THE BOOK OF THE DEAD.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume I, Issue 41, 25 March 1914, Page 6

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD.

THE WORSHIP OF OLD NILE.

[Specially written for The Sun.] The custom of embalming the dead survived in Egypt for more than 5000 years.' It survived the influence of the Greeks and the Romans, and it disap : peared only a couple of hundred years before the coming of Mohammed, and the Book of the Dead grew out of the early rituals of the priests over the ceremony of embalming the bodies of the. dead, and these rituals were petitions-to the gods for the welfare of the departed one in the strange world beyond the grave. Not that the early Egyptians had any very, clear idea of a spiritual life, that was a later development; in the beginning they looked forward to a material existence much the same as they had enjoyed upon earth, and the symbols of this materialism endured in the customs of the latest dynasties, when the dead were still provided with meats and the implements of life, whose '' Ea'' should aid them across the boundary.: The earliest texts show that the main ideas of the Egyptian religion did not change with the later dynasties, and it seems that they must have been handed on to the priests of the later years in much the same form as they were received by the early priests. But in the later years a great body of spiritual philosophy grew up around the simple dogmas of the remote times. THE LITE ETERNAL.

The most prominent feature of the Egyptian religion, from the most remote to the latest" times, was the doctrine of immortality and the belief in the resurrection of a spiritual body. Later Egypt decorated the doctrine with theories and speculation, but the common faith remained unchanged, and with these beliefs grew the body of texts, hymns, and rituals, that forms the Book of the Dead and which were believed to give power to man. beyond the grave. The collection increased, and grew more noble as the centuries passed, and the form of the hymns and rituals varied in dignity and beauty with* the rank of the dead. They were memorised at first, but; as they grew in volume, and as the meaning of some became obscure, they were written down by the priests in the hieroglyphic, <>r picture writing of Egypt. It is not known by whom the Book was compiled, nor where it had its origin, but it is certain that the Book in its connected form, ..containing the brutal materialism of the primitive times together with the exalted metaphysics of the priesthood of the later years, is as old as Egyptian civilisation. The Book, or a great'portion,, of it,, was first discovered in 1881, by M. Maspero, in a stone pyramid at a place now called Sakkara, the tomb of Unas, King in Egypt 3.333 years before Christ. In the pyramids of Gizeh; the tombs of kings of an earlier dynasty, there are no inscriptions, but the tomb of Unas was everywhere covered with vertical lines of hieroglyphs which formed the text of the Book.

THE WRITINGS ON THE WALLS. Other tombs discovered yielded inscriptions which were mostly duplicates of this text, but sometimes there were additions, and thus the first collected series of texts was gathered. Tombs of the eleventh and twelfth dynasties revealed sarcophagi covered inside with texts from the Book, and paintings representing the usual made to the dead, with-prayers that "the departed one might have such things offered to him for ever. At the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty; the Book, always in process of revision, but never losing its evidence of developing schools of thought, began to be inscribed on papyri, possibly for economy's sakt; for whereas only kings ' and very wealthy folk could afford to have tlu' texts incised deeply on the walls of [their tombs, those, of. moderate station qould afford a roll of papyrus., Most of the papyrus copies of the Book were found at Thebes, and the roll which | was reported by cable yesterday as havjing been stolen from the Louvre in Paris l is'probably one of-these, for they vory in length from about 15 to 90, feel, and are often decorated with symbolic "vignettes in bright colours. Atout 9i)o 8.C., about the time when the' priests of Amen-Ea, in seeking to usurp tem'poral as well as spiritual power, cause ,i the nation to rebel against them, transcriptions from the , Book seem to have ceased to be a funeral custom; but with the rise of the twenty-sixth dyn asty there was a revival' of the old religious customs, and. the priests which succeeded those of Amen rearranged and systematised the Book of the Dead, probably through a college of priests. THE REVISED VERSION.

The rearranged version also had attached to it short religious works lor funeral use,, and it seems as if in the later papyri an attempt was made to extract only the essential portions of the old works and leave out references to faiths and beliefs that had long since been discarded, and by:andby all sense of the original meaning of the texts was lost by the.scribes and engravers who, copied them.. Papyri and inscriptions of decadent years of Egypt show that little of the meaning of the old Book of the Dead remained, for in some there are no hymns, no appeals to the gbcls, and no references to a future life, possibly showing that the Egyptians' of the decadent years had lost their faith and accepted a common materialism. The use of phe Book seenia ; to' have out almost entirely at the beginning of the Christian! era, except for a few scraps of texts found on" some mummies, and its decline' is beJieved to be contemporary • with the Greek influence, when the life of Egypt, which was so intimately bound up with the care of suffered a great change; I 'Previously, as tombs and ~ monuments'•ttestif y , th> Egyptians' lived more ; in • tne idea of

a future life with their dead than in the present, and their tombs are the most enduring relics of this ancient civilisation. / THE FAITH OF EGYPT.

The Book of the Dead is a remarkable revelation of the life, habits, and customs of Egypt from the earliest times, it not only shadows out the changing, developing faiths, and their decline, but also the developing manners and common lives of the people, and in its later additions it is full of a fine nobility of thought, and intricate metaphysical idda, woven through the admonitions-to the dead and the supplications to the gods. Says the "Book of Breathings," appealing for the good keeping of the soul of Osiris Kerasher: "He hath given food to the hungry, and water to the thirsty and clothes to the naked. He hath made offerings to the gods and to the Khus, and no report whatsoever hath been made against him before the gods. O, come let him enter the Tuat and not be repulsed, let him follow Osiris, let him be a, favoured being amongst the favoured ones, divine, amongst the perfect ones. Let his soul live. Let his soul be received in whatever place it pleaseth, and let him receive the Book of Breathings." ■:..■■■ But before the priests of the middle dynasties made such an appeal, even before they allowed the dead man the right of preservation by embalming, they held a solemn trial over his body, to judge whether in life his deeds were good, or whether they were evil. D. H.