The Egyptians and the dead: the wooden simulacres of the dead presented in the Egyptian banquets as described by Herodotus and the custom of keeping the mummies in the houses
I reproduce here several paragraphs of the very interesting text of Pr. Barbara Borg “The Dead as a Guest at Table? Continuity and Change in the Egyptian Cult of the Dead”, in M. L. Bierbrier (ed.), Portraits and Masks. Burial customs in Roman Egypt. Colloquium London 13.-14.7.1995 (London 1997), p. 26-32
“In his epic poem Punica (13.475) Silius Italicus describes the visit of Scipio Africanus to the underworld. There Scipio meets the ghost of Appius Claudius, who was fatally wounded near Capua. Appius laments that he could not find peace because his friends had failed to cremate and bury his body. Scipio wishes to do him this favour but claims that he does not know according to which rites it should be done, so he lists a number of different practices: 'All over the world the practice is different in this matter , and unlikeness of opinion produces variou s ways of burying the dead and disposing of their ashes. In the land of Spain, we are told (it is an ancient custom) the bodies of the dead are devoured by loathly vultures. When a king dies in Hyrcania, it is the rule to let dogs have access to the corpse. The Egyptians enclose their dead, standing in an upright position, in a coffin of stone, and worship it; and they admit a bloodless spectre to their banquets.' 1 The text goes on like this but we will stop here because our interest today is directed at the Egyptian practice.
We find confirmation for this in Lucian' s De luctu (21): ' Up t o that point, the wailing , the same stupid custom prevails everywhere ; but in what follows , the burial, they have apportioned out among themselves , nation by nation, the different modes.The Greek burns, the Persian buries, the Indian encases in glass, the Scythian eats, the Egyptian salts. And the latter — I have seen whereof I speak — after drying the dead man makes him his guest at table!' 2
These reports by two authors of the first and second centuries AD strike a modern reader as being fairly strange. One would expect them to have instantaneously provoked scientific curiosity. Surprisingly, this is not the case, and these passages have aroused little or no interest. It is, however, not the place here to examine the reasons for this awkward silence within the academic community. 3
First of all, one should notice that there can be little doubt as to the veracity of these statements. Teles, Diodorus, Cicero and Sextus Empiricus confirm that the Egyptians kept the mummies of their relatives at home. 4 To be sure, some of the texts show great similarity and therefore may depend on each other or on still another common source. 5 But at least two authors knew Egypt personally. Diodorus visited Alexandria during the180th Olympiad (60—56 BC) — moreover , R. Merkelbach recently confirmed the general reliability of paragraphs I 91-9 3 by comparing Diodorus' description of the judgement-ceremonial with evidence from the papyri 6 - while Lucian spent several years in Egypt, where he held a high position in the office of the prefect of Egypt. For the most intriguing part in the passage quoted above, the participation of mummies at banquets, he even stresses his testimony as an eyewitness.
In some of the texts the Egyptians and their strange habits clearly function as 'the other ' of Greeks or Romans. 7 Nevertheless, this does not necessarily indicate that the habits used in this way were simply invented for the purpose. In the case of Egypt, particularly, there existed enough bizarre practices to serve these needs, and this applies not only to mummification itself. Animal worship, for example, proved to be a major argument in the mostly unfavourable conceptions of Egypt, as propagated by non-Egyptian authors. However, it was also an actual and widespread practice in Graeco-Roman Egyptian popular religion. 8
We find further evidence in Christian texts which relate that even the Coptic Christians used to keep the preserved and adorned bodies of venerated persons, predominantly martyrs, above ground. According to Athanasius this custom drove St Anthony into the desert to await his death in solitude. 9 It was this custom again (and not mummification itself) that provoked the censure of bishops and other higher clergy — an idle censure, as it turned out, as is shown not least by the display and worship of relics up to the present day. It can hardly be imagined that the Copts 'invented' the habit themselves, but it is plausible to presume that they adopted it from their pagan predecessors. 10
Support for our hypothesis can be found in the mummies themselves: Flinders Petrie reports that several of the mummies he excavated at Hawara 'had been much injured by exposure during a long period before burial'. The 'mummies had often been knocked about, the stucco chipped off.' They were 'dirtied, fly-marked, caked with dust which was bound on by rain'. In the footcases of the mummies 'the wrapping h ad been used by children, who scribbled caricatures upon it.' Petrie already connected his observations with the tradition that the dead were kept in the houses of their relatives and also assumed a domestic cult for them. 11
The passage in Herodotus which Petrie and others succeeding him drew upon cannot, however, serve as proof. Herodotus reports (2.78) that at banquets people in Egypt used to show around a well-made and nicely painted νεκρόν ξύλινον to remind the participants of the transitoriness of life and to encourage them to enjoy the advantages of the present.There are two main reasons why this cannot possibly have anything to do with the custom we are considering here. First of all, it appears highly unlikely that νεκρόν ξύλινον could ever be translated as mummy. The expression must refer to some sort of wooden figure of a dead person or even of death itself - one to two ells long, according to Herodotus. It may well be a wooden skeleton, as is indicated by banquet equipment with representations of skeletons.12 Secondly, the sense of the procedure described by Herodotus is contrary to the whole meaning connected with a mummy, especially one of a relative.13 The mummy was a symbol of and guarantor not for death but for life, even though for an other worldly one .”
“What, then, was the origin of that custom? Neither in Greek nor in Roman religion is there any indication of a domestic cult of the dead. Likewise, in pharaonic Egypt the dead were not kept in the house of the relatives but, after embalming, were accompanied in a ceremonial procession to the tomb, where they were buried and received sacrifices. Later on they were commemorated on various days. The family offered sacrifices at the tomb and apparently also invited guests to a solemn banquet that took place in special rooms of the temple. 31
However, for some time now, an increasing number of references have indicated that there already existed in pharaonic times a cult for the deceased in the house of the relatives...”
“In conclusion, then, there are several clear indications of a domestic ancestral cult already in place in pharaonic Egypt, a cult that could be celebrated even in front of images of the deceased! 36 Such cults seem to have been the exception rather than the rule, and up to now there is no chronological series into the Greek and Roman periods. There may be two main reasons for this. First, excavations of living quarters that could provide further data are still rather scarce and, secondly, we face a problem of visibility — or lack of attention to less clearly visible material. Ancestral cult was mainly part of the popular religion, the beliefs among the middle and lower classes,37 whereas the material evidence that usually catches the attention of archaeologists and Egyptologists gives information only about the uppermost class and its ideology. One reason for the fact that most of the evidence for ancestral cult comes from Dei r el-Medina may be the very ability of the craftsmen living there to manifest their beliefs in a more 'visible' form. Thus, in spite of the lack of contemporary evidence , the later custom of keeping the mummies of the deceased in the house can only be derived from the Egyptian ancestral cult.”
“The significance of the step from venerating the dead in the presence of substitutes like stelae or busts, or from the depiction of banquets for the dead, to the factual, physical attendance of the deceased in the form of his mummy, cannot be overestimated, and it would be most interesting to know when it was made and under what circumstances. It was no later than the third century BC, as we know from Teles, but it may have been even earlier. Once the practice was introduced, the new form of the portrait mummy must have fulfilled the requirements of the cult as wel l as the demand for representation particularly well.’
[Conclusion] “Whatever the religious beliefs and social implications in connection with the display and veneration of portrait mummies may have been precisely, the fact that mummies were kept in the house for some time, and most probably received some sort of cult there, helps to explain the discrepancy between the character of the mummies — costly but weakened in their magic powers by their new worldly shape — and their careless, sometimes even rude burial without any grave markers. The Egyptian ancestral cult rarely goes back more than one or two generations , as is shown not least by the inscriptions on th e akh-iker stelae.47 This leads to the assumption that the portrait mummies were kept in the house for approximately the same time. After the immediate relatives had died themselves, and after interest in the more distant ancestors had faded, the mummies may have been handed over to the temple in charge. As is shown by the different contexts , the kind of burial they were given depended on many factors that can only be identified on the basis of new evidence and extensive research. 48 In the case of the careless burials mentioned above, a proper family tomb was obviously not available. Perhaps the relatives were not interested any more in an expensive burial and entrusted the mummies of their ancestors to the priests or servants of the temple who, away from the control of the family, cared as little for the burial as they often did before for the treatment of the bodies during embalming.49″
Source on the net with the communication in its entirety https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/propylaeumdok/407/1/Borg_The_Dead_as_a_Guest_at_Table_1997.pdf
Barbara Elisabeth Borg FSA (born 26 December 1960) is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Exeter.[1] She is known in particular for her work on Roman tombs, the language of classical art, and geoarchaeology. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Borg
Herodotus’ passage on the wooden simulacres of the dead used in Egyptian banquets is as follows (2.78, ancient Greek original and its translation by A. D. Godley):
Ἐν δὲ τῇσι συνουσίῃσι τοῖσι εὐδαίμοσι αὐτῶν, ἐπεὰν ἀπὸ δείπνου γένωνται, περιφέρει ἀνὴρ νεκρὸν ἐν σορῷ ξύλινον πεποιημένον, μεμιμημένον ἐς τὰ μάλιστα καὶ γραφῇ καὶ ἔργῳ, μέγαθος ὅσον τε πηχυαῖον ἢ δίπηχυν, δεικνὺς δὲ ἑκάστῳ τῶν συμποτέων λέγει " Ἐς τοῦτον ὀρέων πῖνέ τε καὶ τέρπευ· ἔσεαι γὰρ ἀποθανὼν τοιοῦτος." ταῦτα μὲν παρὰ τὰ συμπόσια ποιεῦσι.
After rich men's repasts, a man carries around an image in a coffin, painted and carved in exact imitation of a corpse two or four feet long. This he shows to each of the company, saying “While you drink and enjoy, look on this; for to this state you must come when you die.” Such is the custom at their symposia.
I think that Pr. Borg is totally right that Herodotus writes that wooden simulacres of the dead were presented in the Egyptian banquets of his era, not the mummies themselves. On the other hand, perhaps Herodotus’ text shows that the tradition of painting veristic individualized portraits of the dead has also Egyptian roots and it was not just an imitation of a Roman custom, as it seems that Pr. Borg claims elsewhere in her text. I say this because the simulacres described by Herodotus may be understood as representations of a corpse in general, but nothing excludes that they were imitations of relatives of the persons who offered the banquets. Moreover, perhaps the presentation of wooden simulacres of the dead in the banquets of upper class Egyptians of the fifth century BCE should be seen as a step toward the generalization of the domestic ancestral cult, which was for a long time, as Pr. Borg says, part of the popular religion of the lower and middle classes of the Egyptian population, with eventual form of this domestic ancestral cult, again as Pr. Borg says, the keeping of the mummies in the Egyptian houses.
