Yasmin miller

Accessibility, Transmission and Experience of Funerary Knowledge in Ancient Egypt (Working Title)

Most of the sources from which the afterlife concepts of the Ancient Egyptians are reconstructed today (e.g., the pyramid texts in the Old Kingdom or the afterlife books, such as the Amduat, from the New Kingdom onwards) were probably reserved only for a small religious elite and the king in pharaonic times. Thus, most people probably knew only fragmentarily about the afterlife concepts described in these sources and may therefore have had different afterlife expectations.

My dissertation project will investigate the accessibility to and dissemination of knowledge about afterlife existence in ancient Egypt. The focus will be on possible limitations of this knowledge with regard to different social classes and different time periods. In this way it will be worked out which - possibly different - attitudes and expectations existed towards otherworldly spaces and the forms of existence assumed there. And it shall also be investigated whether these different expectations also presupposed different actions in this world as preparation for the hereafter, and thus whether the respective 'knowledge of the hereafter' became directly experienceable for the individual.

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