Ancient Egyptian Letters to the Dead : The Realm of the Dead through the Voice of the Living /
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In Ancient Egyptian Letters to the Dead: the Realm of the Dead through the Voice of the Living Julia Hsieh investigates the beliefs and practices of communicating with the dead in ancient Egypt through close lexical semantic analysis of extant Letters. Hsieh shows how oral indicators, toponyms, and adverbs in these Letters signal a practice that was likely performed aloud in a tomb or necropolis, and how the senders of these Letters demonstrate a belief in the power and omniscience of their deceased relatives and enjoin them to fight malevolent entities and advocate on their behalf in the afterlife. These Letters reflect universals in beliefs and practices and how humankind, past and present, makes sense of existence beyond death.
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1 online resource. :
Includes bibliographical references and index. :
9789004472327
9789004472310
Regressus ad uterum : la mort comme une nouvelle naissance dans les grands textes funéraires de l'Égypte pharaonique (Ve-XXe dynastie) /
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"This work, stem[ming] from a doctoral dissertation, aims at demonstrating that referring to birth and its practical modalities is an essential aspect of Ancient Egypt's funerary beliefs. From the Pyramid Texts to the books of the afterlife in the New Kingdom, funerary writings of Egypt are full of allusions to post mortem fate viewed as second birth, which imitates more of less precisely the biological process of the first. Be he king or an ordinary man, the dead is carried in gestation by one or several divine mothers and is born again in the afterworld; there his umbilical cord is cut, he is washed, fed and cared for like a newborn child. Numerous mythical elements join the purely practical ones, thus reinventing the biological model and showing the intermingling of both the worldly and cosmic levels. thanks to this cyclic process, not only does the deceased access the hereafter, but he is also eternally alive there." -- Page [4] of cover.
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xi, 451 pages : illustrations ; 29 cm :
Includes bibliographical references and indexes. :
9782724707434