“Look, the Book of the Dead,” I said. My daughter ran across the museum gallery. “Like in the movie, Dad!” Jess was talking about The Mummy (1999). We’d seen it that summer. “Well, ye-e-es,” I muttered uncomfortably. Then I spotted the twinkle in her eye. My ten-year-old was teasing. “It’s just a book,” we laughed, quoting a character in the film. “No harm ever came from reading a book.”

Jess, lover of all things ancient Egypt, never passed up a good mummy movie—or a bad one. We were forever chatting about the real Egypt in all its mystery. That summer, 1999, we drove three hours to an exhibit in Richmond, Virginia. A museum was displaying wonders discovered in the Valley of the Kings. 
Fourteen years later, in 2013, my last date with Jess was a trip to King Tutankhamun’s tomb—a museum in South Carolina was hosting its traveling exhibit. At the time, I barely noticed Tut’s two-handled, lotus-shaped alabaster chalice. The tomb’s discoverer, Howard Carter, named the artifact the Wishing Cup. He had a translation of the ancient hieroglyphs inscribed on his own gravestone.

May your soul live, you who so love Thebes, 
may you face the north wind, 
knowing only joy for millions of years.

That same day our small group (Jess, her fiancé, my wife and I) went to Columbia’s local zoo and gardens, one of my daughter’s favorite spots. None of us dreamed that we had so little time left. Jess died on January 16, 2015. Today a memorial brick bearing her name greets visitors on the main walkway of the zoo. Each time I visit, I hunker down by her small red block, brushing away the detritus of crowds: a bit of popcorn, some dirt, grass creeping between the cracks. It is as sacred to me as any pyramid on the Nile.

“Why do ten-year-olds want to visit museums’ Egyptian galleries but not Mesoamerican galleries?” asks Bob Brier, one of the world’s foremost Egyptologists. “On some level, we identify with ancient Egyptians in ways we don’t with other ancient civilizations.” Brier has a point. Ancient Egyptians had an afterlife that was similar to our view of a Christian heaven, albeit a tad more complicated. They too anticipated a day of judgment and considered their sacred texts, particularly the Book of the Dead, as sure guides to paradise. “Ancient Egyptians are close enough to us culturally that we can identify with them but far enough away in time that we can fantasize about them,” Brier concludes. “We visit the pyramids and are amazed. . . We are left with a sense of mystery and wonder.” 

Historian Adrian Goldsworthy has a similar reaction. He observes that Egypt’s “awe-inspiringly massive” monuments, the profound intimacy of mummification, and the “models of everyday things left in the tombs of the dead” conjure up images of timeless mystery that “are dramatic and at the same time alien.” As far back as the fifth century B.C., venerable Greek historian Herodotus could not contain his enthusiasm for the land of the pharaohs: “It possesses more wonders than any other country, and exhibits works greater than can be described.” But ancient Egypt is not merely a playground for history buffs.

Sigmund Freud was a great collector of Egyptian artifacts, enjoying them for their artistic beauty and as metaphors for his explorations into the human psyche. He was particularly fond of a baboon statue of the god Thoth, in which he saw a balance between instinct and intellect. But as with many of us today, Freud’s fascination was not purely academic. He was not a “stupid superstitious bast*rd,” as a character in The Mummy (1999) puts it. Freud felt there was a real psychological comfort in ancient treasures. His housekeeper often observed him pausing on busy days to touch the Thoth statue, and others in his collection, enjoying the tangible pleasure they provided.

Millions of Years

Millions of years was a euphemism for eternity in ancient Egypt, and for good reason. Just as we have difficulty grasping the idea of millions of anything, it was thought, so too we cannot comprehend the eternal. They felt that our dead exist on a plane where finite time does not exist. The limitations of space and chronology simply do not apply, an aspect of ancient Egypt captured in a scene of horrifying romance in The Mummy (1932). 

The titular character, Imhotep, tells a woman he believes is his reincarnated princess that she must be “ready to face moments of horror for an eternity of love.” And yet it is this tragic eternity of love that has driven the one-time priest mad during his deathless sleep across the millennia. He is an eloquent, sad figure, scarred by horror and violence. “My love has lasted longer than the temples of our gods,” he says. “No man ever suffered as I did for you. . . It was not only this body I loved, it was thy soul.”

When we watched this scene, Jess used to joke that the best response was from the later 1999 film of the same name, when Evie (also the mummy’s supposed reincarnated love), quipped, “Yes, that is very romantic, but what has it got to do with me?” Or with the real Egypt, for that matter? 

The historical Imhotep was not a priest at all. He was the world’s first recorded genius: pyramid architect, royal physician, and the pharaoh’s vizier, or prime minister. Neither he nor anyone else that we know of in ancient Egypt believed in reincarnation. Not that Jess and I cared—they’re just movies, after all. Why spoil the fun?

Ancient Egyptians believed that joy was meant to be eternal. One of the most common expressions for tending the dead was “jubilation,” a term of comfort and promise. They were “a people who regard death as merely a transition to eternal life,” observes Joseph Kaster, professor emeritus of ritual and myth at the New School of Social Research in New York City, “who so intensely enjoy this life that they look forward to living in ongoing felicity on the divine plane, doing all the good and happy things they enjoyed doing upon earth.”

We may picture ancient Egypt as a land where a select few held extravagant wealth while the majority toiled in slavery and misery. This image does not bear close scrutiny, if Egyptian art, architecture, and writing are any guide. Many craftsmen and their loved ones were laid to rest in impressive structures that reflected means and education. Their tombs have stirring artistic renditions of a beautiful afterlife. 

One farmer in Qurna, for example, had a wall painting next to his sarcophagus depicting lush trees and verdant fields where he and his family stroll with ease in a rural idyll. Seeing this work of art, I do not dream of pharaohs and wealth; I think of fathers, mothers, and children yearning for a future reunion of peace.

I believe that when we are reunited with our loved ones, we will have difficulty recalling the miseries, scars, and traumas of life. Oh, we will remember that our wounds existed, but I suspect they will seem distant, separate, apart. We will be healed and whole, happy in the company of those we love, “knowing only joy for millions of years.”  

The Mummy Speaks

“Death is but the doorway to new life,” the opening title card of The Mummy (1932) informs us. The film is calling upon millennia of deeply-felt tradition. In The Mummy (1999), Imhotep slips into the underworld, crying out in desperation and shock, “Death is only the beginning.” These are more than pithy lines. The end of biological life was not final to ancient Egyptians. Death was seen as a disease; eternity its final and absolute cure. 

Ancient Egyptians believed that we have a life force, a spiritual essence, and a soul. Our life force leaves the body at the time of death, when our essence is born. After a burial, our life force and spiritual essence combine into the eternal soul. This may seem odd to us, but the concept is not too different from stories told by thousands of people who speak of near-death experiences. 

In those cases, the body died; whatever electrical impulse or “life force” animates our flesh and blood was gone. Yet survivors relate that their souls took a journey to an afterlife, from which they ultimately returned, reanimating their bodies. Such a near-death experience would have come as no surprise to the ancients. Nor should it to Christians. 

Early ethnic Copts and Coptic Orthodox believers in Upper Egypt were influential in formulating arguments for the doctrine of Incarnation—Jesus as God and man. They, along with most orthodox Christians, held that the divine and human were unified in Christ. It may be that an older theology of a pharaoh who was both god and man helped Coptic believers wrap their brains around the idea, suggests respected Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson.  

Coptics’ hope for physical-spiritual union led them to envision a personal God of compassion and relationship. Reading one enigmatic poem found near Nag Hammadi, it is easy to see why God’s self-revelation of his dual nature resonated with the cultural heritage of early Christians in Abydos:

For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the silence that is incomprehensible.
I am the utterance of my name.

Before Jess passed, this sort of thing held little interest for me. Now it matters a great deal. I join millions of mourners across the centuries who wonder if our dead continue on. Just as we believe today in a future reunion with our loved ones, ancient Egyptians also hoped that death was not the end. One such promise is inscribed inside Pepi I’s pyramid in Saqqara: “Raise yourself. You have not died. Your life force will dwell with you forever.”

Laments of Hope

I have discovered a surprising sense of communion with Egyptian lament. The ancients thought of death as a spiritual process of ascension that allowed the dead to interact with the living. Our loved ones retain their ability to create, it was thought. They engage with us through these moments of creation—theirs and ours. “Death in ancient Egypt therefore,” writes Martin Bommas, director of the Macquarie University History Museum in Sydney, “is not something that can happen in isolation.” Nor can mourning.

The litanies of Isis and Nephthys, wife and sister to Osiris, for example, were aimed at reviving the deceased by resuscitating this precise creative power. Isis was the most eloquent of the Egyptian gods, the divine embodiment of love’s power over death. “No other goddess in ancient Egypt had the healing power of Isis,” Bommas explains. One prayer inscribed on a coffin from around 2,000 B. C. features a moving lament in the voice of Isis:

Weary beloved, so weary, resting as you do;
weary in this place you knew not that I know;
I found you here, in your place, weary and beloved.

The laments of Isis do not ignore our inevitable pain of grief. “My eyes are filled with tears,” she cries in an inscription from a Theban Tomb. “My heart is filled with sorrow; my body, filled with pain.” Yet while acknowledging the reality of death, the prayers of Isis also provide hope for a future reunion:

Take your place forward in the tent of our god as I speak your
precious name from the ship eternal, the day we unite at last

During a funeral procession, the two most prominent female mourners (wife/daughter; mother/sister; etc.) took the place of Isis and Nephthys at the head and foot of the bier. Weeping was not only acceptable, but expected. Then as now, this could lead to some heavy-handed showmanship among distant relatives—a trend I also witnessed in modern services when I worked at a busy funeral home—but for the most part, the tradition provides a time and place for natural and profound grief. 

The Egyptians may have been onto something. “Death is pushed to the margins in modern life,” suggests poet and priest John O’Donohue.  “Our consumerist society has lost the sense of ritual and wisdom necessary to acknowledge this rite of passage.” In ancient Egypt, the deceased were not forgotten. The body and soul were treated with equal reverence in speech and act.

In one poem from a Theban tomb an anonymous scribe refutes the idea of healing his grief. He has lost everything in an instant, he writes, like a calf lost in the night. Poet Friedrich Rückert was familiar with such texts. They influenced his belief that composing songs of sorrow connected him with his dead daughter:

I would have an ancient Egyptian embalmer, expert
in cheating death by the art of his decoration,
all our torments purify, transform to song.

I am struck by this thought. Transforming my torment into words does not remove my grief. Rather, it helps me discover ways to face a world without my daughter in it. The laments of others who knew similar loss speak to me of sorrow and hope. This may be why I always think of Jess when I read an elegy preserved in two pyramids, written some five thousand years ago:

She that flies, flies! away from us, from us all;
no longer on earth, she is in heaven, and You,
her God, hold her soul in your arms. She rushes
the sky as a heron, kisses the sky as a falcon.

As I write these words, I am creating something in memory of Jess, feeling her near, reminded of our many happy moments that are all the more precious in her absence.  Such acts preserve a continuing bond in this life until we are reunited in the next. They also give our memories substance.

Tales of the Living Mummy

“Torn from the tomb to terrify the world!” screams the poster for Hammer Film’s The Mummy (1959). Its sequel, The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964) promises a “5,000 year-old monster on the rampage!” and the next film admonishes us, “Beware the beat of the cloth-wrapped feet!” in The Mummy’s Shroud (1967). “The Gods of Egypt still live in these hills, in their ruined temples,” warns a character from The Mummy (1932). “The ancient spells are weaker, but some of them are still potent.” It’s all modern ballyhoo, of course, and has nothing to do with ancient Egyptian legends. 

Or does it?  

The world’s first living mummy tale comes to us from ancient Egypt. Dating from the Ptolemaic period (332-31 B.C.), Papyrus Cairo 3064615 tells of Setne Khaemwase’s visit to an ancient tomb in search of a scroll written by the god Thoth in his own hand. Setne was the fourth son of Ramses II (the only factual part of this tale), but the mummy he discovers in the tomb is unimpressed. 

“My husband isn’t here,” the mummy tells Setne. Her name is Ihweret, wife of the sorcerer-prince Naneferkaptah. “Leave now,” she warns him. “The Thoth scroll brought only evil to my beloved.” Now it’s Setne’s turn to be unimpressed. Calling upon ancient tradition, he rolls the dice, literally, in a game of senet, to win the scroll.

Senet was similar to backgammon, with two players moving pieces around a board of thirty squares using lots, or rounded sticks with a flat side. The final squares of the track featured symbols for life, death, or rebirth into eternity. “The game symbolizes in this way,” writes Apostolos Spanos, a specialist in historical gaming with the University of Agder, “a bridge between the world of the living and that of the dead.” Mourners began placing senet boards in tombs some 5,000 years ago. The practice had great religious and ritual significance, highlighting the Egyptian belief that our departed loved ones may interact with us. It also emphasized, Spanos concludes, “the freedom of the dead’s spirit, that could visit earth to play senet with a still living opponent.” 

The nefarious Setne won his board game at great cost. Later, when the Thoth papyrus is finally returned to the tomb, Naneferkaptah makes his appearance. In death the prince has become an immortal of terrifying force. Perhaps The Mummy (1999) didn’t stray too far from legend when it proclaimed: “The sands will rise. The heavens will part. The power will be unleashed.”

Northward

Jess and I never went to Egypt together—one of many trips that we hoped for that will never be. Yet I have this sense that she knew, as I now know, how the sacred can empty us and fill us with the sublime. In Luxor it is possible to be overwhelmed by a majesty at once immediate and ancient. The Great Hypostyle Hall in the Temple of Karnak, with its 134 papyrus-shaped stone columns, stuns us into silence. “A room so vast that it makes you feel like an insect,” writes Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson. “Everyone who sees it in person comes away overawed.”  

Egypt is steeped in sorrow. The laments of Thebes (modern Luxor), passed down through millennia, remind us that our world is silent, broken, sick. To exist is to suffer, they write, but we do not suffer without hope:

Northward

What has happened to our family? our small
home? collapsed, empty, save for ruin. Bitter
Fate, admit your guilt; foul Destiny,
admit you fill my days with loss.

My promise, my hope, you left us for a grave,
you are bound northward, dressed for best.
Our house is in ruin; you are full to
brimming, you are overflowing.¹

Ancient Egyptians saw the north as a region of celestial resurrection after death. The south, on the other hand, represented our physical world. Because of this, the dead were often buried with heads toward the north; they were “bound northward.” 

This tradition stems from the Nile’s life-giving waters. Despite many twists and turns, the river predominantly flows north. The metaphor for our lives is hard to miss: we too are bound northward, though our lives may be filled with much grief.

The ancient Egyptian view on bodily resurrection also has striking parallels with Christian beliefs—though not in the way we might expect. They certainly hoped for a bodily resurrection, but for them the question remained an enigma with no ready answers. Paul may have agreed. 

Traveling to Damascus to root out more Christians, Paul was beset by a light from heaven and the voice of Jesus. The men with him may have heard the voice without seeing anyone; or, alternatively, as Paul describes it, “those who were with me saw the light, but did not understand the voice of the One who was speaking to me.” 

Paul was a vehement defender of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, of course, but miracles are often ineffable. This may have contributed to his subsequent musings on the subject. Paul was not shy about our ignorance of how, in purely practical flesh-and-blood terms, resurrection applies to the rest of us.“Now I say this, brothers and sisters, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable [our bodies] inherit the imperishable. Behold, I am telling you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed.” 

Ancient Egyptians, too, found the whole process a mystery. Christians had a host of reliable witnesses attesting to the literal resurrection of Jesus—something unique in the world. Egyptians, on the other hand, relied on myth, faith, and hope in Osiris. 

“No god was more fundamental to the consciousness of the ancient Egyptians than Osiris, god of resurrection and king of the Afterworld,” observes John Foster, a specialist in ancient Egyptian literature with the University of Chicago. Osiris was a good king, cruelly murdered for his decency, who rose again through the auspices of Isis. He then fathered a son, Horus, who restored justice and balance to the world. The story speaks to deeply-held beliefs of living on through our progeny. Moreover, each Egyptian saw him or herself as “an osiris” who could be resurrected into eternity. This idea of resurrection appealed powerfully to ancient Greeks, great admirers of Egypt, according to Alexandra Villing with the British Museum in London. The resurrection of Osiris held hope for all humanity.

With the rise of Christianity, mummification was outlawed. The reasoning may seem a tad convoluted for modern believers. Mummies, it was said, represented a physical resurrection rather than a spiritual one. However, today modern American funeral practices owe much to mummification. Embalming is perfectly legal and for many believers, preferable, as I learned working at a funeral home. Conditions change, of course. At the time, pagan practices were rampant in Egypt: mummification was closely associated with the worship of Isis. 

Orthodox Christians in the second century took a literal view of resurrection, citing accounts that demonstrated clearly that the appearances of Jesus could not have been a ghost or hallucination. His followers ate and drank with him after his death. Appearances of the dead as a presence were as commonplace in the first century as they are now, but the idea that Christ was corporeal was something else entirely. “It is certain,” exclaimed orthodox writer Tertullian, “because it is impossible!” In fairness, ancient Egyptians may have thought the same thing about the resurrection of desiccated mummies.

Here I pause. I’m not suggesting we should buy copies of the Book of the Dead and light incense at midnight. Rather, I observe that the ancient Egyptians, as with civilizations across the globe, were deeply involved in questions of the afterlife, confirming for me, at least, that God did indeed set eternity in the hearts of all humanity across the ages. 

Poets through the ages have echoed this despair, grief, and frustration. Over one third of the psalms are songs of lament; in fact, three begin with the word “why.” The weeping of Israel was ignored by God at one point; then, after being promised that deity would hear their cry, their keening again went unanswered. “Even when I cry out, pleading for help,” writes Jeremiah, “he shuts out my prayer.” 

Jess is dead now. She and I will never visit Egypt together in this life. But I hope that she, in the mystery of eternity, has already seen the ancient land of her dreams. My home is empty where she should be, but in my mind, she is bound northward, she is full to brimming, she is overflowing.

1. The tomb inscriptions in this essay have been adapted by the author, unless otherwise noted through links to the original sources. “Northward” is inspired by traditional Egyptian lament. ↩︎