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Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife
How our understanding of the ancient Egyptian afterlife was shaped by Christianity.
Many of us are familiar with the ancient Egyptians’ obsession with immortality and the great efforts they made to secure the quality of their afterlife. But, as Rune Nyord shows, even today, our understanding of the Egyptian afterlife has been formulated to a striking extent in Christian terms. Nyord argues that this is no accident, but rather the result of a long history of Europeans systematically retelling the religion of ancient Egypt to fit the framework of Christianity. The idea of ancient Egyptians believing in postmortem judgment with rewards and punishments in the afterlife was developed during the early modern period through biased interpretations that were construed without any detailed knowledge of ancient Egyptian religion, hieroglyphs, and sources.
As a growing number of Egyptian images and texts became available through the nineteenth century, these materials tended to be incorporated into existing narratives rather than being used to question them. Against this historical background, Nyord argues that we need to return to the indigenous sources and shake off the Christian expectations that continue to shape scholarly and popular thinking about the ancient Egyptian afterlife.
Many of us are familiar with the ancient Egyptians’ obsession with immortality and the great efforts they made to secure the quality of their afterlife. But, as Rune Nyord shows, even today, our understanding of the Egyptian afterlife has been formulated to a striking extent in Christian terms. Nyord argues that this is no accident, but rather the result of a long history of Europeans systematically retelling the religion of ancient Egypt to fit the framework of Christianity. The idea of ancient Egyptians believing in postmortem judgment with rewards and punishments in the afterlife was developed during the early modern period through biased interpretations that were construed without any detailed knowledge of ancient Egyptian religion, hieroglyphs, and sources.
As a growing number of Egyptian images and texts became available through the nineteenth century, these materials tended to be incorporated into existing narratives rather than being used to question them. Against this historical background, Nyord argues that we need to return to the indigenous sources and shake off the Christian expectations that continue to shape scholarly and popular thinking about the ancient Egyptian afterlife.
315 pages, Paperback
Published March 5, 2025
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December 18, 2025
Evaluating this book is a challenge. It may turn out to be one of the most important books ever written about ancient Egyptian religion, but as it stands now, it leaves the reader hanging.
In 2018, Nyord published in the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections a paper titled "Taking Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Religion Seriously", in which he argued that "the hypothesis of the Egyptians’ belief in, and quest for, an eternal personal afterlife is not only dubious in its historical origin, but also extremely weak in methodological terms." This book is a result of the project outlined in that paper, tracing that historical origin in detail.
The problem starts with a smattering of Greek and Roman texts that comment on Egyptian beliefs about death. Herodotus said the Egyptians believed a deceased human soul is reincarnated in other creatures, becoming in turn every variety of animal before being reborn in a new human form. Plato, whose ideas were often assumed to derive from Egyptian beliefs, said the soul is incarnated in different bodies, and the next body it enters is determined by how it has behaved in its previous lives. Diodorus Siculus said that dead Egyptians were evaluated by the living to judge whether they were worthy of burial. Servius said the Egyptians, in contrast with the Roman practice of cremation, preserved corpses "surely so that the soul might last".
As early modern Europeans began looking firsthand at ancient Egyptian antiquities, without being able to read Egyptian texts, they tried to use these classical sources to explain practices like mummification and the building of monumental tombs. The disparate ideas in these sources gave the antiquarians plenty of room to maneuver when piecing them together into a coherent picture. As European awareness of other cultures broadened in the late 17th and 18th centuries, scholars tried to work out the history of ideas across many cultures. But their worldviews and their body of evidence were still very skewed toward Christianity, so the act of comparison allowed Christian concepts to seep in to their reconstructions of the Egyptian afterlife. By the time hieroglyphs were deciphered, the reconstructions still differed widely. But it was common to believe that burial practices sought to preserve the body in order to preserve the soul (based on Servius), that the soul was thought to transmigrate into new bodies (based on Herodotus and Plato), and that the soul was thought to undergo some kind of judgment after death (based on Diodorus and Plato with heavy doses of Christian projection).
The first scholars to read hieroglyphs projected these beliefs onto the Egyptian evidence, most famously reading the weighing of the heart in the Book of the Dead as a moral judgment. Plato's version of transmigration had been used to support the idea of such a judgment, but with that idea now seemingly found in the Egyptian texts themselves, transmigration was gradually abandoned in the mid-19th century. With it gone, the other two assumptions were used to formulate a framework that was remarkably Christian-like in many of its particulars, yet able to encompass all kinds of un-Christian-like evidence. For example, spells in funerary texts that ward off different threats are interpreted as signs that the soul had to avoid these threats like an obstacle course on its way to paradise, and burial goods are interpreted as objects that the soul can use once it arrives there. The framework became a set of assumptions unthinkingly imposed on the evidence.
Nyord's argument seems radical, but its presentation is compelling. And it echoes points made by many other scholars: Christina Riggs's argument that mummification was meant to divinize the body rather than preserve it; Mark Smith's argument that most funerary spells were limited to the context of the ritual that they were used for, rather than representing the permanent state of the deceased in the afterlife; Jiří Janák's argument that the weighing of the heart was more like an "immigration interview" than a Christian Last Judgment; Campbell Price's qualms about the traditional explanation of tomb goods; and many recent studies of ritual interaction between the living and the dead that undermine the idea of a sharp divide between this life and the afterlife.
But if the traditional framework is faulty, what did the Egyptians believe about death? Nyord's 2018 paper suggests some possibilities, but this book doesn't expand on them much. He acknowledges the question but avoids it with an irritating spasm of postmodernism: "Judging ideas developed in the past by modern standards would introduce significant anachronism through the notion of a timeless and unchanging ideal of Egyptological research" (and, absurdly, "It is not that the past scholars discussed here were 'wrong' in any meaningful sense"). The Egyptians really did have ideas about the nature of death, and while we can never fully recover those ideas, any hypothesis should strive to get closer to them. Analyzing what past scholars believed and why is a different mode of analysis from evaluating whether those beliefs fit the evidence, but both are valid. And if Nyord didn't think the latter mode were valid, he wouldn't have started this project.
Nyord's acknowledgements show a more sympathetic reason for the omission: the project got too big. The historiography became a book in its own right, and a new framework for Egyptian beliefs about death will have to wait for a later book. But Nyord has shown that such a book is needed, so that the traditional framework can be tested against it if nothing else. The implications of that contest reach into every tomb, chapel, coffin, and funerary scroll.
In 2018, Nyord published in the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections a paper titled "Taking Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Religion Seriously", in which he argued that "the hypothesis of the Egyptians’ belief in, and quest for, an eternal personal afterlife is not only dubious in its historical origin, but also extremely weak in methodological terms." This book is a result of the project outlined in that paper, tracing that historical origin in detail.
The problem starts with a smattering of Greek and Roman texts that comment on Egyptian beliefs about death. Herodotus said the Egyptians believed a deceased human soul is reincarnated in other creatures, becoming in turn every variety of animal before being reborn in a new human form. Plato, whose ideas were often assumed to derive from Egyptian beliefs, said the soul is incarnated in different bodies, and the next body it enters is determined by how it has behaved in its previous lives. Diodorus Siculus said that dead Egyptians were evaluated by the living to judge whether they were worthy of burial. Servius said the Egyptians, in contrast with the Roman practice of cremation, preserved corpses "surely so that the soul might last".
As early modern Europeans began looking firsthand at ancient Egyptian antiquities, without being able to read Egyptian texts, they tried to use these classical sources to explain practices like mummification and the building of monumental tombs. The disparate ideas in these sources gave the antiquarians plenty of room to maneuver when piecing them together into a coherent picture. As European awareness of other cultures broadened in the late 17th and 18th centuries, scholars tried to work out the history of ideas across many cultures. But their worldviews and their body of evidence were still very skewed toward Christianity, so the act of comparison allowed Christian concepts to seep in to their reconstructions of the Egyptian afterlife. By the time hieroglyphs were deciphered, the reconstructions still differed widely. But it was common to believe that burial practices sought to preserve the body in order to preserve the soul (based on Servius), that the soul was thought to transmigrate into new bodies (based on Herodotus and Plato), and that the soul was thought to undergo some kind of judgment after death (based on Diodorus and Plato with heavy doses of Christian projection).
The first scholars to read hieroglyphs projected these beliefs onto the Egyptian evidence, most famously reading the weighing of the heart in the Book of the Dead as a moral judgment. Plato's version of transmigration had been used to support the idea of such a judgment, but with that idea now seemingly found in the Egyptian texts themselves, transmigration was gradually abandoned in the mid-19th century. With it gone, the other two assumptions were used to formulate a framework that was remarkably Christian-like in many of its particulars, yet able to encompass all kinds of un-Christian-like evidence. For example, spells in funerary texts that ward off different threats are interpreted as signs that the soul had to avoid these threats like an obstacle course on its way to paradise, and burial goods are interpreted as objects that the soul can use once it arrives there. The framework became a set of assumptions unthinkingly imposed on the evidence.
Nyord's argument seems radical, but its presentation is compelling. And it echoes points made by many other scholars: Christina Riggs's argument that mummification was meant to divinize the body rather than preserve it; Mark Smith's argument that most funerary spells were limited to the context of the ritual that they were used for, rather than representing the permanent state of the deceased in the afterlife; Jiří Janák's argument that the weighing of the heart was more like an "immigration interview" than a Christian Last Judgment; Campbell Price's qualms about the traditional explanation of tomb goods; and many recent studies of ritual interaction between the living and the dead that undermine the idea of a sharp divide between this life and the afterlife.
But if the traditional framework is faulty, what did the Egyptians believe about death? Nyord's 2018 paper suggests some possibilities, but this book doesn't expand on them much. He acknowledges the question but avoids it with an irritating spasm of postmodernism: "Judging ideas developed in the past by modern standards would introduce significant anachronism through the notion of a timeless and unchanging ideal of Egyptological research" (and, absurdly, "It is not that the past scholars discussed here were 'wrong' in any meaningful sense"). The Egyptians really did have ideas about the nature of death, and while we can never fully recover those ideas, any hypothesis should strive to get closer to them. Analyzing what past scholars believed and why is a different mode of analysis from evaluating whether those beliefs fit the evidence, but both are valid. And if Nyord didn't think the latter mode were valid, he wouldn't have started this project.
Nyord's acknowledgements show a more sympathetic reason for the omission: the project got too big. The historiography became a book in its own right, and a new framework for Egyptian beliefs about death will have to wait for a later book. But Nyord has shown that such a book is needed, so that the traditional framework can be tested against it if nothing else. The implications of that contest reach into every tomb, chapel, coffin, and funerary scroll.
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