 Have you ever heard about the Egyptian Book of the Dead? You probably have without even realizing it. The very well-known depiction of Anubis weighing the heart comes from these texts, for example. Though they are very ancient in the sense of where we are in history at the moment, they are actually dynastic Egyptian efforts to document the very ancient empire from which the new kingdom emerged. The Book of the Dead not only contains details of the afterlife and information about the gods of Egypt, who judge the Egyptians in this world and the next, but it also contains a vast list of spells that were designed to help a person on their journey to the afterlife and the trials that would be waiting, wait, till you hear this. The Egyptian Book of the Dead contains the oldest known religious writings in the world. Horos of the religious legend who suffered died and was buried in Aminta and who rose again from the dead like the winter sun as Horos in spirit, lifting aloft the insignia of his sovereignty. This was he who made the pathway not merely betwixt to the two horizons, but to eternal life as a son of Ra, the Holy Spirit in the Exotology. The intermediate link in the mythos, which connects the solar orb with yesterday, is now the intermediary between the two worlds and two lives in time and eternity. It is Horos who declares, I am the link, I am the everlasting one, I am Horos who stepeth onward through eternity. After the Book of the Dead was first translated by Egyptologist, it gained a place in the popular imagination as the Bible of the Ancient Egyptians, though this is seen as highly inappropriate because of the very ancient history that predates humanity's current imagination of how the civilization arose and fell. As you must consider Atlantis and Fath, for example, as the founders of pre-Dynastic Egypt, way back what we refer to as prehistory or the before time, anyway. The best known example of the Book of the Dead is the so-called Papyrus of Unifer, which was written around 1310 BC. The Book of the Dead was a fundamental work of ancient Egyptian culture. It was a very extensive text. In ancient times, owning the Book of the Dead was extremely expensive. The book consisted of approximately 200 chapters or spells and it was part of a tradition of funerary texts, which includes the earliest dynastic Egyptian texts detailing the kingdom that they superseded. The spells from the legendary book were extracted from these ancient texts and date from the 3rd millennium BC. Some of the chapters that made up the book continued to be inscribed on walls of tombs and sarcophagi just as the spells had been intended to be viewed from the beginning. Their surviving papyra include a varied collection of religious and magical texts and differ markedly in their illustrations. Some people ordered their own copies of the book, perhaps with a choice of spells they considered most significant for their own progression in the afterlife. The book was commonly recorded with hieroglyphs on papyrus scrolls and often illustrated with vignettes representing the deceased and his journey to the afterlife. The afterlife was considered to be a continuation of life on Earth and after passing through various difficulties and judgment in the Hall of Truth, a paradise which was a perfect reflection of an individual's life on Earth. After the soul has been justified in the Hall of Truth, it passed on to cross over Lily Lake to rest in the field of reeds where the soul would find all that had been lost in life and could enjoy it eternally. In order to reach the paradise, however, you needed to know where to go, how to address certain gods, what to say at certain times, and how to comport yourself in the land of the dead, which is why we would find an afterlife manual extremely useful, hence the Book of the Dead. The spells throughout the book promised a continuation of a person's existence after death, just as in life there were trials and there were unexpected turns in the path, areas and experiences to be avoided, friends and allies to cultivate, but eventually the soul could expect to be rewarded for living a good and virtuous life. For those left behind in life, the spells would have been interpreted the way people in the present day read horoscopes, for example. Horoscopes are not written to emphasize a person's bad points, nor are they read to feel badly about yourself. In the same way, the spells were constructed so that someone still living could read them. Think of their loved ones in the afterlife and feel assured that they had made their way safely through the fields of reeds, something along those lines, anyway. The texts and images of the Book of the Dead were magical as well as religious. Magic was as legitimate an activity as prayer to the gods, even when the magic was aimed at controlling the gods themselves. Indeed, there was little distinction from the ancient Egyptians between magical and religious practice. The concept of magic was also intimately linked with the spoken and written word. The act of speaking a ritual formula was an act of creation. There is a sense in which action and speech were one and the same thing. The magical power of words extended to the written word. Hieroglyphic scripts were held to have been invented by the god Thoth, and the hieroglyphs themselves were powerful. The written words conveyed the full force of a spell when spoken out aloud. This was true when the text was omitted, as often occurred in the later books of the Dead Scrolls, particularly if the accompanying images were present. The Egyptians also believed that knowing the name of something gave power over it. In this sense, the book empowers its owner with the mystical names of many of the entities that would encounter in the afterlife, giving them power over them. The spells of the book made use of several magical techniques which can also be seen in other areas of Egyptian life. A number of spells were protected to cease from harm. In addition to being represented on a book of the dead papyrus, these spells appeared on ornaments and jewelry wound into the wrapping of the mummy. If you think of this type of magical understanding or magical thinking not being uncommon, not only in ancient times but also in modern times, then we must consider that a force was present here on earth throughout history. It's not hard to imagine that a powerful group of beings existed on this earth. They descended, they conquered, they built, they left, and they left in their wake a civilization that continued to worship them up until even today. Maybe we are a species with amnesia or perhaps this is actually our way of remembering the time that we evolved from. Researchers have spent years trying to track down all the pieces of the book of the dead given to Amunhotep, a powerful Egyptian official from around 1400 BC. Nearly a hundred fragments of this scroll were recently found, not in a sandy tomb, but in the basement of the Queensland Museum where they were donated almost a hundred years ago. Isn't that crazy? We will leave it there for now, guys. Let us know what you are thinking. Comments below and as always, thank you for watching.