Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, by David Lorton.

Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt by Jan Assmann; David Lorton

Review by: Foy Scalf
Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 70, No. 1 (April 2011), pp. 124-126
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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124  F  Journal of Near Eastern Studies
hundred scribal hands have been identified as respon­
sible for the more than eight hundred different manu­
scripts that have been discovered to date;2 hence no
explanation is offered for how so many scribes would
have made do with so few inkwells.
4. Nor does the author, in adopting the outdated
Essene hypothesis, take into account the fact, now
widely recognized, that the range of theological per­
spectives represented in the texts precludes them from
having originated with only one of the many groups
representing the various strains of Jewish thought in
the period represented by the scrolls, which extended
from early in the second century b.c. to late in the
first century a.d.3
inkwells were found in the scriptorium; and according to M. Broshi
(“Inkwells,” in the same publication, p. 375), a grand total of four
on the entire site.
2 
I purposely use a round number because, owing to the frag­
mentary nature of many of the texts, estimates of the total number
of distinct manuscripts discovered range between eight hundred
and nine hundred. The encyclopedia cited in the previous footnote
gives the number as “more than eight hundred” (L. H. Schiffman,
James C. VanderKam, “Preface,” p. viii).
3 
Strangely, the author knows of the existence of the encyclo­
pedia cited in the two previous notes, but he appears not to have
profited from the recognition expressed by some authors of this
collective work that the discovered scrolls cannot possibly represent
a single theological current and the relatively few scribes who would
have set down in writing the documents of such a group. See the
discussion in the review cited here above, n. 1, and the quotation
there of E. Tov, one of the most important figures in Dead Sea
Scrolls research, to the effect that “The scribes who wrote the texts
found in the Judean Desert were in a few cases local, but most of
them wrote elsewhere in ancient Israel” (p. 830; as becomes clear
from perusing the longer discussion on p. 827, “ancient Israel” does
not designate the Israelite period but ancient Israel as opposed to
modern Israel).
Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt. By Jan Assmann. Translated from the German by David Lorton. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 490 + 7 figs.
Reviewed by Foy Scalf, University of Chicago.
The work of Jan Assmann, one of the most prolific
Egyptologists of our time, has been made increasingly
more available to English speakers through the efforts
of Cornell University Press (CUP) and their steadfast
translator of Egyptology books, David Lorton.1 Death
1 
Jan Assmann, The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (Ithaca,
2001), a translation of Ägypten: Theologie und Frömmigkeit einer
frühen Hochkultur (Stuttgart, 1984).
5. I am not an expert myself in this huge field and
hence cannot say whether the author’s documentation
is adequate or not, but it is perhaps not out of place
to cite what appears to be a telltale detail: the author
makes reference (p. 24) to an ostracon which is said
to prove the existence of a “community” (yaḥad) at
Qumran, but he is seemingly unaware of a refutation
of the reading proposed in the editio princeps.4 In the
very next issue of the journal in which the original
claim was made, one of Israel’s leading epigraphers
provided a close-up photograph and new hand-copies
of the text itself in support of her claim that the word
yḥd is not in fact present on the ostracon.5 The original
publication is cited as one of five arguments indicating
“a strong relationship between the site, the caves, and
the Scrolls” (p. 23), but the refutation of the crucial
reading goes unmentioned.6
The author has correctly realized that for the scrolls
to make sense to a broader audience they must be
placed in a plausible historical, cultural, religious, and
literary context. He unfortunately has chosen one that
is far too narrow to accommodate the multifarious
data present in the texts themselves.
4 
Frank Moore Cross and Esther Eshel, “Ostraca from Khirbet
Qumrân,” Israel Exploration Journal 47 (1997): 17–28 (ostracon
no. l).
5 
A. Yardeni, “A Draft of a Deed on an Ostracon from Khirbet
Qumrân,” Israel Exploration Journal 47 (1997): 233–37.
6 
Above, I described the author as “seemingly unaware” of the
refutation—the adverb is necessary because, in the presentation
of the reading and argument put forward in the editio princeps,
one finds the caveat “If their reconstruction is correct . . .” (p. 24).
Whatever the basis of this qualification may be, even the readers of
a general work deserve to be made more specifically aware of the
tenuous nature of a particular argument.
and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, a slightly abridged
and updated translation of Tod und Jenseits im alten
Ägypten (2001), exhibits the same high standard
of quality we have come to expect from past CUP
volumes. The present volume straddles the line be­
tween scholarly tome and advanced student reading.
Divided into two parts, “Images of Death” and “Ritu­
als and Recitations,” the book’s seventeen chapters

serve as a compendious introduction to how ancient
Egyptians approached their mortality as well as their
impending immortality. Part one (chaps. 1–9) focuses
on the various roles played by death in Egyptian funer­
ary religion. Part two (chaps. 10–17) addresses the
rites, personnel, and literature associated with death.
Discussions of the many facets of Egyptian religious
mentality will serve well in the classroom for both
undergraduates and graduate students, while schol­
ars and interested readers will find a useful introduc­
tion along with a plethora of new and noteworthy
interpretations.
For scholars familiar with Assmann’s previous work,
one of the strengths of this book is its attempt to
disentangle an issue for which Assmann himself is
somewhat responsible. In his 1990 contribution to
the Festschrift of Miriam Lichtheim, Assmann pro­
posed a dichotomy between mortuary texts and fu­
nerary texts.2 According to his categorization, the
former were meant for recitation during rituals as­
sociated with embalming and burial while the latter
were meant to accompany the deceased to the grave
and provide him with support in his netherworld
journeys. The distinction between mortuary texts
and funerary texts, however, cannot be rigorously
maintained because texts meant for ritual recitation
were often taken to the grave for their religious effec­
tiveness, while spells originally meant to be employed
by the deceased often found their way into the rites
accompanying burial. Therefore, English-speaking
Egyptologists have used the terms interchangeably.
In the present work, Assmann correctly abandons
this terminology in favor of “mortuary liturgy” and
“mortuary literature,” thereby wisely placing the onus
on the noun rather than the descriptor, the function
rather than the text (p. 238, original “Totenliturgien”
and “Totenliteratur”). In this view, a single papyrus
could serve as a mortuary liturgy when recited by a
priest, but as mortuary literature when taken to the
grave. However, some confusion has resulted from
the translation process. To take only two examples,
“Totenkult” is translated as “funerary cult” (p. 323),
while “Totenspruch” is translated as “mortuary spell”
on the same page. Earlier in the text, “Totensprüchen”
is translated as “funerary spells” (p. 301). Lorton is
not to be forcefully blamed for the lack of consistency,
2 
Jan Assmann, “Egyptian Mortuary Liturgies,” in Studies in
Egyptology Presented to Miriam Lichtheim, ed. Sarah Israelit-Groll
(Jerusalem, 1990), 1:1–3 and n. 2.
Book Reviews  F 125
for it reduces the monotonous repetition of terms
in the English translation and only affects those with
specialized knowledge in the field. Nevertheless, one
must return to the German original when tackling any
such terminological issues.
Throughout Death and Salvation, Assmann con­
tinues to build upon his vast store of important
publications, yet again bringing to his work a deep
background in theoretical literature, especially anthro­
pology and philosophy. This gives his work a decidedly
comparative flair, citing parallels or contrasts with cul­
tures ancient or modern, Near Eastern or otherwise.
He is often bold, proposing ideas that will surely in­
spire debate among fellow Egyptologists. For exam­
ple, he claims in the introduction under the section
“Death as Culture Generator” that man grapples with
the existence of death by creating “an artificial world
in which he can live and that is culture” (p. 7). This
follows from his thesis that “death is the origin and
center of culture,” which the reader meets as the very
first sentence of the book (p. 1). Although he is well-
versed in cultural theory, it would be no surprise to
see Assmann’s supposition garner as much opposition
as it does support.
Many Egyptologists would likely disagree with
Assmann’s statement that “[p]rior to the Graeco-
Roman Period, there are no traces of shamanism,
prophecy, or mysticism in Egypt. All forms of imme­
diate contact with the divine realm refer to life after
death” (p. 78). This old Egyptological opinion had
already been contested twenty years ago by Edward
Wente and further evidence such as the Letters to the
Dead or the ecstatic episode portrayed in the Tale of
Wenamun also contradict it.3 Assmann is at his best
when explaining the elements of the personality, es­
pecially the ka as social signifier, being “the vehicle of
the vindication that restored the individual’s status as
a social person, which had been destroyed by death”
(p. 96), an idea that has already found its way into
recent scholarly literature.4
As the volume under review is a translation of an
earlier work, it is necessary to consider the useful­
ness of the English edition. Following the layout of
the German original, the English edition has its notes
placed at the end, which is a tiresome inconvenience
3 
Edward Wente, “Mysticism in Pharaonic Egypt?” JNES 41
(July 1982): 161–79.
4 
Cf. Mark Smith, Transversing Eternity: Texts for the Afterlife
from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt (Oxford, 2009), 6.
126  F  Journal of Near Eastern Studies
for those interested in the sources of Assmann’s di­
verse insights. While nearly all of the chapters con­
tain more endnotes in the German version due to
abridgement (the exceptions are chapter 5 and the
afterword), Lorton has made the information in the
English endnotes less cryptic to non-Egyptologists
by expanding the abbreviations. The English text has
been streamlined by moving translations of several
Egyptian passages from the body of the German edi­
tion to various notes in the English edition. The very
useful indexes of sources, divine names, non-Egyptian
names, and ancient and modern authors’ names, pres­
ent in the German volume, have unfortunately been
removed from the English edition, being replaced
by a simple word index that includes only a random
selection of the items found in the more extensive
Les cultes d’Amon hors de Thèbes: Recherches de géographie religieuse. By Ivan Guermeur. Bibliothèque de l’École
des Hautes Études, Sciences Religieuses 123. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Pp. xi + 634 + 22 pls.
Reviewed by Foy Scalf, University of Chicago.
Derived from his 2001 doctoral thesis at l’École Pra­
tique des Hautes Études, Les cultes d’Amon hors de
Thèbes by Ivan Guermeur is a substantial book de­
signed to stand as a reference volume for Egyptolo­
gists. With a preface by Christiane Zivie-Coche and a
postface by Jean Yoyotte, the volume under review has
clearly found favor with Guermeur’s advisors and col­
leagues. The book is fundamentally a catalog divided
into nine sections, each devoted to a geographical
region presented without particular order: (1) Mem­
phite region, (2) Western Delta, (3) Central Delta, (4)
Eastern Delta, (5) Upper Egypt, (6) Middle Egypt,
(7) Deserts, (8) Lower Nubia, and (9) Upper Nubia.
Within these nine sections, there are forty-seven chap­
ters corresponding to attested cults of Amun in each
of these broader regions, identified by toponyms or
cult designations (e.g., ʾImn ḫnty ḥw.wt nṯr.w, ‘Amun,
foremost of the temples’).
Each chapter begins with a brief introductory
section providing a description of the locality and a
statement of the cult’s importance, supplemented with
bibliography. Guermeur then presents the documen­
tation for the cult in question, classified by a simple
system of abbreviations: DR for royal documents
(“documents royaux”), DP for private documents
German indexes. It is surprising to find detailed in­
dex entries under “mortuary,” but none under “fu­
nerary” (though “funeral” does occur), despite the
latter term’s appearance at least twenty-three times
in the text and its critical importance to portions of
Assmann’s argumentation.5
It is needless to say that much of Assmann’s Egyp­
tological work has become required reading, and
Death and Salvation will be no exception. Contro­
versial, insightful, incredibly informed, and in constant
contact with the primary textual material, this volume
will continue to inspire discussion for years to come.
E.g., as a descriptor for rites/rituals/cults (pp. 38, 90, 229,
5 
323), liturgies (pp. 33, 95), etc.
(“documents privés”), IT for temple inscriptions
(“inscriptions provenant des temples”), and IG for
geographical inscriptions (“certaines inscriptions
géographiques”). Most chapters include a short con­
clusion summarizing the cult’s temporal range and
significant features. Following this catalog there is an
essay focused on Amun’s connection to royal power,
the development of that power over time, the clergy,
and theology. A helpful set of indexes includes royal
names, private names, divine names, place names,
titles, and sources. Twenty-two plates complete the
volume, illustrating several monuments and figures
of reference.
In his introduction, Guermeur reviews the principal
theories about Amun’s development, beginning with
Sethe’s foundational work and the ensuing reactions to
it.1 As is often the case in studying the ancient world,
students may be surprised at how little we know about
such an important figure in the Egyptian pantheon as
Amun, especially regarding his origins and eventual
eminence as a so-called “imperial divinity.” Guermeur
Kurt Sethe, Amun und die acht Urgötter von Hermopolis: Eine
1 
Untersuchung über Ursprung und Wesen des ägyptischen Götter-
königs, Abhandlungen der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften
zu Berlin, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse Jahrg. 4 (Berlin, 1929).