Barry Kemp

The Egyptians created a world of supernatural forces so vivid, powerful and inescapable that controlling one's destiny within it was a constant preoccupation. In life, supernatural forces manifested themselves through misfortune and illness,and after death were faced for eternity in the Otherworld, along with the divine gods who controlled the universe. The Book of the Dead empowered the reader to overcome the dangers lurking in the Otherworld and to become one with the gods who governed. Barry Kemp selects a number of spells to explore who and what the Egyptians feared and the kind of assistance that the Book offered them, revealing a relationship between the human individual and the divine quite unlike that found in the major faiths of the modern world.

How To Read The Egyptian Book Of The Dead

Egyptian culture is divided from us by several millennia, a lost people and a dead language. We can discover much about this fascinating civilization from its physical remains, but perhaps the greatest insights into the Egyptian mind come from Egyptian hieroglyphs. They reveal the priorities, concerns and beliefs of the Egyptians - a whole worldview. Unlike the Western alphabet, which is an arbitrary set of symbols not anchored in reality, each Egyptian hieroglyph denotes a concept central to Egyptian thinking. The language and its written form is intimately bound up with the imaginative world of the Egyptians. Here, Barry Kemp presents 100 of the Egyptian hieroglyphs to provide access to this unique culture. Kemp takes us on a journey through the Egyptian mind, revealing not only aspects of day-to-day life in Ancient Egypt, but gradually building a picture of the historical and mythological references that were the cornerstones of Egyptian thought. This fascinating book helps us get inside a long-vanished world.

Barry Kemp

Books

Your next favorite book is out there