"The overall model for understanding the ancient Egyptian afterlife in scholarship and popular culture alike is well known: The ancient Egyptians believed in a post-mortem judgement that would determine their fate in the afterlife, being either rewarded with an eternal life of bliss or punished with painful annihilation. However, in my new book Yearning for Immortality, I argue that for the most part these ideas were in place well before the decipherment of hieroglyphs"
"If we cannot read texts like the "Book of the Dead" as straightforward descriptions of the Egyptian afterlife, then what sources can we draw on to get a sense of ancient Egyptian ideas of life and death? And correspondingly, what strategies for reading and viewing funerary texts and art can we use to approximate an indigenous understanding as opposed to one projecting Western models of postmortem existence?"
The standard model portrays ancient Egyptians as believing in a post-mortem judgement determining eternal bliss or annihilation. Many of those ideas existed well before hieroglyphs were deciphered and reflect Greek and particularly Christian frameworks more than indigenous Egyptian concepts. Therefore the prevailing understanding of the Egyptian afterlife requires fundamental rethinking. If funerary texts such as the "Book of the Dead" cannot be read as straightforward descriptions of native beliefs, alternative sources must be identified to recover Egyptian ideas about life and death. Reading strategies should minimize projection of Western postmortem models and seek indigenous perspectives.
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