But the skeptic Harpus proclaim
belongs to the semantic
of the feast that being a
typical hetero tope forms
an independent universe of meaning
within the broader context
of general culture.
We meet with the same
exaltation to remember death,
realize the shortness of
life and grasp the present
festive moment with all
the tendency of awareness
and enjoyment in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
And they act as a divine
innkeepers Siduri,
who greets Gilgamesh with these words,
Gilgamesh, whither are you wandering?
Life, which will look
for, you will never find
For when the gods created man,
they let death be his share,
and life withheld in their own hands.
Gilgamest, fill your belly.
Day and night make merry.
Let days be full of joy, dance
and make music day and night.
And wear fresh clothes and
wash your head and bathe.
Look at the child that
is holding your hand,
and let your wife delight in your embrace.
These things alone are the concern of men.
Gilgamesh in his search of immortality
has reached the end of the world.
Siduri tells him that
immortality is not men's lot,
but mortality, and that
he should make his short
stay on Earth as joyful
and lively as possible.
Men should not spoil the
precious moment of earthly
existence by worrying about
the imaginary hereafter.
The relation of this
mystery to the fees is given
by the fact that Siduri is an innkeeper,
pouring wine to the gods.
Banquet songs fall into here competency,
even in the Bible, we meet
with this skeptical view
of afterlife and immortality.
In chapter nine of Ecclesiastes, we read,
Go, eat your food with
gladness and drink your wine
with a joyful heart, for God has already
approved what you do.
Always be closed in white,
and always anoint your head with oil.
Enjoy the life with your
wife, whom you love,
all the days of this
meaningless life that God
has given you under the sun,
all your meaningless days.
For this is your lot in life
and in your toilsome labor under the sun.
Whatever your hand finds to
do, do it with all your might,
for in the realm of the
dead, where you are going,
there is neither working nor planning
nor knowledge nor wisdom.
There's even the relation
of this text to the junk
of banquet songs, because
the book of Ecclesiastes,
Qohelet, is read during
the feast of Sukkot,
that they spend in booths of branches
that much singing and wine drinking.
Besides the feast and literature,
however, there's still
a set place where voice is
given to doubt and disbelief.
And this is the demiurge
the ritual lamentation
of the surviving widow,
I quote only one example of this Johanne.
The house of those in the
west is deep and dark.
There is no door, no window
in it, no light to brighten,
no north wind to refresh the heart.
The sun does not rise there,
they lie forever in sleep,
because of the darkness,
even in the daytime.
Oh, woe, may the dear one be
safe and sound breathing air.
Or another takes, the one
with the booming voice
is silent, he does not speak.
The self-aware one is unconscious.
Those in the West are in
difficulty, their condition is bad,
how motionless is the
one who has gone to them.
He cannot describe his
condition, he rests in his lonely
place and eternity is
with him in darkness.
There is one very late text and
this will be my last example
dating from the first century BC.
It is a Stela that a
high priests Takh set up
for his deceased wife, or
which he she herself has set up
and when she was still alive,
in which she addresses
her surviving husband.
O my brother, my husband,
my friend, high priest.
Your heart were not weary
of drinking and eating
of intoxication and lovemaking.
Spend a good day, follow
your heart day and night.
Let no care into your heart.
What are years not spend on Earth?
The West, it is the land of
slumber, a burdensome darkness,
the dwelling place of those who are there.
Sleep is their occupation .
They wake not to see their brothers.
They cannot gaze upon
their fathers and mothers,
their hearts miss their
and their children.
The water of life,
which is the nourishment
of every mouth, it is thirst for me.
It comes only to the one who is on Earth.
I thirst, though there's water beside me.
I do not know the place where I am,
since I came to this valley.
Give me flowing water.
Say to me, "May your form
not be far from the water."
Turn my face to the north
wind on the bank of the water.
Surely my heart will
be cooled in its grief.
Death, Come, is his name,
whoever he calls to himself,
they come immediately, though their hearts
shudder in fear of him.
No one sees him among gods and men.
Great and small alike are in his hand.
No one staves off his curse
from the one he chooses.
He steals the son from his mother,
rather than the old man
that is drawing nigh to him.
All the fearful are placed before him,
but he turns not his face to them.
He does not come to the
one that prays to him,
he does not heed the man who praises him,
he is not seen, so no
gift can be given to him.
These skeptical and pessimistic voices,
may have been always
there, and may have found
their expression in the head
of a typology of literature,
the feast and to lament,
even if it took much time
to admit them into the
canon of tomb inscriptions,
that they're eternalizing aspirations.
That this was possible,
however, that the Egyptians
were able to endure the tension
between belief and disbelief.
And to give disbelief a
voice, even in the canon
of tomb inscriptions is the best proof
of the strength of their
belief in immortality.
The Egyptians seem to
have been by far the first
to form a concept of
immortality originally advanced
a politically motivated concept
connected to the institution
of sacred kingship, elevating Pharaoh
to the rank of the immortal gods.
But after the collapse of the Old Kingdom,
it was extended to
virtually all human beings.
The immortality of the soul
however, was just one part
of the Egyptian concept of immortality,
linked to the ba, the
judgment and the Elysium.
The other part concerned
the endless duration
of the mummified corpse resting
in the monumental tomb in the Earth.
This double form of immortality
is expressed in innumerable texts.
For instance, may your ba exist
living in Neheh like Orion
in the womb of the goddess of heaven, na.
While your corpse may endure in Djet,
like the stone of the mountains.
If Western Christianity
has indeed inherited
the Egyptian dream of immortality,
it concerns only the first part,
the ideas of soul, judgment,
justification and paradise.
The preservation of the body
is the much less important
and mummification remains a
specificity of ancient Egypt.
But Ancient Egypt seems to have
been the first civilization
to dream the dream of
immortality, thank you all.
(clapping)
- [Man] Well, thank you
for this very learned,
typical of yourself, learn and lecture.
I will try to be brief.
I am an Iranist and
lament the fact that Iran
is little known clearly
among scholars in general,
apart from Iranistics.
My point is that I would
say circa 1200 BCE,
a poet priest named Zarathustra,
whom we know as Zoroaster,
let's call him that because
of the Nietzschean confusion.
Zoroaster not necessarily
the same as Zoroastrianism,
which is the development of
only some of Zoroaster's ideas.
My point here is that
Zoroaster, conceived of the soul
of the righteous realistically opposed
to that of the wicked,
entering a unification
in a sunny paradisiac place with the gods.
This was an important
doctrine, the chief doctrine
of the poems of Zoroaster.
And the residue of that
even though it went
through many changes, how would
you assess this parallelism?
And how would you also
assess the influence
in the later phenomenon the
more westerly phenomenon
of the Persian Empire
under which the Jews lived,
and for which there are clear,
eschatological influences
from Iran, how would you
assess this in the balance
with the learned presentation
you gave concerning Egypt?
- Yeah, thank you.
This is very important question, I think.
This is also a question of how to date
these Iranian Saracen texts.
And if these texts are really
last ancient dating from
the second millennium BCE,
I think we are then confronted,
we are dealing with two independent roots.
Not one Ancient Egypt
but two roots of the idea
of immortality then
Iranian and an Egyptian.
And ancient Israel had access to both.
Of course they met with
Zoroastrianism in Babylon
and then they were ruled
by a Persian in the fifth
and fourth centuries, so,
there were ample occasion
for being influenced by Zoroastrianism,
but they were also
ruled, of course by Egypt
in Ptolemaic times and
in very early times,
which I am not too sure
whether they have survived
substantial memories until the composition
of the biblical texts.
But they were in contact
with both influences
exposed to both influences, so,
I see no difficulty in admitting,
Zoroastrianism as another
sphere where the idea of
immortality came up independent
of course, if this belongs
to the second millennium,
I do not believe that they
have also Egyptian influence
on Iran that's too far away.
Of course we see
later influences in this
iconography of Ahura Mazda,
and of course, all, they've got Asura
and so the iconographic influence
of Egypt on Persia is quite evident.
But of course, that much later period.
- [Man] I just heard,
for those who don't know,
ancient Iran is to the east,
not where we have it in Persia.
- [Woman] Thank you so much
we need to give him a chance.
Thank you very much.
- Yeah, thank you.
- [Man] Hello, thank you so much
for your stimulating question.
I tried to be very brief,
I have two precise questions to ask you.
First is, in terms of
the ontological character
of the soul of the king, which
would ascend to the heavens,
I'd be grateful if you
could shed some light on it.
Because as you know, the
notion of seeking, for example,
in Greece, in Plato is not
exactly your individualized,
personalized soul, which
you find in Christianity
and which I must must add,
following the gentleman
who has just asked questions,
could have not developed
without an Iranian influence,
the personalization the soul
is something for which Iranian
plays an important role.
So just what's the
ontological status of the soul
that ascends to heaven,
and joins the gods,
is it the personal soul?
That's my first question.
Second question is, since
you made the connection
between Mesopotamia and Egypt,
if I could borrow a term
from the late John Pian Vano,
and use the term of ideology
of death, desecrating an Egyptian tomb,
which obviously have grave
consequences in religious terms
and ritual terms, just
like you would have had
in Mesopotamia, what exactly
is the similarity of the manner
in which more so common
mortals would dwell,
common mortals would dwell in their tombs
because they wouldn't go into the heavens
and the way in which for
example, the dead of Mesopotamia
would be indebted to him.
So what exactly in terms
of the ideology of death
in Egypt and Mesopotamia
would be the situation
of common men who can't
ascend to the heavens?
Who cannot have any sort
of privileged access to the heavens?
So, these are my two questions the exact
ontological nature of the soul.
And then of course, the
manner in which common men
would live in their tombs
and as you know, of course,
in Mesopotamian desecrating
them was a huge, huge sin.
Thank you.
- All right.
Well, thank you very
much, difficult questions.
While the ontological status.
- [Man] Personalized soul
or is it something else?
- Yes, so, I conceive of
the Egyptian concept of ba
as the force that animates
a body from within,
so that the spirit of life
but closely related to the body,
and leaving the body after death, so,
the ontological status of the soul
before death is part of the person.
Very important, spiritual, invisible,
life giving animating part of the person
and the ontological
status after death, well,
is
still a part of the person,
but now free to move
in the realms of the universe
and no longer bound to the body.
But the Egyptian idea and idea of death
is that this is no definite separation.
So the soul is able to freely
move in heaven and underworld
but stays in contact with the cults
and visit the mommy every night.
So by day it is free to
move around the world
and every night it enters the
tomb and rests upon the mummy.
And this is also the
reason why mummification
and tomb building and non-violation
of the tomb is so essential
for the Egyptians.
So the Egyptian idea of surviving
death is to what formerly
what in life was one unity of the person
is now a network of components,
ba, the ka, and the tomb
and the Elysium, it is a network
of communicating elements
and the violation of the tomb,
but disturb this network,
yeah, whereas in Mesopotamia,
there is I think there's
no idea of an Elysium.
This is the land without
return and is now.
So there is violation
of the Mesopotamian tomb
is even worse.
- Even worse.
- [Man] I genuinely
enjoyed your presentation.
Would you please give a little more detail
about the concept of
justice and its relationship
to my heart and maybly
compare it and contrast it
with what appeared in Athens with Socrates
and Plato dikay and dika
yo sanae in the process
of justification, do they
look similar or different?
- Yeah, thank you.
Well, the Egyptian content
of Maat is justice,
but it's justice and truth.
So dikay and Alitalia together,
this is just one concept in Egypt.
Like Asha in Persian.
So the Egyptians do
not distinguish between
what is there and what
should be here, yeah.
This is the right.
And this content of Maat of justice,
is also the foundation of permanence.
So the unjust that does not correspond
to justice is doomed to perish.
And so this is the link
between being truth and justice known.
And I think this is different
from the Greek idea of dikay.
- [Man] Thank you.
- [Man] Hello, thank you.
Could you say something about
the fate of non-human animals
after death in ancient Egypt.
- Yes, thank you.
Yeah, even the animals were
mummified in ancient Egypt,
and were in the subject of all
these rituals of transfiguration.
So even the animals had a soul.
The Egyptians were, did not
make a very strong distinction
between animals and men,
even animals and gods,
there were the sacred animals
and these huge cemeteries
of mummified animals that
were in a way sacred,
even manifestations of the
divine in animal, so yeah.
- [Woman] Hi, when I
was studying in Egypt,
some Egyptian scholars were
talking about the relationship
between the three pyramids in Giza.
- Macro fudge.
- [Woman] Okay, the three pyramids in Giza
with the position of the
stars in for example,
in the constellation of the belt of Orion.
- Well this is a theory,
but do not subscribe.
- Is that true?
Okay, but I was wondering,
is there a relation
between the building of
tombs and stars in any way?
'Cause I know on some
days, there's, you know,
one day a year light
comes into a certain tomb,
were they very interested in astronomy
and if you could talk about it.
- Well, yeah, there's
been tomb where this seems
to play a role in the
temple of Abu Simbel,
where the certain time the rays
of the sun hit the statues,
the back, this does not refer to tombs,
but to the temperate of Abu Simbel.
And the tombs are I think that
they are not also the pyramids of course,
are oriented towards the cardinal points.
And there is always an
opening to the north
where the ba of the king can
fly up to the Polar Star.
But the pattern of the pyramids on Earth,
I think this is coincidence
that this has something to do with.
- Thank you for your questions.
Thank you for this magnificent lecture.
And let's thank Professor
Assmann one more time.
(clapping)
(upbeat music)
