Crossing the culture

Ex-President Mubarak is 84. He currently stands accused by opponents of ordering soldiers to fire on peacefully demonstrating protestors, 800 of whom died during the uprising earlier this year which ousted him from a leadership of almost 30 years.

If he is found guilty, he will face the death penalty. There is no question that Mubarak is experiencing ill health and that, one way or another, his end is near. As a Muslim, he will expect judgment to follow death and he will hope that, at that judgment, the good in his life will outweigh the bad.

After death

The ancient Egyptian pharaohs spent their entire reigns thinking about their deaths. Nothing was more important than eternal life. They spent their lives in palaces made of mud bricks, of which nothing remains today, yet they prepared splendid tombs of solid rock for their bodies to rest in. They, too, expected a judgment by the gods, who would weigh the heart against the feather of truth and justice to see if their good deeds outweighed the bad. Their confidence was lifted by trust in the scarab god Kephri, who represented new life and resurrection.

In the Egyptian museum in Cairo there are two rooms filled with royal mummies. In each room lie about ten corpses, wrapped in strips of cloth. In the room next door are some of the amulets found on the mummies, including scarabs which were wrapped tightly over the heart. These scarabs were inscribed with the instruction: ‘Do not stand up against me as a witness’ — meaning that the heart of the pharaoh should not confess to any of the wrongs that he had done when he faces Osiris, the god of judgment. It is interesting that these people knew that they had something very real to fear because of the state of their hearts. They needed a seal over their heart to protect them from the ‘Gobbler’ or god of destruction.

Valley of the Kings

The ancient Egyptians took eternal life incredibly seriously. When a pharaoh was appointed as king, he immediately chose a site for his tomb in the Valley of the Kings and his workers began to dig. The longer the pharaoh reigned, the longer they dug and the deeper their tomb became. After 60 pharaohs or so, the Valley was riven with tomb systems, the majority of which were looted almost immediately, often by the workers themselves, who not only knew where the tombs were, but also knew the tricks to get back in, sometimes the same night of the burial ceremony. It is incredible to consider that the treasure discovered by Howard Carter in 1922 in Tutankhamen’s tomb was only a fraction of the riches that would have been placed in and then stolen from each of the longer reigning pharaohs’ tombs. Wherever that treasure is, and in whatever form it now exists, it is certain that the pharaohs themselves did not miss it.

In the fifth century, many tombs in the Valley of the Kings were used by Christians as churches, drawing their own pictures of crosses and Christ figures on the walls and attempting to erase the faces on the images of many of the Egyptian gods depicted in the tombs. A temple in the nextdoor valley, built by Queen Hatshepsut, is still known as Deir-el Bahri, or Monastery of the North, which Christians established there in the seventh century.

I wonder how much those early Christians helped their fellow countrymen to turn from idols and accept Christ as the only God who could ensure eternal life. I wonder if they ran apologetics courses, in which believers were encouraged to use the image of the scarab seal to help their friends and family to understand the role of Christ at judgment.

Eternal investment

John wrote in his first letter that we have the certainty of new life and resurrection because, ‘if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defence — Jesus Christ, the Righteous One’. No one in history has invested quite as much money and energy in death and eternal life as the ancient Egyptians. But as soon as we realise that we have been forgiven in Christ, we too can invest indulgently in the confident expectation of eternal life.

The pharaoh and the scarab

After death

Valley of the Kings

Eternal investment

Eleanor Margesson

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