The Book of Traversing Eternity is an
ancient Egyptian funerary text used primarily in the
Roman period
The Roman Empire ruled the Mediterranean and much of Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. The Roman people, Romans conquered most of this during the Roman Republic, Republic, and it was ruled by emperors following Octavian's assumption of ...
of
Egyptian history (30 BC – AD 390). The earliest known copies date to the preceding
Ptolemaic Period (332–30 BC), making it most likely that the book was composed at that time.
[Hornung, Erik (1999). ''The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife'', Cornell University Press, pp. 151–152]
The book describes the
deceased soul as visiting
temples
A temple (from the Latin ) is a place of worship, a building used for spiritual rituals and activities such as prayer and sacrifice. By convention, the specially built places of worship of some religions are commonly called "temples" in Engli ...
in
Egypt
Egypt ( , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country spanning the Northeast Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea to northe ...
and participating in the cycle of periodic religious rituals, particularly those related to the funerary god
Osiris
Osiris (, from Egyptian ''wikt:wsjr, wsjr'') was the ancient Egyptian deities, god of fertility, agriculture, the Ancient Egyptian religion#Afterlife, afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation in ancient Egyptian religion. He was ...
. Some scholars have seen the book's content as a description of the
Duat, similar to the "underworld books" from the
New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BC). Others, such as
Jan Assmann
Johann Christoph "Jan" Assmann (7 July 1938 – 19 February 2024) was a German Egyptologist, cultural historian, and religion scholar.
Life and works
Assmann studied Egyptology and classical archaeology in Munich, Heidelberg, Paris, and Göt ...
, have argued that the book describes the deceased as joining with the religious community of the living.
Erik Hornung says that in the ''Book of Traversing Eternity'' "the realm of the dead was brought into this life, and this other-worldly Egypt became the 'temple of the world', as it came to be called in
late classical antiquity."
Terence DuQuesne says that in the book "there is movement back and forth between places in Egypt and locations in the sky or in the netherworld… The text reads like a consecutive narrative, a magical mystery tour on different levels of reality."
Along with other funerary works, this text eventually superseded the ''
Book of the Dead
The ''Book of the Dead'' is the name given to an Ancient Egyptian funerary texts, ancient Egyptian funerary text generally written on papyrus and used from the beginning of the New Kingdom of Egypt, New Kingdom (around 1550 BC) to around 50 BC ...
''.
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See also
*
Egyptian mythology (Origins)
*
References
Further reading
*
External links
*
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...
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web pagedescribing a funerary tablet with text from the Book of Traversing Eternity
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Funerary texts in ancient Egyptian