Magic of Mummies Is Resurrected at Brooklyn Museum

The Brooklyn Museum, which possesses one of America’s greatest collections of Egyptian antiquities, has now unrolled one of the signal treasures from the Pharaonic Age — a 21-foot long “Book of the Dead.” The museum touts the precious papyrus as “the world’s finest existing copy” of the funerary texts that aimed to guide the deceased, through prayers and spells, past the underworld to the afterlife of eternal bliss. They retain their cadaverous charisma.A Book of the Dead was bespoke, as no two posthumous journeys were alike. The one on display here, which underwent three years of restorative work, dates from between 340 and 57 before the common era. It is remarkable for its completeness. It possesses some 162 incantations. The ancient Egyptians called them “Spells of Coming Forth by Day.” This book belonged to Ankhmerwer, son of Taneferher, which means “the one beautiful of face.”Ankhmerwer’s book is written in hieratic, a kind of cursive and abridged hieroglyphics used by priests. The name itself comes from the Greek for “priestly writing.” The script and the double outlines mean, scholars infer, that this Book was composed in the Memphite style of Lower Egypt. It is one of the many curiosities of Egyptology that “Lower Egypt” refers to the northernmost region of the country, most notably the fertile Nile Delta.Memphis was the first capital of Unified Ancient Egypt, founded some 3,000 years before the common era by King Narmer, reckoned to be the first Pharaoh. Eventually passed first by Thebes and then by Alexandria, it was from Memphis that the commands to build the pyramids were issued. The Alabaster Sphinx and titanic likeness of Ramses II — rumored to be the enslaver of the Hebrews — bear witness to the city’s grim grandeur.‘Shabty of Neferptah,’ ca. 1352-1279 B.C.E. Serpentine, yellow-and-white pigment, and gold leaf. Via Brooklyn MuseumThis Book of the Dead opens with a vivid image of Ankhmerwer standing before the god of the dead and resurrection, Osiris. Ankhmerwer raises his arms in adoration, in posthumous worship of the husband of Isis, who the ancient Egyptians also turned to as an avatar of the Nile’s bounty. On the table between the dead and the deity is a table piled high with bread and what look to be ducks, as even sojourners in the Duat, or underworld, had to eat. In another scene Ankhmerwer kneels before the rays of the sun. He is joined in solar adoration by a host of baboons. An even older Book of the Dead, also on display, belonged to one Sobekmose, who writes “I am a swallow, I am a swallow. I am a scorpion, the daughter of Re … I am the crocodile who seizes.” The museum explains that “Egyptians hoped to join the gods after death as divine spirits” and that “coffins functioned as safe spaces for rebirth.”The Egyptian religious imagination seamlessly melded the human, animal, and divine. On display here are cat coffins that were likely dedicated to Bastet, the cat goddess of music and love. Dogs were sacred to the jackal-headed god of embalming and protector of the dead, Anubis. The god of wisdom, Thoth, took the form of an ibis bird. The museum notes that “millions of ibises were bred, sacrificed, mummified, and interred” at their own necropolis.A riveting scene in Ankhmerwer’s posthumous procession comes when he appears at the Judgement Hall of the Two Truths before the ruler of the Underworld, Osiris, who weighs his heart against a feather, meant to symbolize justice. The Egyptians imagined that every human heart was so scrutinized in the halls of the dead. Thoth is on hand to record the result while a monstrous beast, Amut, crouches, ready to pounce if Ankhmerwer is found wanting.One spell ordains that it be “recited over a scarab . . .placed in the area of a man’s heart.” Its text reads “O, my heart . . . do not stand witness against me. Do not oppose me in court. Do not act against me in the presence of the gods.” Another reads that “if they summon so-and-so to do any work that is done in the God’s Land. . . .‘I will do it, it is me,’ you should say.” The Egyptians imagined that the dead were required to labor no less than the living.

Magic of Mummies Is Resurrected at Brooklyn Museum

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