In an interview on Ancient Egypt

Let's start with Jan Assmann. Tell me about Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt

A lot of people, when they come to look at Ancient Egypt and Egyptian material, think that Egyptians were obsessed with death and funerary rituals because so much that survives from their world relates to death and the transformative realm; the transfiguration of a person in the next world. This is also true, in part, because death is one of the most problematic experiences for people in any age. Assmann offers studies and interpretations of a whole range of funerary texts and liturgies, biographies, songs and hymns and shows us the full complexity of the Egyptians’ relationship with death. Their images of it were diverse, complex, and often conflicting. Death was denied and feared, ‘an enemy’, but death was also a kind of return to an original state, to the womb, and also, perhaps more familiarly, death was a transition to another world.

When you start to look in detail at Egyptian concepts of death they often seem contradictory. There is a paradise similar to earth but better; then there is a real fear, death as something that will dismember you and take you apart. This is very human in a way, the contradiction, and of course it makes sense that death has all these possibilities.

Assmann is an Egyptologist but he is also a great humanist scholar, and he uses Egypt almost as a case study for a wider way of looking at human concepts of the world and experience, especially religious belief and practice. His background in comparative religion perhaps makes Egyptology and Egyptian religion more broadly accessible.

How did you get interested in Egyptology?

I’m from New Zealand, the other side of the world from Egypt, but my parents took me travelling from an early age and it was somewhere in Greece that I decided I wanted to be an archaeologist. Then, at the beginning of my university career, somebody showed me Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar and I fell in love with hieroglyphs and Egyptian texts. I was very lucky to have Anthony Spalinger as a Professor at Auckland University – a world-renowned Egyptologist at the bottom of the world! I go to Egypt a few times a year and I’m just starting my own project there, in Luxor.

The Ancient Egyptian period, but it covers thousands of years. Presumably things changed a lot in that time?

My work is mostly on the Late New Kingdom and early first millennium (ca. 1200 to 700BC); you really do have to specialise! Change over time is difficult to approach, in part because we do specialise, but certain basic features such as art and religion also seem, on the surface, to be so static and unchanging. But there is enormous change and diversity – linguistic, religious and social developments were dramatic, for example ­– but ruling groups also wanted to preserve traditions so sometimes change isn’t immediately obvious and can be hard to assess.