12/5/19 Shannon Brewi PD7

12/5/19

Shannon Brewi PD 7

Aim: How does the Egyptian Book of the Dead highlight diverse philosophies in existence?

Notes:

We continued watching The Book of the Dead National Geographic film.

• The Book of the Dead is necessary to purchase if you want life after death.
• Every person who wants to buy a Book of the Dead gets a version that is unique

to them.

• It is a perilous journey to reach the Afterlife, so you need the Book of the Dead

to help you on your journey there.

• Death was a crisis to overcome

• You must fight demons on your journey.
• If you succeed, your final destination is the Field of Reeds or the Field of Offerings.

This is considered paradise.

• There is a lot of manual labor for the gods in the Afterlife, so you want to bring

slave figurines with you in order to have them do the work instead.

• In the Afterlife, people’s hearts are weighed to determine if they deserve eternal life.

If the heart is too heavy, you are killed and do not get to experience eternal life. If your

heart is light, then you were a good person in your life and deserve to live forever.

• The heart was believed to be the most essential organ. It is where the soul lives.
• Ancient Egyptians believed it was essential for the dead to have their mouth open in

the Afterlife, so there would be an opening of the mouth ceremony. They needed an open

mouth in order to be able to eat, drink, talk and breathe. Opening the mouth also opened

all the other senses, since the senses were turned off during death. This was a spiritual

awakening.

• The dead would immediately meet Anubis, who would help guide them on their

journey. Anubis was associated with jackals.

Student Reflection:

By watching the film, we learned about the importance of the Book of the Dead to Ancient Egyptians. The film also showed similarities between the Egyptian text and the Bible. The Book of the Dead predates the Bible, so it is believed that it influenced the Bible. Many of the men that contributed to writing the Bible were Egyptian, which explains these influences. For example, the “judgment of the heart” aspect of the Book of the Dead is reflected in the Bible. In the Bible, this is instead the judgment of the person’s life and their sins to determine if they go to Heaven or Hell after death. Both of these documents have a great deal of emphasis on eternal life. Realizing these similarities will help us in our study of the Old Testament in the next unit. Learning about Ancient Egyptians’ beliefs by studying the Book of the Dead is a good background before diving into reading and interpreting the Old Testament.