(Dear Ankhiry),
Why
are you punishing me when I treated you so well in life? an aggrieved husband
writes to his wife.
The
husband continues...
What evil thing have I done to you, that I should land in
the wretched state I am..?
The Egyptians wrote pathetic 'Letters to the Dead', usually on the sides of offering bowls or in this case, on a strip of papyrus attached to a wooden statue of the dead wife. (Leiden Museum.)
They were not love letters.
They implored the dead to cease their
curses or to come to their aid and provide guidance with the intractable
problems of living.
What have I done to you? I made you my wife when I was a
young man. I was with you when I held all kinds of offices. I stayed with you,
I did not send you away…
Often the letters grew threatening...
I will lodge a complaint against you with the Ennead in
the West, and one shall judge between you and me on account of this letter…
In the spirit of this fascinating ancient Egyptian practice, I feel I should write a Letter to the Dead of Egypt too.
Or at least a thank-you note.
Without the dead of Egypt and their peculiar belief in an afterlife that
allowed the dead to ‘take it with them’, the treasures of their civilization
preserved in their tombs would never have come down to us.
I am grateful that they believed and that they lived in an age where humankind and gods, the living and the dead, and the
forces of good and evil, existed side by side in two parts that held the
universe together
As an author of ancient Egyptian-based fiction I can't thank them enough.
