A hypocephalus is a small disk-shaped object generally made of stuccoed linen, [1] but also of papyrus, [2] bronze, gold, wood, or clay, which ancient Egyptians from the Late Period onwards placed under the heads of their dead. The circle was believed to magically protect the deceased, cause the head and body to be enveloped in light and warmth, [3] making the deceased divine. It replaced the earlier cow-amulet. [2]
Hypocephali symbolized the Eye of Ra (Eye of Horus), which represents the sun deity. The scenes portrayed on them relate to Egyptian ideas of resurrection and life after death, connecting them with the Osirian myth. [4] To the ancient Egyptians the daily setting and rising of the sun was a symbol of death and rebirth. The hypocephalus represented all that the sun encircles — the world of the living, over which it passed during the day, was depicted in the upper half, and that of the dead, which it crossed during the night, in the lower portion.
Hypocephali first appeared during the Egyptian Saite Dynasty (663–525 B.C.) and their use continued for centuries. [1] Chapter 162 of the Book of the Dead version of that period contain directions for the making and use of hypocephali. [5]
Hypocephali are kept in museums in Europe (including several examples of the British Museum), the Middle East, and in the United States — three in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and one in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. No two hypocephali are the same, and there are just over 100 known samples of them.
Images of hypocephali may be found at:
Abydos is one of the oldest cities of ancient Egypt, and also of the eighth nome in Upper Egypt. It is located about 11 kilometres west of the Nile at latitude 26° 10' N, near the modern Egyptian towns of El Araba El Madfuna and El Balyana. In the ancient Egyptian language, the city was called Abdju. The English name Abydos comes from the Greek Ἄβυδος, a name borrowed by Greek geographers from the unrelated city of Abydos on the Hellespont.
Osiris is the god of fertility, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation in ancient Egyptian religion. He was classically depicted as a green-skinned deity with a pharaoh's beard, partially mummy-wrapped at the legs, wearing a distinctive atef crown, and holding a symbolic crook and flail. He was one of the first to be associated with the mummy wrap. When his brother, Set, cut him up into pieces after killing him, Isis, his wife, found all the pieces and wrapped his body up, enabling him to return to life. Osiris was widely worshipped until the decline of ancient Egyptian religion during the rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire.
Hathor was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion who played a wide variety of roles. As a sky deity, she was the mother or consort of the sky god Horus and the sun god Ra, both of whom were connected with kingship, and thus she was the symbolic mother of their earthly representatives, the pharaohs. She was one of several goddesses who acted as the Eye of Ra, Ra's feminine counterpart, and in this form she had a vengeful aspect that protected him from his enemies. Her beneficent side represented music, dance, joy, love, sexuality, and maternal care, and she acted as the consort of several male deities and the mother of their sons. These two aspects of the goddess exemplified the Egyptian conception of femininity. Hathor crossed boundaries between worlds, helping deceased souls in the transition to the afterlife.
The Book of the Dead is an ancient Egyptian funerary text generally written on papyrus and used from the beginning of the New Kingdom to around 50 BCE. The original Egyptian name for the text, transliterated rw nw prt m hrw, is translated as Book of Coming Forth by Day or Book of Emerging Forth into the Light. "Book" is the closest term to describe the loose collection of texts consisting of a number of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through the Duat, or underworld, and into the afterlife and written by many priests over a period of about 1,000 years. Karl Richard Lepsius introduced for these texts the German name Todtenbuch, translated to English as Book of the Dead.
Menes was a pharaoh of the Early Dynastic Period of ancient Egypt credited by classical tradition with having united Upper and Lower Egypt and as the founder of the First Dynasty.
Ancient Egyptian art refers to art produced in ancient Egypt between the 6th millennium BC and the 4th century AD, spanning from Prehistoric Egypt until the Christianization of Roman Egypt. It includes paintings, sculptures, drawings on papyrus, faience, jewelry, ivories, architecture, and other art media. It is also very conservative: the art style changed very little over time. Much of the surviving art comes from tombs and monuments, giving more insight into the ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs.
Khakaure Senusret III was a pharaoh of Egypt. He ruled from 1878 BC to 1839 BC during a time of great power and prosperity, and was the fifth king of the Twelfth Dynasty of the Middle Kingdom. He was a great pharaoh of the Twelfth Dynasty and is considered to be, perhaps, the most powerful Egyptian ruler of the dynasty. Consequently, he is regarded as one of the sources for the legend about Sesostris. His military campaigns gave rise to an era of peace and economic prosperity that reduced the power of regional rulers and led to a revival in craftwork, trade, and urban development. Senusret III was among the few Egyptian kings who were deified and honored with a cult during their own lifetime.
A pyramidion is the uppermost piece or capstone of an Egyptian pyramid or obelisk. Speakers of the Ancient Egyptian language referred to pyramidia as benbenet and associated the pyramid as a whole with the sacred benben stone. During Egypt's Old Kingdom, pyramidia were generally made of diorite, granite, or fine limestone, then covered in gold or electrum; during the Middle Kingdom and through the end of the pyramid-building era, they were built from granite. A pyramidion was "covered in gold leaf to reflect the rays of the sun"; during Egypt's Middle Kingdom pyramidia were often "inscribed with royal titles and religious symbols".
The Joseph Smith Papyri (JSP) are Egyptian funerary papyrus fragments from ancient Thebes dated between 300 to 100 BC which, along with four mummies, were once owned by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement. Smith said that the papyrus contained the records of the ancient patriarchs Abraham and Joseph.
Naqada III is the last phase of the Naqada culture of ancient Egyptian prehistory, dating from approximately 3200 to 3000 BC. It is the period during which the process of state formation, which began in Naqada II, became highly visible, with named kings heading powerful polities. Naqada III is often referred to as Dynasty 0 or the Protodynastic Period to reflect the presence of kings at the head of influential states, although, in fact, the kings involved would not have been a part of a dynasty. In this period, those kings' names were inscribed in the form of serekhs on a variety of surfaces including pottery and tombs.
The Amratian culture, also called Naqada I, was an archaeological culture of prehistoric Upper Egypt. It lasted approximately from 4000 to 3500 BC.
The Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan is a department forming an historic part of the British Museum, with Its more than 100,000 pieces making it the largest and most comprehensive collection of Egyptian antiquities outside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
The Books of Breathing are several late ancient Egyptian funerary texts, intended to enable deceased people to continue to exist in the afterlife. The earliest known copy dates to about 350 BC. Other copies come from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods of Egyptian history, as late as the second century AD. It is a simplified form of the Book of the Dead.
The Book of Abraham is a work produced between 1835 and 1842 by the Latter Day Saints (LDS) movement founder Joseph Smith that he said was based on Egyptian papyri purchased from a traveling mummy exhibition. According to Smith, the book was "a translation of some ancient records ... purporting to be the writings of Abraham, while he was in Egypt, called the Book of Abraham, written by his own hand, upon papyrus". The work was first published in 1842 and today is a canonical part of the Pearl of Great Price. Since its printing, the Book of Abraham has been a source of controversy. Numerous non-LDS Egyptologists, beginning in the mid-19th century, have heavily criticized Joseph Smith's translation and explanations of the facsimiles, unanimously concluding that his interpretations are inaccurate. They have also asserted that missing portions of the facsimiles were reconstructed incorrectly by Smith.
The Joseph Smith Hypocephalus was a papyrus fragment, part of a larger collection of papyri known as the Joseph Smith Papyri, found in the Gurneh area of Thebes, Egypt, around the year 1818. The owner's name, Sheshonq, is found in the hieroglyphic text on said hypocephalus. Three hypocephali in the British Museum are similar to the Joseph Smith Hypocephalus both in layout and text and were also found in Thebes.
The following outline is provided as an overview of a topical guide to ancient Egypt:
The Cavern deities of the underworld were ancient Egyptian minor deities charged with punishing the damned souls by beheading and devouring them.
Egypt–Mesopotamia relations were the relations between the civilisations of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, in the Middle East. They seem to have developed from the 4th millennium BCE, starting in the Uruk period for Mesopotamia and the half a millennium younger Gerzean culture of Prehistoric Egypt, and constituted a largely one way body of influences from Mesopotamia into Egypt.
The Breathing Permit of Hôr or Hor Book of Breathing is a Ptolemaic era funerary text written for a Theban priest named Hôr. The breathing permit or Book of Breathing assisted its owner in navigating through the afterlife, being judged worthy and living forever.
The Book of Joseph is an untranslated text identified by Joseph Smith after analyzing Egyptian papyri that came into his possession in 1835. Joseph Smith taught that the text contains the writings of the ancient biblical patriarch Joseph. From the same papyri collection, Smith produced the first part of the Book of Abraham, but was killed before any known part of the Book of Joseph was translated.