Ancient Egyptian mortuary religion is full of ideas which, in their conventional Egyptological interpretation, are very difficult to take seriously, seemingly contradictory and naïve as they are. This has not been a major problem within the field of Egyptology itself due to a disciplinary stance that tends to avoid engagement with the ideas ascribed to the ancient Egyptian actor, but in comparison with anthropological approaches — especially the recent “ontological turn” — such apparently absurd ideas raise a significant challenge. This paper argues that in order to “take seriously” ancient Egyptian practices, much of the Victorian baggage still with us in the traditional idea of the “quest for immortality” needs to be rethought.

The aim of this dissertation is to trace the diachronic development of the notion of Duat, the ancient Egyptian realm of the dead. Despite being a key component of the afterlife beliefs, this notion has defied all scholarly attempts at a clear definition, as it underwent a process of evolution over thousands of years without ever designating just one place at a time, but always possessing both chthonic and celestial features at once. Furthermore, new images and ideas were constantly introduced, and new layers were added to the core ideological framework established in earlier times. This study is based on the analysis of royal and non-royal funerary texts from the end of the Old Kingdom to the end of the New Kingdom (Pyramid and Coffin Texts, Book of the Dead, Underworld Books, and Books of the Sky) and aims to outline what the term Duat encompassed, where it was thought to be located, and how its characterization evolved over time. Besides presenting the most significant passages mentioning and/or describing the Duat in the various funerary compositions, each chapter will also discuss any relevant theological, cosmological, geographical, and astronomical notions necessary to clarify the conceptual framework, of which the Duat formed but a part, and will try to relate its evolution to the concurrent changes in Egyptian culture, society, and ideology. Additionally, since patterns of distribution of texts and imagery played a significant role in both temples and tombs, an analysis of the correlation between the various funerary texts and their material support complements the study, with the purpose of highlighting what the Egyptians believed to be a magical synergy between the texts for the afterlife and their context. By bringing together all these aspects, significant insight will be gained not only into the conceptualization of the next, metaphysical world but also into the understanding of the physical reality in which the Egyptians lived every day, long before those funerary texts would be of any use to them.

Collective representations of death can provide particularly germane departure points for the inference of prehistoric notions of immortality. Building on the idea that humans may have an intuitive sense of the continued existence of others after death, I suggest that one way in which a sense of immortality can be stimulated is through the communal and embodied experience of how others are buried and how social relationships are dramatized in mortuary rites and settings. In the case of early Egypt, from the late Neolithic through to Early Bronze Age, social relationships were dramatically reconfigured over an interval of some 1500 years—from pastoralist communities to a state society headed by divine kingship. The establishment of the latter, I propose, was achieved not primarily through the elevation of ancestors to divine status as is so commonly inferred, but via fundamental changes in the spatial performance of social relations and the concomitant reorientation of temporal references in certain elite cemeteries.

Building on the ongoing debates surrounding the archaeological application of New Materialism, posthumanism, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and the anthropological ontological turn, this paper examines sexual interactions between deities and humans, as well as among deities represented as statues in ancient Egypt. Acknowledging the existence of such sexual encounters and providing detailed descriptions of the involved entities alone does not fully recognize the underlying gender and class structures. This paper argues that these analyzed sexual encounters were shaped by gender and class-based power asymmetries, revealing that the ancient Egyptians and contemporary perspectives are not as distinct as they might seem.

Living with the Dead presents a detailed analysis of ancestor worship in Egypt, using a diverse range of material, both archaeological and anthropological, to examine the relationship between the living and the dead. Iconography and terminology associated with the deceased reveal indistinct differences between the blessedness and malevolence and that the potent spirit of the dead required constant propitiation in the form of worship and offerings. A range of evidence is presented for mortuary cults that were in operation throughout Egyptian history and for the various places, such as the house, shrines, chapels and tomb doorways, where the living could interact with the dead. The private statue cult, where images of individuals were venerated as intermediaries between people and the Gods is also discussed. Collective gatherings and ritual feasting accompanied the burial rites with separate, mortuary banquets serving to maintain ongoing ritual practices focusing on the deceased. Something of a contradiction in attitudes is expressed in the evidence for tomb robbery, the reuse of tombs and funerary equipment and the ways in which communities dealt with the death and burial of children and others on the fringe of society.