Cartografias do além: o mundo dos vivos e o universo dos mortos no antigo Egito

Abstract

The Book of the Dead is one of the most known documents of Ancient Egypt. It is a kind of guide, which the deceased used in their search for eternity. It reveals some Egyptian ideas concerning the post-mortem destination, presenting the world of the dead as a place where the Egyptians should essentially practice what they did in life. We identified the presence of two recurring motifs in the Book: the need to move and the need to eat after death. Through these, the dead could recover from the chaos represented by the finiteness of the physical body. In this study, we propose to classify and analyze these two recurring motifs in the chapters of Ani’s Book of the Dead, which dates from the New Kingdom. Based on that, we conceived that the world of the dead was an extension of the world of the living, and the Book of the Dead was a real cartography of the beyond.