Egypt of the Pharaohs and of the Khedivé

by F. Barham Zincke

CHAPTER XXIV.
EGYPTIAN BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE.

All that are in the graves shall come forth: they that have done good unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation.—St. John.

The ancestors of the Egyptians, when they entered the valley of the Nile, did not come either empty-handed, or empty-headed. They brought with them their looms, their ploughs and seed-corn, and their sheep and cattle: for what they had been used to in the old home was what they would wish to have in the new. They did this whether they came by land or by sea. None of the first European settlers in the New World found any difficulty in carrying with them their live stock across the broad and stormy Atlantic. They brought with them also, and which was of more importance than all the rest, their belief in an after life. We are as certain of this, whether they came in ten, or twenty thousand years ago, as we are that, at a geological epoch so remote from the present time that the organized life of the Earth has since been changed again and again, there were winds and tides, and sunshine and rain. Every branch of the Aryan family, from the Ganges to the Thames, participated in this belief; it had, therefore, existed among them at a date anterior to their dispersion. It occupied in their organized thought the position the vertebrate skeleton does in the animal organization. It was the governing idea. Everything contributed to it, or was deduced from it: either, went to feed it, or grew out of it. Those races of animals which have not arrived at vertebration are the lowest forms, with the fewest specialized organs: still they appear to have a kind of tendency towards it, or virtual capacity for it. Just so of the mental condition of some portions of our race with respect to this idea of a future life. There are some whose thought is so rudimentary that it has never yet grown into this form; but they are the lowest minds: still, even they have a kind of tendency towards it, and of capacity for it—though, indeed, several such tribes and people have died out without ever having attained to it. And so will it be with many of those who, at the present day, are in this condition. They will be swept away by those who possess the higher form of organized thought, without their ever reaching this point in the progress of moral and intellectual being.

If the question be asked—Why we do ourselves believe in a future life?—the answer is—That we believe in it for the same reason that Homer and Virgil, Cheops and Darius, Porus, Arminius, and Galgacus believed in it—that is to say, because our remote, but common ancestors, had passed out of the state in which thought is chaos, and had reached the state in which thought has begun to organize itself; and because the vertebral column of the form in which it had with them begun to organize itself was belief in a future state. None of all of us, whether dwellers on the banks of the Ganges, the Thames, or the Nile, could any more get rid of, or dispense with, or act independently of, that formative column of thought, than our animal constitution could of its formative column of bone. Belief in God, in moral distinctions, in personal responsibility, in the supremacy of intelligence—that is to say, that it is intelligence which orders, and co-ordinates God, the universe, and man, would all be powerless and unmeaning, were it not for this belief in a future life. These, and others beliefs may feed and support it; but it acts in, and through them, and gives them their chief value. It puts man in permanent relation with God, and the universe. Hitherto with us nothing else has done this. Without it these other beliefs would have been mere chaotic elements of thought.

We must see this in order that we may understand the life, the mind, and even the arts of the ancient Egyptians. Nothing about them is intelligible if their belief in a future life is lost sight of; for this it was that made them what they were, and enabled them to do what they did. The connexion with it of their greatest achievement is close and evident. As an instrument of human progress, language, of course, takes precedence of everything. Nothing would be possible without it. But, if man had stopped short at the acquisition of language, not much would have been gained. Something more was needed, and that something was the art of writing, which is that extension of the uses of language, without which no serviceable amount of knowledge could have been attained, or retained. Without this little could have been done. With it everything became possible. The further we advance by its aid, the longer, and the broader, and the more glorious are the vistas that open before us. Now, of this we are certain, that the ancient Egyptians discovered this art. The idea of the possibility of speaking words to the mind through the eye, and rendering thought fixed, and permanent, and portable, and transmissible from generation to generation, of committing it, not to the air, but to stone, or, still better, to paper, first occurred to the Egyptians. And they were the first to give effect to the idea, which they did in their hieroglyphic form of writing, out of which afterwards grew the hieratic and demotic forms.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this discovery. It contained in its single self the possibility of the whole of science, art, law, religion, history, beyond their merest rudiments, which were all that would have been attainable without it. It contained all this as completely as the acorn contains the oak. Where, and what would any and every one of them now be were it not for that discovery? Indeed, what does it not contain? There are now 31,000,000 souls within the United Kingdom, had it not been for that discovery probably there would not have been 3,000,000. Neither the readers nor the writer of this book would have existed. None of the existing population of Europe would have seen the light. Other combinations would have taken place. Europe would be sparsely tenanted by tribes of rude barbarians—only a little less rude in its favoured southern clime. The New World would be still unknown. On the day some Egyptian priest, perhaps at This, thought out a scheme for representing words and sounds by signs, Christianity, the British Constitution, and the steam-engine became possible. With respect to so great, so all-important a discovery, one on which the destinies of the human race so entirely depended, every particular of its history must be deeply interesting. Of one particular, however, at all events, we are certain: we know where it had its birth. And this is what has made so many in all times desire to visit Egypt. It was that they wished to see the land of those who had conferred this much-containing gift upon mankind—not all of them seeing this distinctly, yet having a kind of intuition that the wisdom of the Egyptians was a mighty wisdom to which civilization, through this discovery, owed itself.

We know, too, another particular, and that is, that this discovery was first used for sacred and religious purposes; and it must have been invented for the purposes for which it was first used. We can imagine what prompted the thought that issued in the discovery. We can trace out what it was that set the discovering mind at work. It must have been some idea in Egypt that was more active, and so more productive than ideas that were stirring in men’s minds elsewhere. It must have been some need in Egypt that spurred men on more than the needs felt elsewhere. And this idea could only have been that of the future life; and this need that which arose out of this idea, the need of recording the laws it prompted, and the ritual which grew out of it; and of aiding, embellishing, and advancing in their general laws, their religious observances, their arts, and what afterwards became their science and their history, the whole life of the people which was struggling to rise into higher conditions, more worthy of their great idea.

But we must give some account of what the Egyptian doctrine of the future life actually was. Fortunately, in the Book of the Dead, we have for its historical reconstruction the identical materials the old Egyptians had for its construction in their own moral being. This Book of the Dead was one of their Sacred Scriptures. Its contents are very various and comprehensive, and are quite sufficient to give us a distinct idea of what we are in want of here. It is divided into 165 sections. Its object is to supply the man, now in the mummy stage of existence, with all the instructions he will require in his passage to, and into, the future world. It contains the primæval hymns that were to be sung, and the prayers that were to be offered, as the mummy was lowered into the pit of the catacomb or grave; and the invocations that were to be used over the mummy, the various amulets appended to it, and the bandages in which it was swathed. These bandages had great mystical importance. Some of them have been unrolled to the length of 1,000 yards; and we are told that there is no form of bandage known to modern surgery of which instances may not be found on the mummies.

What has now been mentioned forms, as it were, the introductory part of the book. The rest is devoted to what is to be done by the mummy himself on his passage to, and entrance into, the unseen world. It taught him what he was to say and do during the days of trying words, and on the occasion of the great and terrible final judgment. An image of the rendering of this awful account had already been presented to the eyes of the surviving friends and neighbours at the funeral. It was a scene in which the mummy had often taken part himself in the days of his own earthly trial. The corpse, on its way to the grave, had to pass the sacred lake of the nome, or department. When it had reached the shore there was a pause in the progress of the procession, and forty-two judges, or jurymen, stood forward to hear any accusations that any one was at liberty to advance against the deceased. If any accusation could be substantiated to the satisfaction of the judges, whether the deceased were the Pharaoh who had sat on the throne, or a poor peasant or artizan, the terrible sentence, to an Egyptian beyond measure terrible, was passed upon him, that his mummy was to be excluded from burial. The awful consequence of this was 3,000 years of wandering in darkness, and in animal forms.