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We're in the Brithish Museum in London,

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in a room that is filled with ancient Egiptian mummies,

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and as a result it's also filled with modern children.

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And tourist. It's a great room, there's great stuff here.

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We're looking at a fragment of a scroll

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which is largely ignored.

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It's a papyrus scroll.

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A papyrus is a reed that grows in the Nile Delta

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that was made into a kind of paper-like substance

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and actually was probably the sigle most important surface for writing

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right up into the Medieval.

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We're looking at a written text of something that we call the Book of the Dead

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which the ancient Egyptians had other names for,

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but which was a ancient text

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that had spell and prayers and incantations,

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things that the dead needed in the afterlife.

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This is a tradition that goes all the way back to the Old Kingdom,

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writing that we call pyramid text.

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These were sense of instructions for the afterlife,

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and than later we have coffin text, writing on coffins

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and then even later in the New Kingdom,

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we have scrolls like this that we call the books of the dead.

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Sometimes the texts were written on papyrus,

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like the one we are looking at,

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sometimes they were written on shrouds

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that the dead were burried in.

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So these were really important texts that were originally just for kings in the Old Kingdom,

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but came to be used by people who were not just part of the royal family, but

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still people of high rank, and that's what we're looking at here.

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This text was found in the tomb of someone named Hunefer, a scribe.

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A scribe had a priestly status,

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so we are dealing here with somebody who was literate,

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who occupied a very high station in Egyptian culture.

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And we actually see representations of a man who had died,

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who was burried with this text

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and if you look on the left edge of the scroll at the top,

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you can see a crouching figure in white,

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Hunefer, who is speaking to a line of crouching deities,

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gods prophesing the good life that he lived

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that he's earned a place in the afterlife.

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Well, what we have below is a scene of judgement

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whether Hunefer has lived a good life

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and deserves to live into the afterlife,

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and we see Hunefer again, this time standing on the far left

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and we can recognize him beacause he's wearing the same white robe

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and he's being led by the hand by a god with a jackal head, Anubis,

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a good that is asscociated

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with the dead, with mumification, with cemeteries

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and he's carrying in his left hand and ankh,

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a symbol of eternal life, and that's exactly what Hunefer is after.

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If we continue to move toward the right,

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we see that jackal-headed god again, Anubis, this time crouching

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and adjusting a scale, making sure that it is exactly balanced.

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On the left side, we see the heart of the dead

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so the heart is on one side of the scale, on the other side there's a feather.

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The feather belongs to Ma'at that we also see at the very top of the scale,

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and we can see a feather coming out of her head.

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Now, Ma'at is a deity associated with divine order,

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with living an ethical, ordered life.

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And in this case, the feather is lower, the feather is heavier.

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Hunfer has lived an ethical life, and therefore is brought into the afterlife.

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So he won't be devoured by that evil-looking beast next to Anubis.

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That's Ammit who has the head of a crocodile, the body of a lion and a hind-quarters of a hippopotamus.

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He's waiting to devour Hunefer's heart, should he be found to have not lived an ethical life,

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not lived according to Ma'at.

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The Egyptians belived that only if you lived the ethical life, only if you pass this test,

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would you be able to have access to the afterlife. It's not like the Christian conception

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where you have an afterlife for everybody,

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no matter if they were blessed or sinful

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that is you either go to Heaven or you go to Hell.

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Here you only go to the afterlife if you have been found to be ethical.

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The next figure that we see is another deity,

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this time with the head of an ibis, of a bird.

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This is Thoth who is reporting the proceedings of what happens to Hunefer,

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and in this case reporting that he has succeeded and will move on to the afterlife.

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I love the representation of Thoth. He is so upright, and his arm is stretched out,

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rendered in such a way that we trust him that he's gonna get this right.

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Next we see Hunefer yet again, this time being introduced to

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one of the supreme gods in the Egyptian pantheon, Osiris.

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And he's being introduced to Osiris by Osiris' son, Horus.

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Horus is easy to remember,

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cause Horus is associated with a falcon, and here has a falcon's head.

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Horus is the son of Osiris and holds in his left hand an ankh which we saw earlier,

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and again that's a symbol of eternal life.

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He is introducing him to Osiris as you said, who is in this

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fabulous enclosure, speaks to the importance of this deity.

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He's enthroned, he carries symbols of Egypt, and he sits behind a lotus blossom, a symbol eternal life

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and on top of that lotus blossom, Horus' four children who represent the four cardinal points:

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North, South, East and West.

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The children of Horus are responsible for carrying for the internal organs

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that would be placed in Canopic jars,

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so they have a critical responsibility for keeping the dead preserved.

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We see Horus again, but symbolized as an eye.

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Now remember, Horus is represented as a falcon, as a bird,

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and so here even though he's the symbol of the eye, he has talons instead of hands,

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and those carry an ostrich feather, also a symbol of eternal life.

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The representation of the eye of Horus has to do with another ancient Egyptian myth,

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the battle between Horus and Seth, but that's another story.

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Now, behind Osiris we see two smaller standing female figures,

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one of whom is Isis, Osiris's wife, the other is her sister, Nephthys,

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who's a guardian of the afterlife and mother of Anubis,

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the figure who we saw at the very beginning leading Hunefer into judgment.

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Notice the white platform that those figure are standing on. That represents natron,

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the natural salts that were deposited in the Nile and they were used by the ancient Egyptians

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to dry out all of the mummies there in this room.

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So that they could be preserved.

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Actually, the word "preservation" is really a key to thinking about Egyptian culture generally,

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because this is a culture whose forms,

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whose representations and art remain remarkably the same for thousands of years.

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Even though there are periods of instability or even just before this we have Amarna Period

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where we saw a very different way of representing the human figure.

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What we see here, these forms look very familiar to us,

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because this is the typical way

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the ancient Egyptians represented the human figure.

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Even though this is a painting from the New Kingdom, these forms would have been recognizable

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to Egyptians thousands of years earlier in the Old Kingdom.

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And we see that mixture that we see very often in ancient Egyptian art,

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of words, of hieroglyphs, of writing and images.

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I love the mix, in our modern culture we really make a distinction

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between written language and the visual arts,

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and here in ancient Egypt,

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there really is this closer relationship, this greater sense of integartion.