Egyptian Funerary Culture

The legacy of ancient Egypt is almost always envisioned with its grandiose tombs, mysteries mummies, and ever-lasting pyramids. It is no surprise that all of these are directly related to Egypt’s funerary culture and spiritual beliefs. The effort put into these objects’ preservation has been of great help to modern scholars to better understand their religion. However, we develop a skewed perception because of this, as artifacts and texts from other perspectives or of different subjects are lacking in comparison. Given this, I believe that it is safe to say that their funerary culture, religion, and mythology were extremely important to the Egyptians since so much priority was given to their burials and temples, ensuring that they were built to last. …show more content…
The main corpora of ancient Egyptian funerary texts (in order of associated time period) are: the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts, the Book of the Dead, and the underworld books. (It was most likely that these texts found in the tombs came from a wider, pre-made selection, though no library or collection has been found containing them (Lichtheim 1976:119)). Throughout these texts, the overall target is the same: the deceased must safely reach the afterlife, bypassing any obstacles through means of magical knowledge. However, they differ in methodology, which underlying themes are emphasized, and so on. Over time, a complex narrative of what happens to the deceased emerges. Religion, however, did not exist within a vacuum. I will argue that as the social and political history of ancient Egypt grew, they deeply influenced how the funerary texts developed as well. I will summarize the overall themes of history by kingdom and connect them to their temporally-related funerary