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10.3 — Egypt and Mesopotamia
Two of the oldest recorded mythologies, both from river civilisations, and their pictures of what happens after death could hardly be more different.
Egypt
Who are the main Egyptian gods?
Ra, the sun, who sails across the sky in a boat by day and through the underworld by night, fighting the serpent Apep every night so that the sun can rise. The sunrise was not automatic — it was a battle won again each night.
Osiris, god of the dead and of resurrection; Isis, his wife, goddess of magic; Horus, their son, associated with kingship; Set, Osiris's brother, associated with the desert, storms and disorder; Anubis, jackal-headed, who oversees embalming and the weighing of the heart; Thoth, ibis-headed, god of writing, wisdom and record-keeping; Ptah, the craftsman creator; Hathor, of love and music.
The god names and roles shift enormously across three thousand years, and gods merge — Ra and Amun become Amun-Ra, Ra and Horus become Ra-Horakhty. Egyptian religion did not require consistency, and multiple contradictory creation accounts were maintained simultaneously in different cities without anybody treating that as a problem.
What is the story of Osiris?
The central myth, and the one that structures Egyptian funerary practice.
Osiris ruled Egypt well. His brother Set murdered him, in some versions sealing him in a chest and throwing it into the Nile, and later dismembering the body and scattering the pieces across Egypt.
Isis searched and gathered them. With her sister Nephthys and with Anubis she reassembled and embalmed the body — the first mummy — and by magic conceived a son from it. Osiris did not return to the world of the living but became ruler of the dead.
Horus, the son, grew up and contested the throne with Set, in a long series of trials and combats. Horus eventually won and became the model of the living king, while Osiris was the model of the dead one.
The whole of Egyptian burial practice is an enactment of this. The dead person is identified with Osiris, embalmed as Osiris was, and expected to be reborn in the same way. Mummification is not preservation for sentiment — it is a technical requirement, because the person's spiritual components need an intact body to return to.
What happens when you die, in the Egyptian account?
You are judged, and the test is specific.
The heart is placed on a balance against the feather of Maat, the principle of truth, order and correct proportion. Anubis operates the scale and Thoth records the result. The dead person recites a declaration of innocence — a list of things they did not do, running to dozens of items covering theft, deception, cruelty, disrespect and interference with irrigation.
If the heart balances, you pass into the Field of Reeds, a version of Egypt with good harvests and no shortage.
If it does not, Ammit eats the heart — a creature with the head of a crocodile, forequarters of a lion and hindquarters of a hippopotamus — and you cease to exist entirely. That is not hell. It is annihilation, and it is the outcome Egyptians feared.
The heart was left in the body during mummification for exactly this reason, and the brain was discarded as unimportant. Spells were sometimes buried with the dead instructing the heart not to testify against its owner, which is a very human piece of insurance.
What is the Book of the Dead?
Not a book, and not one text. It is a collection of around 200 spells, of which any given copy contains a selection chosen and paid for by the buyer.
The spells cover the journey: passing gates, answering guardians who demand their own names, avoiding traps, and — the famous one, spell 125 — the weighing of the heart. They were written on papyrus and buried with the body, and the quality varied with expense. Cheaper copies were mass-produced with blank spaces for the name to be filled in.
Its Egyptian name translates roughly as "the book of coming forth by day".
What did the pyramids and the mummies actually involve?
Mummification took about seventy days. The internal organs were removed and stored in four canopic jars, each under the protection of a different son of Horus — except the heart, which stayed. The brain was removed through the nose and discarded. The body was packed and covered in natron, a naturally occurring salt mixture, for around forty days to dry it completely, then oiled, resined and wrapped in linen with amulets placed between the layers.
The pyramids are Old Kingdom, roughly 2600–2500 BCE, and were abandoned as a form afterwards — later pharaohs were buried in rock-cut tombs in the Valley of the Kings, hidden rather than advertised, precisely because pyramids had all been robbed.
Tutankhamun is famous for an accident of history: he was a minor pharaoh who died at about nineteen, and his tomb is the only royal Egyptian tomb found substantially intact, in 1922 by Howard Carter. The "curse" was a newspaper invention. Lord Carnarvon, who funded the dig, died months later of an infected mosquito bite; most of the excavation team lived long lives, including Carter, who died sixteen years later.
Mesopotamia
How is Mesopotamian myth different?
Darker, and more explicitly about the relationship between humans and gods as labour.
In the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish, the god Marduk kills the primordial sea-goddess Tiamat and makes the world from her body — sky from one half, earth from the other. Humans are then created from the blood of a slain god, specifically to do the work the lesser gods were tired of doing. Irrigation, agriculture, building.
That is the stated purpose of humanity in the text: to feed the gods through sacrifice and to maintain the canals, so the gods can rest. It is a strikingly unsentimental account, and it comes from a society whose survival depended entirely on continuous back-breaking irrigation work.
The main gods: Anu (sky), Enlil (wind and authority), Enki/Ea (water, craft, wisdom and the one who repeatedly sides with humans), Inanna/Ishtar (love and war), Marduk (Babylon's city god, elevated to chief god as Babylon rose), Ereshkigal (the underworld).
What happens after death in Mesopotamia?
Nothing good, for anyone.
The underworld — Kur, or the House of Dust — is a dark place where the dead eat clay and drink brackish water. There is no judgement and no distinction between the virtuous and the wicked. Kings and beggars end in the same place. What can improve the condition is having living descendants who make offerings; the worst fate is to be forgotten and unfed.
That bleakness is the engine of the Gilgamesh epic, discussed in 9.1. Gilgamesh's terror at his friend's death is entirely rational within this system: there is no consolation available, and the epic's answer — build walls, do work that outlasts you, and go home — is the only one on offer.
Compare Egypt on the same page. One civilisation spent enormous resources preparing for a good afterlife it was confident existed; the other concluded there was none worth having and put its effort into the walls.
What is the flood story, and how many versions are there?
At least three Mesopotamian versions, and then the biblical one.
The Sumerian version has a king named Ziusudra. The Atrahasis epic has the flood sent because humans have become too numerous and noisy for the gods to sleep — a strikingly petty motive. The Gilgamesh version has Utnapishtim, who tells Gilgamesh his own story.
The shared elements are specific enough to indicate direct transmission rather than coincidence: a god warns one man, he builds a boat to given dimensions, takes his family and animals, the flood lasts a set number of days, the boat grounds on a mountain, he releases birds to test for land, he sacrifices on landing, and the gods smell the sacrifice and regret the flood.
The Genesis account shares all of these. When George Smith deciphered the Gilgamesh flood tablet at the British Museum in 1872 and realised what he was reading, the reported reaction — that he undressed in his excitement — is probably embellished, but the public impact was genuine and large.
Flood myths exist worldwide, including the Indian story of Manu and the fish, and Greek Deucalion. Some of that is transmission and some is independent: most early civilisations were on flood plains, and a catastrophic local flood is a universally available experience.
What did Mesopotamia leave that is still in use?
An unusual amount.
Writing, in 2.1. Base-60 arithmetic, which is why an hour has 60 minutes and a circle 360 degrees, in 2.7. The seven-day week, probably. The zodiac, whose twelve constellations along the sun's path were established by Babylonian astronomers and passed to Greece.
Systematic astronomical records kept for centuries, accurate enough that modern astronomers use Babylonian eclipse observations to measure the slowing of the Earth's rotation over the last 2,700 years.
Written law, in Hammurabi's code and its predecessors. The wheel, the plough, beer, and the arch.
And the concept of a written contract, which is what the writing was invented for, and which is arguably the most consequential item on the list.
What comes next
The next page turns to Indian myth — which is not a dead tradition being reconstructed from manuscripts but a living one, and which therefore has to be approached differently.