The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife
October 2025 | Vol. 13.10
By Rune Nyord
Pyramids, mummified bodies, lavish grave goods — the story of the ancient Egyptians’ obsession with death and the afterlife, with attendant themes of judgment, salvation, and eternal life, has been incredibly successful, and it remains one of the primary associations most people have with the ancient culture. At first sight, this framework offers remarkably apt explanations of much of what the ancient Egyptians did. However, if we ask for specific texts or images that explicitly present ideas such as postmortem judgment to achieve eternal life, they turn out to be quite difficult to find. We might point to imagery such as the famous weighing of the heart scene, but the idea that this represents an ancient Egyptian counterpart to the Christian Final Judgment is not actually expressed in the accompanying texts and has to be supplied in the modern commentary.
If this framework is not found in contemporary Egyptian sources, where does it come from, and why has it proved so successful? These are the questions guiding my new book Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife, available in Open Access from the University of Chicago Press.
In 1819, three years before Champollion’s decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs began to provide access to indigenous texts, British polymath Thomas Young could already write confidently of “the truth of the received opinion, that the Egyptians believed in a future state of rewards and punishments”. One might expect that this “received opinion” came from the Greek and Roman authors that naturally formed the main sources of knowledge about ancient Egypt before the hieroglyphs could be read. But even there, clear expressions of Egyptian beliefs in postmortem judgment and the reward of eternal life are difficult to find. In fact, classical authors writing on ancient Egypt such as Herodotus, Diodorus, and Plutarch have remarkably little to say about afterlife beliefs considering how prevalent these ideas now seem in the ancient culture. Instead, a main inspiration turns out to come from early modern scholars’ own Christian ideas, with specific beliefs projected unto the ancient Egyptians for a variety of reasons.
The Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE) offers a detailed discussion of mummification techniques, which does not, however, address the question of any underlying motivations. In a different section of the work, he has a passage (Histories II, 123) briefly describing an ancient Egyptian belief in transmigration of the soul after death through every species of animal over a period of 3000 years. As Herodotus presents it, this is an entirely mechanical and automatic system, but by combining it with ideas about reincarnation from Plato, where the new abode of the soul is determined by its nature and behavior during its previous life, early modern scholars were able to introduce an element of ethical judgment into their model of Egyptian beliefs.
Similarly, 1st century BCE historian Diodorus of Sicily describes a ritual where the community gathers to hear accusations against a deceased person to determine whether they have the right to be buried or not (Library I, 92). This description could similarly be reinterpreted by later scholars to describe an event in the afterlife, rather than a ritual on earth — despite Diodorus’s own disavowal of this idea as a misunderstanding by the Greeks. Such a reinterpretation again supports the notion of an ethical judgment determining the deceased’s fate in the afterlife. Essentially, this became the basis of Young’s “received opinion, that the Egyptians believed in a future state of rewards and punishments”.
As noted, some of the inspiration came from ancient Greek notions of postmortem judgment, but that does not explain why such ideas became so much more prevalent in the interpretation of Egyptian religion. Often the motivation was a wish to align ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs with those of Christianity. This raises the question of why early modern scholars would want to draw such parallels in the first place.
Rather than any one single motivation, different scholars could have quite different reasons, though they often end up pulling in the same overall direction. Versions of a particularly frequent argument keep showing up through the centuries: By showing that beliefs in monotheism or immortality of the soul can be attested from the ancient Egyptians to contemporary Christianity, one can virtually prove their universality or innateness.
To mention just a single example, French historian Henri de Sponde (1568–1643) debated the rights of Protestants to be buried in Catholic cemeteries in the aftermath of the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598). One of his key arguments was that historically, all human societies had regarded burial as sacrosanct, so that outsiders to a given religion should not be allowed burial on its sacred ground. This universalist argument provided a strong motivation to see Egyptian burial practices, like all others, as aiming towards ultimate resurrection at the End of Days, and thus entailing a requirement of undisturbed rest. The overt argument was that because such beliefs are a human universal among both pagans, Muslims, Jews, and Christians, it should be respected in his contemporary schism between Protestants and Catholics – but in practice this requires the projection of a contemporary belief in resurrection onto pagan societies of the past.
Such considerations, along with more or less creative reinterpretations of the classical authors, eventually led to a strong expectation by the early 19th century that the Egyptians had believed in postmortem judgment leading either to eternal bliss or damnation. The transmigration of souls as described by Herodotus was sometimes assigned a role in this scheme as a sort of Purgatory that souls might need to go through before being worthy of salvation, completing the parallel to Christian beliefs. But how was this model able to survive almost intact to the present day once ancient Egyptian sources became available in the 19th and 20th century?
The illustrated funerary document known today as the ancient Egyptian “Book of the Dead” (the closest we come to an ancient title is the rather more ambiguous “Book of going out during the day”) played a key role in this process. Well before papyrus copies of this work became widely known, it had been surmised that the frequent pictorial motif of weighing on a balance could be understood by inspiration from European church art as a parallel to the souls being weighed by St. Michael on Judgement Day — in other words the still-prevalent explanatory model that the scene depicts an Egyptian version of the Final Judgment. After all, it had been accepted for centuries that the Egyptians believed in such a judgment leading to rewards and punishments in the afterlife, so this was a small, seemingly logical step. So was the immediate implication that the rest of the imagery of the “Book of the Dead” presented illustrations of other episodes in the journey of the soul through the afterlife. The rising European familiarity with the ancient document in the early- to mid- 19th century came precisely at a time when Christian thought about the afterlife increasingly shifted to themes such as journeys between different locations and trials leading to spiritual improvement, making scholars particularly apt to identify similar themes in ancient Egypt.
Thus, Prussian Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–1884) coined the designation “Book of the Dead” in 1842 in accordance with his understanding of the document as describing the soul’s journey leading to “transfiguration”. In the mid-19th century, there was still some debate about whether the document was best understood as describing a kind of ritual, or, as Lepsius held, a “passport” that also doubled as afterlife itinerary. Lepsius’s position ended up winning the day, partly for political reasons, but likely especially due to its intuitive appeal in light of contemporary thought about the afterlife more generally. With a few minor changes, his basic interpretation of the document can still be found in most works of contemporary Egyptology, whether scholarly or popular. It was able to survive the vastly increasing knowledge of the funerary texts and images through the 20th and 21st centuries by taking on the role of a general explanatory framework rather than engaging with the specific details of the contents of the ancient sources. After all, just about any obscure mythological or cosmological allusion — of which Egyptian ritual texts are full — can be taken as someone else’s belief about the afterlife, if that is what one expects to find.
Ultimately, Yearning for Immortality argues that this genealogy, and especially the very limited contact between the overall framework and details in the indigenous sources, casts significant doubt on the entire idea of the Egyptians’ obsession with judgement leading to a life of eternal bliss, along with the notion that funerary texts and images describe such a personal afterlife in any straightforward fashion. In a significant sense, the “yearning for immortality” of the book’s title is not that of the ancient Egyptians, but rather that of European scholars of the last several centuries. This makes it a pressing task for modern Egyptology to find new ways of reading, viewing, and talking about ancient Egyptian funerary culture.
Rune Nyord is Associate Professor of Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology and Chair of the Art History Department at Emory University. His most recent book,Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025.
How to cite this article:
Nyord, R. 2025. “The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife”, The Ancient Near East Today 13.10. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/european-egyptian-afterlife/.
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