The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife.

• Author: Roth, Ann Macy
• Position: Reviews of Books - Book Review

The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife. By ERIK HORNUNG. Translated by David Lorton. Ithaca: CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1999. Pp. xxiv + 188. $16.95 (paper).

The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife is an English edition of Erik Hornung's Altagyptischen Jenseitbucher (1997), translated from the German by the American Egyptologist David Lorton. The original was subtitled "an introductory overview," which accurately describes the actual scope of the volume. It is essentially a short descriptive catalogue of the collections of ancient Egyptian texts designed to help a dead person navigate the perils inherent in reaching and traversing the realm of the dead. The "books" were initially arranged in chronological order, but the books found in New Kingdom royal tombs, Hornung's specialty, have been extracted and are treated more fully. It is these books which constitute the bulk of the text.

The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife will no doubt serve as an invaluable reference for Egyptologists, particularly those not intensively working in the area of mortuary literature. As a concise summary of the beliefs of the premier scholar working on the New Kingdom royal tombs texts, it will be valuable even to specialists. At the other end of the spectrum, the book might also make a good textbook for a course focusing on mortuary texts, funerary religion, or cemetery archaeology. And it will be a useful source both for scholars who study other ancient civilizations and for tourists who are simply curious about all the peculiar scenes they encounter in the Valley of the Kings. However, the book will not be particularly accessible to people with no familiarity at all with Egyptian religion. The various gods (Horus, Osiris, Re, Apophis) and technical terms (ba, duat) are defined very minimally in the glossary, and the text assumes a basic knowledge of Egyptian beliefs about the underworld.

For each set of texts Hornung gives basic descriptive information, but he does not translate the texts or discuss their meaning in detail. In most chapters, a set sequence is followed. A summary description of the various forms and contexts in which the texts occur is followed by a history of their investigation, including their dating and interpretation. A following section on "Language and Structure" describes the organization of the texts and the phase and peculiarities of the language in which the texts are couched. The final section describes the contents...