Most of what survives from ancient Egypt comes from tombs and temples, built of stone in the dry desert, while houses of mudbrick in the damp valley have mostly vanished. That makes Egyptians look obsessed with death. In fact their tombs were about life: their purpose was to keep a person living forever, with food, family and familiar things.

Many gods, many forms

Egyptian religion had hundreds of gods, many of them tied to particular towns. Gods could appear as humans, as animals or as humans with animal heads, and these forms were ways of showing a god's nature, not literal portraits. Gods also combined. Amun, the hidden god of Thebes, merged with the sun god as Amun-Ra and became the chief state god of the New Kingdom. His temple at Karnak grew over two thousand years into one of the largest religious complexes ever built.

Temples were not places of public worship. Inside the temple, only priests entered the sanctuary, where they washed, clothed and fed the god's statue each day. Ordinary people met the gods at festivals, when the statue was carried out in procession, and in household shrines and small offerings.

The story of Osiris

The most important myth concerned Osiris, a good king murdered by his jealous brother Set. Isis, his wife and sister, searched for his body, restored him with magic and conceived their son Horus, who grew up to defeat Set and claim the throne. Osiris became ruler of the dead. The story explained kingship, since each living king was Horus and each dead king became Osiris, and it offered hope that death could be undone. Egyptian sources mostly allude to the myth in pieces. The fullest connected telling comes from the Greek writer Plutarch, in his essay On Isis and Osiris, written around AD 100.

The parts of a person

Egyptians thought a person had several parts that survived death. The ka was the life force, which needed food offerings to go on living. The ba, shown as a bird with a human head, was something like the personality, free to leave the tomb by day and return at night. When the rites succeeded, the dead became an akh, a transfigured spirit. All of these needed the body as a home base, which is why preserving it mattered.

Making a mummy

The earliest Egyptians were buried in hot sand, which dried bodies naturally. Later, deliberate mummification developed and reached its height in the New Kingdom. Herodotus described the process, and modern study of mummies largely confirms him. Embalmers removed the brain, often through the nose, and took out the lungs, liver, stomach and intestines, which were stored in containers now called canopic jars. The heart was usually left in the body, because it was considered the seat of thought and memory. The body was dried with natron, a natural salt, and the whole process took about seventy days. Then it was wrapped in linen with protective amulets between the layers. The best treatment was expensive; poorer families paid for simpler methods or none.

Spells for the journey

The dead needed knowledge to pass safely through the underworld. The oldest of these religious texts, the Pyramid Texts, were first carved inside the pyramid of King Unas, about 2350 BC. At first they were for kings. In the Middle Kingdom, similar spells, the Coffin Texts, were painted inside the coffins of officials and their families. In the New Kingdom, spells were written on papyrus rolls placed in the tomb. We call these the Book of the Dead; Egyptians called them the spells for going forth by day, a name that shows their real aim: not to stay in the grave but to come out into light.

Tombs also held small figures called shabtis, placed in the tomb to do the dead person's work in the afterlife. If the gods called the deceased to dig canals or plow fields, the shabti was to answer in their place.

Did the afterlife open to everyone?

Older scholarship described a "democratization of the afterlife": spells once reserved for kings spread to nobles and then to ordinary people after the Old Kingdom collapsed. The idea neatly tracks the spread of the texts. Critics reply that ordinary people may always have hoped for eternal life, and that we only see the texts move because the elite could afford to write them down. Hope may have been widely shared even when the means to express it were not.

Worked example: reading a tomb chapel

Picture the decorated chapel of a New Kingdom official in western Thebes. On the walls, servants plow, harvest and brew beer; the official and his wife sit at a table piled with food; musicians play at a banquet. A visitor might read these as scenes of a pleasant life. Egyptians read them as working equipment. Painted food could feed the ka if real offerings stopped. An inscription asks passersby to recite an offering prayer, since saying the words could provide the bread and beer. The tomb was a machine for keeping a person alive in memory and in ritual. It depended on the living, which is why tomb owners pleaded with future visitors. Remembering the dead was a duty, and forgetting them was a second death.