Papyrus is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, Cyperus papyrus, a wetland sedge. Papyrus can also refer to a document written on sheets of such material, joined side by side and rolled up into a scroll, an early form of a book.
Nut, also known by various other transcriptions, is the goddess of the sky, stars, cosmos, mothers, astronomy, and the universe in the ancient Egyptian religion. She was seen as a star-covered nude woman arching over the Earth, or as a cow. She was depicted wearing the water-pot sign (nw) that identifies her.
Seker is a hawk or falcon god of the Memphite necropolis in the Ancient Egyptian religion, who was known as a patron of the living, as well as a god of the dead. He is also in some accounts a solar deity as for The Temple of Seker in Memphis.
Ammit was an ancient Egyptian goddess with the forequarters of a lion, the hindquarters of a hippopotamus, and the head of a crocodile—the three largest "man-eating" animals known to ancient Egyptians. In ancient Egyptian religion, Ammit played an important role during the funerary ritual, the Judgment of the Dead.
Maat or Maʽat comprised the ancient Egyptian concepts of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice. Ma'at was also the goddess who personified these concepts, and regulated the stars, seasons, and the actions of mortals and the deities who had brought order from chaos at the moment of creation. Her ideological opposite was Isfet, meaning injustice, chaos, violence or to do evil.
Heka was the deification of magic and medicine in ancient Egypt. The name is the Egyptian word for "magic". According to Egyptian literature, Heka existed "before duality had yet come into being." The term ḥk3 was also used to refer to the practice of magical rituals.
The ancient Egyptians believed that a soul was made up of many parts. In addition to these components of the soul, there was the human body.
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 BC. The original Egyptian name for the text, transliterated r(ꜣ)w n(y)w prt m hrw(w), 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.
Papyrus Harris I is also known as the Great Harris Papyrus and simply the Harris Papyrus. Its technical designation is Papyrus British Museum EA 9999. At 41 metres long, it is "the longest known papyrus from Egypt, with some 1,500 lines of text." It was found in a tomb near Medinet Habu, across the Nile river from Luxor, Egypt, and purchased by collector Anthony Charles Harris (1790–1869) in 1855; it entered the collection of the British Museum in 1872.
Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge was an English Egyptologist, Orientalist, and philologist who worked for the British Museum and published numerous works on the ancient Near East. He made numerous trips to Egypt and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan on behalf of the British Museum to buy antiquities, and helped it build its collection of cuneiform tablets, manuscripts, and papyri. He published many books on Egyptology, helping to bring the findings to larger audiences. In 1920, he was knighted for his service to Egyptology and the British Museum.
The Joseph Smith Papyri (JSP) are Egyptian funerary papyrus fragments from ancient Thebes dated between 300 and 100 BC which, along with four mummies, were once owned by Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement. Smith purchased the mummies and papyrus documents from a traveling exhibitor in Kirtland, Ohio in 1835. Smith said that the papyrus contained the records of the ancient patriarchs Abraham and Joseph.
Instruction of Amenemope is a literary work composed in Ancient Egypt, most likely during the Ramesside Period ; it contains thirty chapters of advice for successful living, ostensibly written by the scribe Amenemope son of Kanakht as a legacy for his son. A characteristic product of the New Kingdom "Age of Personal Piety", the work reflects on the inner qualities, attitudes, and behaviors required for a happy life in the face of increasingly difficult social and economic circumstances. It is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of ancient near-eastern wisdom literature and has been of particular interest to modern scholars because of its similarity to the later biblical Book of Proverbs.
The Gebelein predynastic mummies are six naturally mummified bodies, dating to approximately 3400 BC from the Late Predynastic period of Ancient Egypt. They were the first complete predynastic bodies to be discovered. The well-preserved bodies were excavated at the end of the nineteenth century by Wallis Budge, the British Museum Keeper for Egyptology, from shallow sand graves near Gebelein in the Egyptian desert.
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 written in the hieroglyphic text on the same hypocephalus. Multiple hypocephali in the British Museum are very similar to the Joseph Smith hypocephalus in layout and text, and were also uncovered in Thebes, Egypt. Other hypocephali also bear a strong resemblance.
Gebelein was a town in Egypt. It is located on the Nile, about 40 km south of Thebes, in the New Valley Governorate.
The Greenfield Papyrus is a papyrus that contains an ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and is named after Mrs. Edith Mary Greenfield, who presented it to the Trustees of the British Museum in May 1910. Now in the collections of the British Museum, London, it is one of the longest papyri in existence with a length of 37 metres.
In Ancient Egyptian religion, Medjed is a minor deity mentioned in certain copies of the Book of the Dead. While not much is known about the deity, his ghost-like depiction in the Greenfield papyrus has earned him popularity in modern Japanese culture, and he has appeared as a character in video games and anime.
Ancient Egyptian afterlife beliefs were centered around a variety of complex rituals that were influenced by many aspects of Egyptian culture. Religion was a major contributor, since it was an important social practice that bound all Egyptians together. For instance, many of the Egyptian gods played roles in guiding the souls of the dead through the afterlife. With the evolution of writing, religious ideals were recorded and quickly spread throughout the Egyptian community. The solidification and commencement of these doctrines were formed in the creation of afterlife texts which illustrated and explained what the dead would need to know in order to complete the journey safely.
Muhammad Mohassib (1843–1928) was an Egyptian antiquities dealer in Luxor, Egypt. He began working as a young donkey boy to Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon and learned English from her. He opened an antiquities shop in Luxor in the early 1880s and became well-known among especially British and French archaeologists and dealers. A lot of important collections in museums in Europe and the US were partly bought from Mohassib. For example, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (US) purchased a "Head of a King" from Mohassib in 1904.
