![]() ![]() ∾ntering in among the gods is a very restricted thing. The reason that the creatures are terrifying is not to scare souls trying to access these places, but to keep out those who dont belong there, Scalf said. Among the spookier illustrations on display at the Getty are depictions of gods (the jackal-headed Anubis the falcon-headed Horus) and monsters (Ammit the Devourer, a crocodile-headed hybrid of a lion and a hippopotamus). In a hellscape primed with booby traps and populated by some of antiquitys most fearful imaginings, magic mattered. Without the right spells, you could be decapitated (Spell 43), placed onto a slaughter block (Spell 50) or, perhaps most humiliating of all, turned upside down (Spell 51), which would reverse your digestive functions and cause you to consume your own waste (Spells 52 and 53). For instance, Spell 33 was used to ward off snakes, which had an unsettling taste for chewing the bones of a putrid cat. Each spell was intended for a specific situation that the dead might encounter along the way. The numbering system he used to identify the various spells is still used today and figures prominently on the Gettys exhibition panels.Ĭompiled and refined over millenniums since about 1550 B.C., the Book of the Dead provided a sort of visual map that allowed the newly disembodied soul to navigate the duat, a mazelike netherworld of caverns, hills and burning lakes. Indeed, the original name for the text translates to the ∻ook of Coming Forth by Day. In 1842 German scholar Karl Richard Lepsius published a translation of a manuscript and coined the name Book of the Dead (das Todtenbuch), which reflected long-standing fantasies about the nature and character of Egyptian civilization. The texts are a means to assuage your mortal anxiety and control your destiny, said Foy Scalf, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago and the editor of the exhibition catalog. Your happiness weighs more happily than the life to come, reads one inscription from the New Kingdom period, which lasted from 1550 B.C. Unlike todays insurance policies, no two copies were the same.ĭespite the books title, it was life rather than the afterlife that preoccupied ancient Egyptians, who lived for 35 years on average. Sara Cole, curator of the Getty exhibition, called the incantations a kind of supernatural travel insurance designed to empower and safeguard the departed on the long, tortuous journey through the afterlife. Rita Lucarelli, an Egyptologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said, I am glad that the Getty finally decided to disclose and exhibit what has been until now an almost forgotten part of its glorious collection of antiquities, but that contains in fact important specimens of one of the most famous ancient Egyptian corpus in the world.Ī standard component in Egyptian elite burials, the Book of the Dead was not a book in the modern sense of the term but a compendium of some 200 ritual spells and prayers, with instructions on how the deceaseds spirit should recite them in the hereafter. On Wednesday, an exhibition at the Getty will present seven of the most representative pieces to the public for the first time. to 100 B.C., have been stowed in a vault, fragile and easily damaged by light. For the last four decades, the writings, which span a period from around 1450 B.C. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1983. Together with his wife, Hanni, Kraus donated the lot to the J. His descendants auctioned off his private library bit by bit, and by the late 1970s his collection of 19 ancient funerary scroll fragments each a part of what is today collectively known as the Egyptian Book of the Dead was acquired by New York book dealer Hans P. By the time Phillipps died in 1872, he had amassed a collection of 60,000 documents and 50,000 printed books. Soon there was hardly room in his moldering Cotswolds mansion for his second wife, Elizabeth, who eventually moved to a boardinghouse in Torquay, an English working-class seaside resort. A professed vello-maniac, Phillipps, a quarrelsome baronet, bought manuscripts indiscriminately from booksellers with whom he engaged in ceaseless battle. In the mid-19th century, British antiquarian Sir Thomas Phillipps announced his intention of owning one copy of every book in the world. ![]()
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