Funerary customs, rituals and beliefs about the afterlife, including the ka, ba and akh and the weighing of the heart, and mummification; funerary texts including the Book of the Dead and the Amduat; and the architecture and decoration of royal and non-royal tombs

What this dot point is asking

NESA wants you to explain what New Kingdom Egyptians believed happened after death, the ka, ba and akh, the weighing of the heart and the Field of Reeds, and how three linked practices, mummification, funerary texts (the Book of the Dead and the Amduat), and tomb architecture and decoration, put those beliefs into physical and textual practice down to the death of Amenhotep III (c. 1390-1352 BC).

The answer

The self after death: ka, ba and akh

Egyptians understood the human person as several linked elements, not a single soul. The ka was a person's life-force or spiritual double, created alongside the body at birth, which needed ongoing food and drink offerings after death to survive, hence the offering lists and offering-table scenes carved into tomb walls. The ba, usually shown as a bird with a human head, represented personality and mobility: it could leave the tomb by day and had to return to the mummified body at night. Only if the body was preserved, correct rites performed, and the deceased justified in judgement, could the ka and ba unite to form an akh, a transfigured, effective spirit capable of joining the gods and the "imperishable stars." Losing any element, a destroyed body, no offerings, a failed judgement, meant the frightening possibility of a "second death," true annihilation.

The weighing of the heart and the Field of Reeds

The deciding moment was the judgement in the Hall of Two Truths, before the god Osiris. The god Anubis weighed the deceased's heart (ib), believed to record a lifetime's conduct, against the feather of Ma'at, the goddess of truth and cosmic order, while the ibis-headed scribe god Thoth recorded the verdict. Waiting nearby was Ammit, the "Devourer," part crocodile, lion and hippopotamus, ready to eat the heart of anyone found wanting, an outcome equivalent to permanent non-existence. A heart that balanced the feather was declared "true of voice" (maa kheru) and admitted to the Field of Reeds (Sekhet-Aaru), imagined as an idealised, eternally fertile mirror of Egypt where the justified dead farmed, feasted and lived forever.

Mummification: the 70-day process

Mummification aimed to preserve a recognisable body for the ka. Embalmers first removed the brain through the nostril with a hooked instrument (excerebration) and normally discarded it, since the heart, not the brain, was considered the seat of intelligence and emotion. The liver, lungs, stomach and intestines were removed through an incision in the flank, dried and treated separately, then placed in four canopic jars, each guarded by one of the Four Sons of Horus and a protecting goddess: Imsety (human-headed, liver, protected by Isis), Hapy (baboon-headed, lungs, Nephthys), Duamutef (jackal-headed, stomach, Neith) and Qebehsenuef (falcon-headed, intestines, Selket). The heart was left in the body.

The body itself was packed in and covered with natron salt for about 40 days to draw out moisture and prevent decay. It was then washed, anointed with oils and resins, packed with linen or sawdust to restore a lifelike shape, and wrapped in many layers of linen bandages. Protective amulets were placed within the wrappings at specific points on the body, most importantly the heart scarab, inscribed with a version of Book of the Dead Spell 30B asking the heart not to testify against its owner, alongside amulets such as the djed pillar (stability, linked to Osiris) and the wedjat eye (protection and healing). The Greek historian Herodotus (Histories 2.85-90), writing centuries later, describes several "grades" of embalming priced by wealth; combined with the biblical account of Joseph's embalming (Genesis 50), this supports the well-established convention that the whole process, drying plus wrapping and ritual, took roughly 70 days.

Funerary texts: the Book of the Dead and the Amduat

By the New Kingdom, funerary texts once reserved for kings (the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts) and then more widely available (the Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts) had developed into two distinct traditions.

The Book of the Dead, properly the "Book of Going Forth by Day," was a compilation of roughly 190 known spells, though no single copy contains them all, written on papyrus scrolls (the best-known surviving example is the Papyrus of Ani) and bought by officials and other private individuals who could afford one, to be placed with the mummy or in the tomb. Its most famous spell, Spell 125, contains the "negative confession," in which the deceased denies a long list of specific wrongs before 42 assessor gods, and is often illustrated with a vignette of the weighing of the heart.

The Amduat ("That Which Is in the Netherworld") was, by contrast, exclusively royal. Painted or carved on the walls of the king's own burial chamber, it described the sun god Ra's nightly journey through the twelve hours of the underworld in vivid, closely captioned detail, a journey the dead king's own fate was believed to merge with. It is first attested under Thutmose I and appears in its first complete form in the tomb of Thutmose III (KV34); later kings of the dynasty, including Amenhotep II and, by the death of Amenhotep III, the Eighteenth Dynasty more broadly, continued the tradition in their own tombs.

Tomb architecture: from pyramid to the Valley of the Kings

Middle Kingdom kings had still built pyramid tombs, highly visible monuments that had proved easy for robbers to locate and plunder. Early Eighteenth Dynasty pharaohs, beginning with Thutmose I (c. 1504-1492 BC), instead had their tombs cut in secret, deep into the limestone cliffs of a remote valley on Thebes' west bank, later known as the Valley of the Kings. The architect Ineni, who supervised Thutmose I's tomb, recorded in his own tomb autobiography that he oversaw the work "no one seeing, no one hearing," a rare contemporary statement that concealment, not display, was now the design goal. A typical tomb of this period descended through corridors and a well shaft (which both symbolised and, it was hoped, physically deterred flash floods and robbers) to a pillared hall and a deep burial chamber housing the sarcophagus and canopic equipment.

Decorated Theban noble tombs and mortuary temples

Officials could not share the king's hidden burial ground, so they built and decorated their own rock-cut chapel tombs on nearby Theban hillsides, above all Sheikh Abd el-Qurna. These tombs typically combine an offering chapel, richly painted with everyday-life scenes (banquets, agriculture, hunting in the marshes, craft workshops) and funerary scenes (offering processions, the journey to the west), with a separate, undecorated burial shaft below. The paintings were not simply decorative: banquet and agricultural imagery was believed to magically supply the deceased's ka with food and pleasure forever, and inscribed offering formulas invited any visitor to speak the words that would keep the offerings flowing even after the family's own cult lapsed.

Kings, meanwhile, separated their concealed tomb from the public mortuary (memorial) temple where their offering cult was performed, built in the open on the desert edge nearer the cultivation. The largest example from this dot point's scope is Amenhotep III's mortuary temple at Kom el-Hetan, now mostly destroyed but originally the biggest such temple ever built in Egypt, still marked today by its two colossal guardian statues, the Colossi of Memnon.

Significance

Mummification, funerary texts and tomb architecture were not separate customs but three expressions of one anxiety: that the self, ka, ba and eventually akh, must survive physically, be judged favourably, and be sustained forever. From Ahmose I's reunified Egypt to the death of Amenhotep III, that anxiety produced an increasingly elaborate, and increasingly class-differentiated, technology of the afterlife: royal netherworld books and hidden rock-cut tombs at one end, and more modest but still magically potent painted chapels for officials at the other.

How to read a source on this topic

Sources for this dot point fall into two kinds that must not be confused. Funerary texts and tomb decoration (Book of the Dead papyri, Amduat wall texts, tomb paintings at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna) are IDEALISED and FORMULAIC: they show the deceased young, healthy and blessed, and the "negative confession" is a template denial, not a factual biography, so it cannot be read as neutral autobiography. Archaeological evidence (mummies, canopic equipment, amulets, tomb architecture itself) shows what was physically done, but rarely explains WHY in the deceased's own words.

Ancient WRITTEN accounts by outsiders, chiefly Herodotus (Histories 2.85-90) and, more briefly, Diodorus Siculus (Bibliotheca Historica 1.91), need particular care: both were Greek visitors writing many centuries after the New Kingdom, describing the Egypt of their own, much later day, filtered through interpreters, so their procedural detail should be treated as broadly indicative rather than proof of exact New Kingdom practice. In every case, work through content (what does it actually show), reliability (genre, date, and whose interests it serves), usefulness (what specific question it can answer), and perspective (a royal netherworld text serves the king's theology; an official's tomb serves his own status and afterlife), and corroborate across source types rather than relying on one.

Historians on death, burial and funerary texts

John H. Taylor (Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt, 2001) is the standard modern synthesis, arguing that Egyptian funerary belief was a set of overlapping, sometimes contradictory models, the ka/ba/akh scheme, a solar afterlife merged with Ra, and an Osirian afterlife via the weighing of the heart, held together in practice rather than a single fixed doctrine. Erik Hornung, the leading modern authority on the royal netherworld books, established the Amduat's distinct, exclusively royal solar theology (The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, 1999) as separate from the more accessible, Osiris-centred Book of the Dead used by officials. Salima Ikram (Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt, 2003) is the standard reference on mummification technique and cautions that Herodotus, though invaluable as the fullest ancient written account, must be checked against archaeological evidence rather than trusted at face value. Nicholas Reeves and Richard Wilkinson (The Complete Valley of the Kings, 1996) reconstruct the development of royal tomb architecture from Thutmose I onward, using Ineni's autobiography as the key textual anchor for why concealment became the New Kingdom's design principle.