82 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reprint of 1994, 1998 edition -- Word and Image together for the first time in 3500 years., March 21, 2008
This review is from: The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day - The Complete Papyrus of Ani Featuring Integrated Text and Full-Color Images (Paperback)
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
The Papyrus of Ani was painted in Egypt about 1250 BC. It represents the best preserved, longest, most ornate, and beautifully executed example of the form of Mortuary Text known as the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Ani was a well-to-do scribe (or accountant) within the Temple hierarchy who, as he approached middle age, decided it was time to order his personalized selection of the prayers and invocations designed as a guide to the Egyptian afterlife. Compiled from the oldest religious culture on earth, these spells (known as the Pyramid Texts) had originally been engraved on the walls of the tombs of kings or pharaohs). As time went on, they began to be more widely available, carved and painted on the wooden sarcophagi of great nobles (where they are known as Coffin texts). Finally, they became even more widely available, painted on scrolls and available to the upper middle class. Ani's papyrus measured 78 feet long by 15 inches high.
The prayers are connected to certain archetypal images. Thus an invocation to Osiris, the Lord of the Underworld, will be written within a painting (or vignette) of that deity. The meaning of the passage is a marriage of word and image, reaching well beyond the merely verbal level of the brain. One of the best known examples of these breathtaking unions of text and image is the Weighing of the Heart scene. Here, the heart (the moral integrity of the deceased, the conscience) is weighed against the feather of Truth and Justice. If the cumulative effects of the person's past have allowed his soul to be as light as the feather of Truth, he or she is judged pure and admitted to the presence of the Lord of the Dead in preparation for the journey through the Afterlife. However, if the person's heart is weighted down with the burden of sin, his soul is flung to the great monster who awaits the recording of the verdict and is no more.
As a magical, polytheistic religion, the Egyptian spiritual path was alive with creativity and energy. The spiritual dignity afforded the observant Egyptian was an invigorating state. One who had led an upright moral life, who had shown respect to the Gods, and, who had been strong enough to persevere through the awesome dangers of the path of the afterlife, was then invited to feast with his Gods, playing board games in beautiful fields, drinking beer and enjoying related pleasures, The successful adherent would reach a stellar glory of his own, at last a member of that hierarchy his life had been spent in honoring.
The impact of Ancient Egypt on modern western culture is of course ubiquitous. Egypt is known as the Mother of Western Civilization. The 42 part Negative Confession is a source of our own Ten Commandments. (The additional ancient statute against the bringing of law suits might be worth revisiting!) Egyptian religion is the source of the Judaeo-Christian belief in the after death resurrection promised to mankind as a reward for righteous living.
The Egyptian religion was a magical religion that involved a continuous interaction between the individual and the various deities who constituted its elaborate and exalted pantheon. Initiates were required to memorize magical formulas and spells, and to demonstrate their proficiency therein; tests of courage and honor were administered by the officers of the Temple. Possession of secret knowledge, along with a highly developed moral character, were necessary to penetrate the deeper levels of Egyptian spirituality.
Egypt's moral teaching presented in its Wisdom literature and Mortuary texts attain to the highest levels of sacred awareness. Egypt's temples, statues, frescoes, carvings, jewelry, painted scrolls and sarcophagi stand as mute witnesses to a brilliant and lofty spiritual culture that has never been equaled on earth. The silent and stationary images of The Egyptian Book of the Dead continue to speak and move today, some four millennia after their creation.
* * * * *
The story of the securing of the Papyrus of Ani combines elements of fate and tragedy, even slapstick, and marks the very end of European colonialism in North Africa. Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, assistant Keeper of the Egyptian Collection at the British Museum, and author and editor of many books on ancient Near Eastern civilizations, arrived in Egypt in 1887 with funds for the purchase of antiquities for the Museum. There had recently been a series of extraordinary finds in Upper Egypt. The Egyptian government, seeking to preserve the finds, had appointed police/military units to seek out native Egyptians in possession of these antiquities and to prevent Europeans from buying them. Budge was personally threatened with arrest should he attempt to purchase anything.
At Luxor, Budge found a papyrus he described as the largest such roll he had ever seen. "... I was amazed at the beauty and freshness of the colours of the human figures and animals, which in the dim light of the candles and heated air of the tomb, seemed to be alive." In fact Budge was obsessed with the papyrus. He arranged for a tin smith to make a cylindrical box to protect the roll. He evaded the chief of police of Luxor, who was carrying out orders from the Director of the Service of Antiquities. The Ani papyrus was stored in a small building nearby the old Luxor Hotel, where it had been placed under government guard. Budge and the antiquities dealers first attempted to get the guards drunk, then to bribe them to leave their posts for an hour. Finally they arranged for a crew to quietly dig under the wall. A substantial supper was arranged for the guards and while they feasted, the conspirators removed the papyrus of Ani along with numerous other finds through the two foot square hole they had dug for the purpose earlier in the evening. Secreting the papyrus aboard a steamer at midnight, Budge arrived in Cairo, and with the help of members of the British army, managed to get the papyrus off to London.
* * * * *
Here's where the real trouble began. Budge cut the papyrus into 37 nearly equal lengths for ease of handling. The sheets were glued onto wooden boards to keep then rigid. Fortunately Budge immediately commissioned a facsimile to be prepared. An exquisite limited edition was produced by color lithography in 1890 preserving forever the awesome beauty of the ancient original. Meanwhile the translation began which took five years and a companion volume of translation was released in 1895. Meanwhile, the extraordinary nature of the find encouraged the British Museum to display the sheets under a large skylight in a central hall. The glue and direct sunlight damaged the papyrus beyond repair. The translation had also revealed that many of the cuts were made in the wrong places, thus chapters were interrupted, vignettes were split, and text was left far from its accompanying image.
Book designer James Wasserman arranged to photograph his extremely rare copy of the British Museum facsimile of the papyrus. Utilizing the modern magic of computers and state-of-the-art production techniques, the images were scanned, reassembled, and electronically recut to best display the 78 foot papyrus as a book. A team of Egyptologists was led by Dr. Ogden Goelet of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at New York University, who wrote an overall commentary on the work along with a plate by plate The bulk of the translation used is that of the late Dr. Raymond O. Faulkner, whose work is universally acknowledged as the most authoritative. It was updated by Dr. Goelet to reflect advances in Egyptian philology. Carol Andrews of the Department of Antiquities of the British Museum wrote the Preface and facilitated access to the original papyrus. Eva van Dassow acted as overall project editor. The work of these scholars made this publication as intellectually accurate as it is visually beautiful.
The translation of the text of each image is placed on the page directly below the image, allowing the reader, for the first time in 3500 years, to gaze on the images while reading the words of the papyrus. Uncluttered with footnotes or other extraneous matter, the papyrus is displayed with the intent of allowing the modern reader to experience the full depth of the original. The restoration of the unity of word and image in this publication of the Papyrus of Ani has brought to life one of the most important early spiritual treasures of mankind.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent for the novice (and for the pros and intermediates, too!), November 7, 2009
This review is from: The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day - The Complete Papyrus of Ani Featuring Integrated Text and Full-Color Images (Paperback)
I own a copy of the prior edition of the book but having glanced over this one it appears to be virtually the same. This text is an excellent addition to one's library, particularly if one is interested in such things or even slightly curious.
I love its arrangement but a number of the images have been so computerized that they almost look cartoonish. While a book of pictures and text is no substitute for the originals, this is about as close as one can get for the price.
And, the price is not bad. The great thing is that those readers who cannot read Egyptian will find in this text a window to ancient Egypt. Even for those who can read the text for themselves without the English translation will find this work of use in beefing up their skills in reading Egyptian due to the fact that most of the images are so clear as to allow actual reading of the Egyptian text from the photos and then checking their work by the translation below.
But, beware! The English text does not match up with the Egyptian text in all places. Faulkner's English translation of an "ideal text" concatinated from a number of texts as the result of textual criticism is what is used in the book throughout. This "ideal text" does not, of course, really exist and so there are places where there will be no English translation representing parts of the Egyptian text and other places where there will be English translation for which there is no Egyptian text.
Yes, there will be differences of opinion in how certain of the passages have been rendered, and certainly we know more about the language than was known at the time this volume was originally released. But, these do not really matter in light of the fact that one can conveniently look over this text without having to travel to the British Museum to do it, and one does not have to rely on the works which transcribe the text of the Payrus of Ani and render them into English.
Although I prefer to look at the originals of texts (because sometimes photos can obscure certain elements of the texts and the medium beneath), this book forms a prized possession on my shelf of things Egyptian.
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