The tombs and funerary iconography of the Ancient Egyptians are familiar stuff but their conception of the afterlife itself remains unexplored by most people. This new exhibition presents a staggering wealth of texts, imagery and objects relating to a series of ritual spells that defined the Egyptians’ threshold of death, collectively known as the ‘Book of the Dead’. They formed a kind of passport to the afterlife, hopefully affording the traveller protection from a variety of dangers and unwanted fates: whatever your idea of the hereafter, most people would agree that avoiding spending it upside down on a diet of your own excrement and urine is a consummation devoutly to be wished. As well as mediating between the worlds of the living and the dead, these texts in their complex and shadowy genesis reveal a great deal about how ritual is central to the development of language and writing.
This is a compelling and intensive exhibition: the papyri, fresh from 1,100 hours of new conservation and reframing are astonishingly vibrant, documenting a thousand years of a culture’s changing relationship with the idea of death; they also require a good deal of close study, and you can imagine that at peak times their impact might well be a bit diminished. Fortunately there are also some superb artefacts on display, from the domestic to the monumental: the tomb of Henutmeyht forms a striking centrepiece; there are scales for the crucial ‘Weighing of the Heart’ and a beautifully alien set of dental tools for the ritual ‘Opening of the Mouth’.
In a kind of ‘making of’, the penultimate room has the tools of the scribes responsible for creating the papyri, including a small figure of the mediating god Thoth, ‘Lord of God’s Words’, in the form of a baboon – surely not the animal you’d entrust with the drawing up of such a (literally) vital document.