But just as commoners weren’t welcome in the royal palace, this heaven was not for ordinary humans. The Hebrew Bible doesn’t say much about what comes after death, notes historian Diarmaid MacCulloch in A History of Christianity. What it does suggest is that ‘human life comes to an end and, for all but a few exceptional people, that is it.’ Neighbouring societies had similar beliefs. In Gilgamesh, the inn-keeper Siduri counsels the hero to give up his search for immortality, telling him that the gods keep eternal life for themselves. Similarly, the epics of Homer – our earliest literary record of Greek thought, dating from around the eighth century BC – include no recognisable heaven for the vast majority of people. The true ‘self’ was the physical body, and although a soul or psyche was thought to survive after death in a dark, dusty underworld, this was a mere shadow of the living person. In the Odyssey, it’s a fate that horrifies the hero Achilles: ‘Never try to reconcile me to death,’ he tells Odysseus, adding that he would rather be a poor man’s servant on Earth than be ‘lord over all the dead that have perished’.
After the sixth century BC that changed. When Greek philosophers broke from mythological accounts and looked instead for physical explanations of the cosmos, their models also fed into religious beliefs, not just in Greece but in the Near East as well. We heard in chapter 3 how Aristotle set out a system of concentric celestial spheres carrying the sun, moon and planets around the Earth; this idea inspired the ‘seven heavens’ described in many Jewish and Christian (and later Islamic) texts. But in an earlier and even more fundamental shift, Aristotle’s teacher, Plato, revolutionised ideas about the soul.
One of Plato’s most famous teachings, written in the fourth century BC, is a story in his dialogue The Republic in which prisoners are chained in a cave facing the wall, so that all they can see are shadows on the rock. The captives believe that these shadows represent real things, but in fact they are just reflections of reality, which exists in the light outside the cave. Likewise, Plato argued, material things that we perceive in our lives and believe to be real are mere reflections of the unchanging ideas or ‘Forms’ that lie behind them. It’s a philosophy in which matter is secondary to consciousness, and physical objects are derived from ideas.
Not surprisingly, then, Plato thought that souls are more important than bodies. In another dialogue, Timaeus, one of his characters describes a benevolent god who shaped the chaos of the cosmos into an ordered system of celestial spheres, crafting first its soul, and only then its physical form. Plato suggested that humans, too, have immortal souls which originate in the divine realm of the stars. Each soul descends through the planetary spheres towards Earth, where it becomes joined with a physical body at birth. When we die, our soul is released from that body and is either reincarnated or, if we’re virtuous enough, ascends through the spheres to return to its place in the stars. ‘We ought to fly away from earth to heaven as quickly as we can,’ he wrote, ‘and to fly away is to become like God.’ (It’s an idea later echoed by the painter Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother of 1888: ‘As we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen,’ he mused, ‘so we take death to come to a star.’)
We each have within us a divine spark, a perfect soul inside our frail, mortal body that can travel to the heavens and live eternally among the stars. It’s a remarkable, inspiring idea. So where did Plato get it from? That’s a story that was hidden for thousands of years.
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On the edge of the Egyptian desert south of Cairo, near the village of Saqqara, there’s a collection of half-ruined pyramids. Part of a vast royal burial ground for the ancient capital of Memphis, they are smaller and for the most part younger than the famous pyramids of nearby Giza. They were built from blocks of limestone around a core of rubble, but the limestone itself has long since been stolen. Once more than 50 metres tall, they now resemble low, crumbling hills.
On 4 January 1881, two brothers from Berlin – Heinrich and Émile Brugsch – visited these rubble piles, hoping to explore the underground chambers hidden beneath. The ancient entrance passage of the first pyramid they tackled was sealed by a heavy granite trapdoor, so they squeezed on their bellies through a narrow tunnel cut by looters centuries earlier. Heinrich was terrified that the huge, ruined stones suspended precariously above would fall and crush them, but eventually they dropped unscathed into a subterranean corridor. ‘What a surprise awaited me, what reward to my efforts!’ he wrote. ‘Wherever I looked, right and left, the smooth limestone walls were covered in innumerable texts.’
The hieroglyphs were expertly carved and arranged in columns. Stooping low, stepping over stones and boulders, the brothers clambered along the corridor and into a wider chamber. It had a peaked limestone ceiling, which was painted black and covered with white, five-pointed stars. Here, too, the walls were covered with hieroglyphs. In the dim candlelight, they read the same name over and over: Merenre, Beloved of the Sun.
During the nineteenth century, just as in Mesopotamia, the colonial powers were enthusiastically combing Egypt for ancient treasures. Near Luxor in the south, European explorers were opening royal tombs dug into cliffs in the Valley of the Kings. Although the tombs had almost invariably been emptied by looters, the art and inscriptions painted on their walls yielded invaluable information about the history of this mysterious civilisation. Disappointingly, though, the chambers of the much older pyramids at Giza were completely blank.
Auguste Mariette, the aging Frenchman in charge of Egypt’s antiquities department, became convinced that all of the pyramids were ‘mute’. It wasn’t even worth the trouble of opening the smaller ones, he argued. But the French government disagreed, and in the summer of 1880, a team of local workmen burrowed into one of the Saqqara pyramids and reported finding hieroglyphics inside. Mariette refused to believe it, insisting they must have entered a nobleman’s tomb by mistake. But in December that year, when he was seriously ill in Cairo, news came of a second pyramid apparently full of texts. With his health fading fast, he sent his long-time colleagues, the Brugsch brothers, to check.
So, on the morning of 4 January, Heinrich and Émile took a train south from Cairo, then a two-hour donkey ride to reach the newly entered pyramid. To the west of the star-painted room was another chamber, also with a peaked, starry ceiling. The walls here, too, were covered in columns of rich inscriptions. And in the corner they saw a sarcophagus made from red-speckled granite, with a shoved-back lid. It was carved with more hieroglyphics, which Heinrich roughly translated: ‘The Great God and Lord of the Light Zone, Living Like the Sun.’
On the floor beside the coffin lay the embalmed body of a young man. Originally wrapped in fine linen, the mummy’s bindings had been torn off by looters, and the shreds were strewn around it like cobwebs. The body had been stripped of amulets and jewellery, but from the high quality of the embalming, with the mummy’s delicate facial features still recognisable, Heinrich concluded it belonged to the pyramid’s owner, King Merenre.
The brothers determined to take the 4,000-year-old pharaoh to Mariette that same evening. ‘Perhaps, I said to myself, it will afford the dying friend a last pleasure,’ Heinrich wrote, ‘to be able to see with his own eyes the mummy of one of the oldest kings of Egypt and indeed of the world.’ They put the mummy in a wooden coffin and strapped it to a donkey for the two-hour ride to the station, then heaved it into the baggage car of the Cairo train, telling the surprised guard they were accompanying an embalmed mayor of Saqqara. Damage to the rails meant the train stopped short of the city, and as the sun set, they had to walk the last few kilometres. ‘To lighten the load, we left the coffin behind and held his dead Majesty at the head end and at the feet,’ recalled Brugsch. ‘Then the Pharaoh broke through the middle and each of us took his half under his arm.’ They finally delivered the mummy to Mariette (who was reportedly horrified by the sight of the battered king) just a few days before the old man died.
It wasn’t the mummy, though, but the newly discovered ‘Pyramid Texts’, as Brugsch called them, that turned out to be the most important find. Similar inscriptions have now been discovered in ten Saqqara pyramids owned by kings and queens of the fifth and sixth dynasties, dating from the twenty-fourth and twenty-third