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🏛️ Mythology · Egyptian Myths2 min

What Went Into the Tomb and Why

Miqo editors · 2 sources

What and why

  • Food and drink. Bread, beer, meat, grain. People believed the deceased would still need food, so the supplies were real, not symbolic.
  • Worker figurines. The small statuettes were meant to go to work instead of their owner if he was called to labor in the afterlife.
  • Organ vessels. The internal organs were stored separately, under the protection of four guardians. The heart was left in place because it was needed at the judgment.
  • Scrolls of instructions. The collection of sayings worked like a guidebook: what to say, whom to name, and how to answer questions.

The third point explains the strange part of mummification: the brain was removed and discarded, while the heart was left inside. People believed that the heart was what thought and felt, and that it would be weighed at the judgment.

  1. Preserve the body. Without the body, there was no anchor for what continued to exist after death, which is why the entire technique of mummification developed.

  2. Make the journey. The path was described as a series of gates and questions, and the correct answers and names were written in the scrolls placed nearby.

  3. Survive the weighing. The heart was placed on scales opposite a feather: balance meant the person had passed, while an imbalance meant they had not.

  4. Live on. After that, food, utensils, servants, and everything familiar were still needed, so the tomb was assembled like a home, not a storeroom.

There was also a backup system in case of disaster. If the body was destroyed, a statue could serve as an anchor, and if the supplies disappeared, images of food on the walls were thought to work no less well than the real thing.

That is why paintings in tombs were not decorations. Scenes of plowing, hunting, and feasting served the same purpose as the objects: they provided the deceased with whatever they depicted.

That is also why the name was written in the tomb. A name was considered part of a person, and erasing it from the wall meant not renaming someone but depriving them of existence - exactly what was done to people whose memory others wanted erased.

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Sources

  1. The burial equipment of ancient Egypt included supplies, worker figurines, vessels for the internal organs, and texts with instructions for the journey to the afterlife
  2. the heart was left in the body as the organ of thought and the object of posthumous weighing, while the brain was removed during mummification