Finding the end of something is hard.
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| P/C David McEachan, from Pexels.com |
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| P/C Bera Yannick, from Pexels.com showing typical offerings--bread, beer, animal leg |
Pyramids and all of the funeral gear created by the ancient Egyptians was clearly intended to last forever. (They said as much in their tomb writings.) Part of their religion included leaving offerings of food, drink, clothing, and ointments to their dearly departed. This would ideally happen often, maybe even daily, but certainly on special festival days.
But... the practice of delivering offerings to these places did not last forever. But how long did they last? That's this week's Challenge:
1. After the Pharaoh's death, how many years did people keep bringing offerings to the pyramids? Was it just a few years and then they gave up? How long did the offerings keep coming?
Finding the ending of something that was supposed to last forever can be a bit tricky. I wasn't expecting to find a memo (or a papyrus or ostracon) with a memo saying "Wajit just dropped off the last offering at the tomb of Wepwawet on this date, XXXX BCE."
So how can you approach a question like this?
I tried the obvious LLMs question:
[How long did ancient Egyptian funerary cults last? That is, after the death of a pharaoh, a cult would be set up to provide offerings to the dead king. How many years after the pharaoh’s death would the cult keep bringing food to the funeral site?]
The answer I got from ChatGPT was:
Ancient Egyptian funerary cults established to honor deceased pharaohs often lasted for centuries, though their duration varied significantly based on the era and the prominence of the pharaoh. In the Old and Middle Kingdoms, particularly, these cults could persist for several generations or even longer. The state-supported cults of powerful pharaohs, such as those of the great pyramid builders (e.g., Khufu, Khafre, Menkaure), were maintained for a few hundred years with dedicated priests offering food and performing rituals at mortuary temples.
However, over time, the continuity of these cults would depend on the resources allocated by subsequent rulers and the changing religious and political climate. By the end of the New Kingdom, many of the older mortuary cults diminished or ceased entirely as political instability and economic challenges led to a reduction in resources and attention given to maintaining such practices.
Thus, while the initial dedication and rituals following a pharaoh's death were intense and sustained, the active period could range from a few generations to potentially several centuries before gradually being reduced to nominal or symbolic remembrance.
Interesting! To summarize: the funerary cults would service the temple with offerings from "several centuries" or "several generations," with significant variance.
I then asked for a few references to support these claims. I got these suggestions:
1. "The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt" by Richard H. Wilkinson
2. "Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt" by Jan Assmann
3. "The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt" edited by Ian Shaw
This a pretty reasonable set of books. Modern Egyptology has been a field of inquiry since the 18th century, when Napoleon and his army went on an invasion of Egypt with 160 "savants" (scholars and academics), bringing back loads of materials for study, especially about Ancient Egypt. While scholarly opinion will shift with time as we learn more about the time, I had figured that there would be substantial writings about the funeral practices, and perhaps one of them would mention when the offerings stopped. These three books were a great starting place.
But how to get access? The first two books I was able to check out of my local library "Complete Gods" was in the stacks, while I had to order "Death and Salvation" by interlibrary loan. But that worked pretty well and I had it two days later. The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt is available in preview mode on Google Books.
When looking these books up in the catalog, I also noticed “Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt” by John H. Taylor--also really relevant.
Even better: "Death and Salvation," "Death and the Afterlife" and "Oxford History" are available on Archive.org (the Internet Library). (You have to login to be able to borrow and read these books, but that's pretty simple.) Once there, you can search within the book. Also wonderful, once you're looking up one of these books, you'll see other closely related books. Here's the UI from Archive.org:
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| A set of books that are "near" to "Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt" at Archive.org. Very much like browsing the shelf in the physical library, but one with a very deep collection. |
So now, with these four resources, I started searching and reading each section that mentioned "cult" or "offering" or "generation." ("cult" because I wanted to read everything about the funerary and mortuary cults; "offering" because I wanted to read how "offerings" were taken to the tombs and for how long; "generation" because I was hoping to find something like "... and people kept bringing offerings for several generations..."
After a happy couple of hours reading probably 200 pages of all these texts, here's what I found: in general, the offerings were kept up for 1 or two generations after the death of the tomb-owner. (It seems very doubtful that they lasted for "several generations" as ChatGPT said.) However, read on...
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| Suggested offerings for the care and maintenance of the dead, including head of cow, goose, and leg of gazelle. |
Since the role of the offerings were to keep the spirit of the dead well-supplied with food and essentials for the afterlife, there was a backup strategy:
Death and the Afterlife:
Page 22: "Since the [deceased] name was so closely linked with the prosperity of the bearer, survival of death was linked to remembrance of the name. It was necessary for it to be pronounced in the context of the offering ritual (see pp. 94 and 192-3), in order to provide nourishment for the dead. Failing that, funerary texts appealed to anyone who might visit the tomb in future years to pronounce the appropriate formula so as to supply offerings for the dead person; thus, as long as the name was remembered, the dead would continue to live."
And therefore, the role of the offerings would be easy to continue over the years. Can't make it with fresh bread and beer? Just have a visitor pronounce the names of the offering goods, and that'll work for the dead.
But how long did the original offering-bearers keep up that tradition of bringing goods to the funeral site?
Death and Salvation:
“For an Egyptian, his hometown was the place not only of his own tomb but also of the tombs for which he, as descendant, was responsible. The meaning of this concept of burial in one’s place of origin was that in this way, the deceased did not fall out of the “connective,” life-giving structure of affiliation but rather remained included in his community. This inclusion took many forms. The most important, but also the briefest and least certain form was the organized mortuary cult; it seldom lasted more than one or two generations..."
Relatives bore the chief responsibility for maintaining the cult of the dead, a duty which fell above all to the eldest son. Inheritance of family property was linked to this act, but in any case providing for dead parents was regarded as an important filial duty (see p. 171). The dead, indeed, exercised considerable influence over the economy of Egypt, since substantial resources, manpower and material wealth were expended in equipping them for eternity.
The Egyptians were fully aware that even the most careful preparations for death could not avert the eventual decay or destruction of the tomb and the cessation of the mortuary cult. The positive, hopeful tone of the mortuary texts is balanced by a genre of literary compositions, mainly dating to the Middle Kingdom, which express skepticism about the worth of making elaborate preparation for the afterlife. This theme was taken up in the Harper's songs, the most famous of which is stated to have been inscribed in the tomb of one of the kings named Intef at Thebes. The general tone of these texts is that tombs fall into ruins, mortuary cults do not endure, and that no one returns from the realm of the dead and strengthen the hopes of the living. Therefore, one should live only for the present, enjoying the pleasures of life to the full….
Throughout most of the pharaonic period the sustenance of the dead was taken care of by magical means. Funerary texts indicate that it was not the physical body but the ka which required feeding (see Chapter 1) (see fig. 56). The ka was dependent on the world of the living to make this possible. This need was met chiefly through the establishment of a mortuary cult, served by relatives of the deceased or by priests, whose duty it was to present offerings to the dead in the context of a formal ritual. This took place in the tomb chapel, to which the ka ascended from the burial chamber below (see Chapter 5), passing through the false-door and taking up temporary residence within the statue of the deceased in order to receive its sustenance. In terms of its procedures, the offering ritual was closely related to the magical purification and provisioning of the images of the gods which took place every day in the great cult temples. The ka of the deceased, like the divinity embodied within the cult-statue in the temple, consumed only the essence of the foodstuffs placed on the offering table. The offerings then ‘reverted’, or, in other words, were eaten by the priests or by those who had performed the ritual. The underlying notion that physical digestion did not take place removed the obligation to ‘neutralise’ (through offering them to the dead) much-needed provisions which might otherwise be consumed by the living...
Mortuary cults were established with great care to ensure that the funerary rituals would continue to be performed from one generation to the next (see Chapter 5). However, despite the most elaborate precautions, it was the fate of all such cults ultimately to fall into abeyance. Though the spirits of long-dead kings might continue to be maintained through temple cults, with the support or consent of the reigning pharaoh, for non-royal individuals, cults of remote ancestors (even grandparents) were probably rarely maintained for more than a generation or two. The Egyptians were well aware of the futility of trusting to tomb and cult for eternal survival, as literary compositions often emphasized. (see p. 45).
So the Egyptians understood that things don't keep running forever, even if that was the religious goal.
But more, I hadn't thought about the differences between "official" (that is, state-run) funeral cults and the ability of the government to continue to provide offerings versus smaller, personal, family-run tombs. Of course, the families would maintain the schedule of grave offerings, but as suggested here, that typically runs out in a generation or two.
But did STATE-run offerings last longer? And then there's the funerary cult of an individual (e.g., Pharoah Ramesses II) or a powerful leader's extended family? (e.g., Ramesses II 52 sons and many, many daughters and many wives, with a large mortuary complex)
In a surprising connection, as I was reading about the Ramesses II funerary cult, I did a search for [ Ramesses II funerary cult ] and discovered several articles about the recent discovery of thousands of mummified rams heads at the Ramesses II temple in Abydos. (Archaeology Wiki, Smithsonian) The interesting thing here is that offerings were being made to the temple of Ramesses II in Abydos a thousand years after his death.
It's a bit like what we see in our own lives--individual gravesites are typically maintained by families for a generation or two, then people move on and the sites are abandoned to the vagaries of time. But official, state-run memorials get preserved for the length of time of the official organization, which can be centuries.
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| An example of a modern cemetery with offerings. The gravesite of L. v. Beethoven, with flowers and gifts from current acolytes. P/C by Dan, Central Vienna Friedhof, Austria. |
2. A related question: How were the people who were the bringers-of-offerings organized? Was there a central church organization or division of the government that handled such long-lasting affairs? What were these organizations called?
I didn't have to do this search explicitly since the answers were scattered throughout the texts I read. For smaller funeral sites, the offerings were done by the familes for a generation or two. For larger (i.e., more important people), the work was done by a fund that supported the maintenance... until it didn't. For VERY important people, the offerings continued for many, many years, supposed by the state itself.
Unless, of course, the next regime took an active dislike to you and tried hard to erase all trace of your existence, a fate literally worse than death for the Egyptians. Around 1350 BC, Pharaoh Amenhotep IV decided that all the gods of Ancient Egypt were a lie, except for one: the sun God Aten. He build a new capital for him in the desert 200 miles south of Cairo, and changed his name to Pharaoh Akhenaten. The campaign of damnatio memoriae against Akhenaten and his successors was begun by a later pharaoh, Horemheb, who decided to erase from history all pharaohs associated with the unpopular Amarna Period, including, and especially Akhenaten. This happened more often than you'd believe. The pharaoh would be erased, and all of the mortuary cults that were dedicated to feeding him in the afterlife were, well, killed off.
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| Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and children from the time before Horemheb. |
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| Akhenaten literally erased from history. |
SearchResearch Lessons
1. Books are still incredibly valuable as resources! Don't underestimate the value of your local library. You might get inspiration from your AI model, but checking with the books to get the whole story (and the context!) is incredibly handy.
2. Online books are better in some ways. While the index in the back of a book is a labor of love, full-text indexing can show you things that you literally cannot find via the index. Learn how to use the various online book resources (e.g., Internet Archive's online texts; Google Books; Hathi Trust; various e-book systems, etc) that provide word-level searching, and then skim through the book text searching for the sections that talk about your topic of interest.
3. Don't underestimate the value of finding by accident. The shelf-like view of Archive.org's "closed related" texts is pretty great. Also keep track of things you run across in the course of your research. (I'll say it again: learning to keep notes as you work is incredibly valuable.)
Keep searching!
