The New Empire (1600-1200 B.C.) was the great period of foreign
conquest. The Hyksos, Asiatic invaders, had held Egypt for a
century or more. The Theban princes who drove them out became
kings of Egypt, and followed them into Asia. With an army trained
in war by the long struggle with the Hyksos, the Egyptian kings,
having tasted the sweetness of the spoils of war, entered on the
conquest of western Asia and the Sudan. The plunder of both these
regions poured into Egypt. Under Thothmes III an annual campaign
was conducted into Syria to bring back the spoils and the
tribute. Foreign slaves and the products of foreign handicraft
were for sale in every market-place. The treasury was filled to
overflowing. A large share was assigned to Amon, the god of the
Theban family. Temples were built for him; estates established
for the maintenance of his rites; thousands of priests enrolled
for the service of his properties. The god became, in a material
sense, the greatest god of Egypt, the national god; and his
priesthood became the most powerful organization in the kingdom.
The high priest of Amon usurped the power of the king and finally
supplanted him. Such was the period in which the next great
development of the Egyptian idea of immortality is to be noted--
a period of priestly activity in the beginning and of priestly
domination in the end.
The priests are the scribes, the men of learning. They have the
lore of all magic, medicine, rules of conduct, religious rites.
It is not mere chance, therefore, that the New Empire was marked
by a great increase of magic in all its forms--texts and
symbolic objects--and by a great development in the knowledge
of the other world. In some of the texts the geography of the
underworld, in which Osiris is king, is worked out in great
detail. When the sun sets in the west, Ra in his boat enters the
underworld and passes through it during the twelve hours of the
night, bringing light and happiness to those who are in the
underworld. In the effort to secure the tomb against plundering,
the royal graves had been cut in the solid rock,--long and
complicated passages with false leads and deceptive turns and the
burial chamber in an unexpected place. The long walls of these
rooms presented a great surface suitable to decoration, and they
were utilized to depict scenes from the underworld and the
passage of Ra through it, so that the tombs became in fact
representations of the land of the dead, and were so considered.
These royal tombs were at a distance from the cultivated land,
hidden in valleys in the desert. Their funerary temples were
built on the edge of the desert beside the temples of the gods of
the place.
Such fantastical reconstructions of the other world, however,
never found general favor and are confined to a few royal tombs.
The priests and other prominent people have rolls of papyrus
buried with them, bearing copies of books of the dead. These
books of the dead are made up of a series of chapters, each
complete in itself and each dealing with some phase of the future
life. There is no set order of chapters. There is no fixed number
of chapters. Each scribe seems to have selected the chapters
which he considered useful. The general title is: Chapters of the
going forth by day. The general character may be given by a
paragraph attached to one of the chapters in the Book of Ani the
Scribe [Edited by E. A. W. Budge, p. 26]: "If this book be known
on earth and written on the coffin, it is my mouth. He shall come
forth by day in any form he desires and he shall go into his
place without being prevented. There shall be given to him bread
and beer and meat upon the altar of Osiris. He shall enter in, in
peace, to the field of Earu according to this decree of the one
who is in the City of Dedu. There shall be given to him wheat and
barley there. He shall flourish as he did upon earth. He shall do
his desires like these nine Gods who are in the underworld, as
found true millions of times. He is the Osiris: the Scribe Ani."
There are chapters to overcome all the evil which a soul may
encounter; there are words to greet all the gods whom the soul
desires to visit. The Scribe Ani had an exceptional position on
earth; he desires to do his desire in the other world; and in the
names of Osiris he recites the magic words that bring him the
power. He is Ani, but he calls himself Osiris; just as the
priestly doctor mixes his dose of medicine and calls it "the eye
of Horus tested and found true."
In addition to magical texts, there are also magical, or
symbolic, objects placed in the graves,--amulets of various
kinds which were to be used in the other world. Some of these
were simply the amulets used in daily life to guard against
sickness, bite of snake, and other earthly evils which were also
incident to the life after death. Other amulets, like the
so-called _Ushabtiu_, were to meet special conditions of the
other world. These _Ushabtiu_, or "answerers," were little images
of workmen bearing agricultural implements whose duty it was to
take the place of the dead in the fields of Earu when Osiris as
king called him to do his share of the field work. Even the king
appears liable to this service, and for him thousands of these
figures were made,--sometimes labeled each with the day of the
year. In a few cases there was even a charm written on the figure
to prevent it hearing the command of any one but its master.
Alongside these manifold manifestations of the belief in magic,
other furniture--implements, weapons, and utensils--are still
placed in the grave. The offering places are still maintained.
All burials are now extended on the back and wrapped in bandages.
Yet the common graves lack the receptacles for the viscera, lack
magical texts, lack ushabtiu, and--in a word--lack all those
things which are typical of the better-class graves of the
period. The conception of the future life among the common people
is apparently not essentially different from that of the Old
Empire. But the books of the dead and the offering formulas show
that the priests and high officials at death were called Osiris.
By the end of the Late Period the Osiris cult of the dead had
come to be universal. No doubt political events had much to do
with this. The absorption of the powers of the king by the
priesthood of the national god Amon-Ra, the crushing of the
nobility by a succession of foreign invaders, and the general
uncertainty of life, had disturbed the old fixed relations. The
hope of every Egyptian turned to a glorified future life as
Osiris.
The tendency to use magical texts and symbolic objects reached
its height. About 700 B.C. a revival of national life, brought
about by the establishment of the Egyptian kings of Sais as kings
of Egypt, led to a renaissance of Egyptian art. The old monuments
were copied and imitated, the old funerary texts and offering
formulas were sought out in the older graves. Even the pyramid
texts reappear after one thousand years of practical oblivion.
The value of master words was so firmly fixed in the Egyptian
mind that misunderstood texts of all sorts were copied out and
placed in the graves to secure to the dead some vague benefit in
the other world.
The process of mummification was at its height. The bodies were
no longer preserved. The process was merely the creation of a
simulacrum of the dead Osiris So-and-So. All the perishable parts
of the body were removed or destroyed by chemicals. Only the
skin, bones, hair, and teeth remained to be padded with mud and
resin, wrapped in cloths, covered with a painted and gilded
_cartonnage_ to represent the glorified Osiris mummy.