All these elaborate preparations, the laborious and costly process of hewing the tomb out of the solid rock and furnishing it with such magnificence, were made because the ancient Egyptians believed that the king’s body to be housed in it had been made imperishable. They imagined that when the body was embalmed the continuation of the king’s existence had been assured. Hence they provided him with food and raiment, the furniture and amulets, the jewels and the unguents, and other luxuries which he had been accustomed to enjoy, before he was taken to his “eternal house” in the desolate Valley of the Tombs. There can be no doubt that in the early days of Egyptian history this naïve belief was regarded in all seriousness as the simple truth. In fact, the thoroughness with which at first the Egyptians gave concrete expression to their faith in making material provision for every want that the deceased might experience could only have been inspired by the confidence that all these preparations were indeed effective. This conviction was deeply rooted in the practice of mummifying the dead, preserving the body so that it should become incorruptible and everlasting; and this was supposed also to involve the feasibility of the prolongation of the dead man’s existence.
The hope of survival was thus based upon the efficacy of the embalmer’s art; and the extraordinary constancy with which for more than thirty centuries—for a span of years four times the length of time that separates us from the arrival of William the Conqueror in Britain—they persisted in their efforts to improve their methods and render more perfect this gruesome practice is a striking tribute to the fundamental importance of mummification to the Egyptians. The craft of the carpenter was first invented for the manufacture of coffins to protect the corpse; the stonemason’s first experiments had for their aim the preparation of rock-cut chambers still further to ensure its safety; the first buildings worthy of being called architecture were intended to promote the welfare of the dead, to provide places to which relatives could bring food necessary for the dead man’s sustenance, and a room to house his portrait statue—another art that was the outcome of the practice of mummification—which took his place at the temple of offerings and preserved his likeness for all time.
These elements of civilization, the arts of architecture and sculpture, and the crafts of the carpenter and the stonemason, were thus direct results of the custom of embalming. But its influence in moulding ritual and belief was no less profound and far-reaching.
Early Beliefs
The belief in the possibility of the continuation of existence after death may have been (and probably was) much older than the Egyptians; but the evidence now available seems fairly decisive that the belief in immortality was not definitely formulated by mankind until the means had been devised of making the corpse everlasting, when “the corruptible body put on incorruption.” Moreover, the ritual of the most primitive religions was based upon the practices of the early Egyptians for revivifying the mummy, or its surrogate, the mortuary statue, by burning incense, pouring out libations, opening its mouth to give it the breath of life, and performing a series of dramatic acts to animate it. By means of these ritual procedures it was supposed that the officiating priest was able to restore consciousness to the dead body and so make it possible for it not only to take an intelligent share in the life around it, but also to hear appeals for help and guidance and to answer such requests.
Egypt alone of the countries of antiquity provides the explanation of these strange beliefs and practices. They were devised by the concrete-minded people of the Nile Valley as part of a comprehensive philosophy of life and death which was formulated as a sort of life insurance, in accordance with the principles of which the deceased himself was supposed to be the beneficiary, and his reward an indefinite prolongation of existence.
This remarkable system of beliefs originated even before the beginning of civilization, sixty centuries ago; but the latter event was responsible for intensifying the conviction of its reality and increasing men’s hope in its potency.
The Dawn of Civilization
Civilization began when the Egyptians first devised the methods of agriculture and invented a system of irrigation. The irrigation engineer was the first man in the history of the world to control and organize the co-operative work of his fellow-men, and become the ruler of a whole community. If there is one lesson more than another that history has demonstrated in Egypt, equally in ancient and in modern times, it is the absolute necessity of a strong and autocratic Government, because the conditions in the Nile Valley are such that the prosperity of the country and the welfare of the whole community is entirely dependent upon the just and equitable distribution of the waters of irrigation throughout the land. It is not to be wondered at that the engineer who successfully achieved this task, and in a very special and real sense controlled the lives and destinies of his people, became the king, whose beneficence was apotheosized after his death, so that he became the god Osiris, who was identified with the river, whose life-giving powers he controlled. For to a people who had never experienced anything of the kind before it must have seemed an altogether miraculous and superhuman act for one man to have in his absolute control the prosperity of a whole community and every individual unit of it.
The connection between this story and the tomb of Tutankhamen may not be apparent. But when it is realized that the original invention of the social system was so closely identified with the god Osiris, it will be understood that the ritual of mummification and burial aimed at identifying the deceased with Osiris, and by imitating the incidents of his story to secure for the deceased a fate like that of the god, whose life-giving powers were sought to grant the continuation of existence.