The Realm of the Dead through the Voice of the Living: Analysis of Ancient Egyptian Letters to the Dead

• Main Author: Hsieh, Julia Pei-Chin
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2019
• Subjects: Ancient history
• ISBN: 9781085777568; 1085777561

This dissertation focuses on the Letters to the Dead - a small body of correspondence sent by living people to their deceased relatives. Eighteen of these Letters are attested spanning the late Old Kingdom to the New Kingdom, with one known piece from the Late Period. So few examples of these Letters exist despite the longevity of this practice, alluding to a well-established tradition that may be oral in origin. Although ancient Egypt offers a wealth of materials for study, and analysis of artifacts, texts, monuments, and other evidence provides a basis for understanding ancient religious conceptions and views of the afterlife, surviving materials derive largely from the elite and so tend to reflect a top-down perspective, much of it through established funerary and religious conventions. The Letters to the Dead, some of which may have been dictated rather than written by their senders, are first-hand documents and provide a level of immediacy not present in official religious texts; essentially, these Letters to the Dead record the voices of the living.Previous studies interpret the Letters to the Dead as products of the religious, social, and political milieux in which they were written, studying them as a sub-category of religious practice rather than in a category in their own right. As these Letters are typically brief with short sentences, translations are used without their contents being closely examined. This dissertation offers an approach to the senders of the Letters to the Dead and their beliefs of the afterlife as gleaned from close lexical semantic analysis of these Letters without attributing them to a specific sector of Egyptian religion. This methodology places the contents of the Letters, and thus their senders, under the microscope as the focal point of study. By treating each Letter as distinct yet bearing in mind that their underlying premise is similar, I present information about the individual senders of the Letters and their overarching beliefs and practices that are embedded in ancient Egyptian culture.I demonstrate that the Letters to the Dead contain oral indicators that appropriate to dialogue, pointing to a possible ritualistic practice of speaking the Letters aloud to the intended recipient in the vicinity of a tomb. I show that the senders of these Letters exhibit religious beliefs that are paralleled in the near-contemporaneous Coffin Texts, and some of these senders may have been educated in a similar literary tradition as authors of later literary texts, enabling them to draw on a vast personal archive of knowledge and information. The senders of these Letters impart their beliefs about their deceased relatives who have transfigured into the Akh or "able dead". These Akh inhabit and traverse the liminal realm between the gods and humans on earth, and are requested to act as intermediaries for their relatives who are plagued by earthly or supernatural troubles. While each Letter to the Dead is unique and there appears to be no standard template, similar word choices to describe the abilities of the Akh indicate an overarching belief system that these deceased relatives can fight malevolent entities and advocate for the living in the courtroom of the gods. The recipients of these Letters to the Dead are always within one generation, directly related to the sender and known by the sender while living, that is, their parents, spouses, or children, although the recipients may be asked to call on other deceased relatives. Many of these Letters discuss issues the senders experienced within their familial group and, while the exact relationship of the senders to the various names and characters specified are seldom clarified, these texts provide more information on the ancient Egyptian concept of family both living and deceased.This dissertation is primary situated in the field of Egyptology, but the topic of communication with the dead can lead to the wide arena of interdisciplinary research. Here I present the first phase of research focused on the Letters to the Dead; future studies into cross-cultural comparisons may identify universals in beliefs and practices between geographically and temporally distinct civilizations and reshape our understanding of "religion" and how humankind, past and present, makes sense of existence beyond death.