Anubis god and guide of the underworld would weigh

■
Anubis , god and guide of the underworld, would weigh each dead
person’s heart.
■
To win eternal life, the heart could be no heavier than a feather.
■ If the heart tipped the scale, showing that it was heavy with sin, a fierce
beast known as the Devourer of Souls would pounce on the impure heart
and eat it
■ . But if the soul passed this test for purity and truth, it would live forever in
the beautiful Other World.

Egyptian Culture: Afterlife
■
People of all classes planned for their burials, so that they might safely
reach the Other World.
■
Kings and queens built great tombs, such as the pyramids, and other
Egyptians built smaller tombs.
■
Royal and elite Egyptians’ bodies were preserved by mummification ,
which involves embalming and drying the corpse to prevent it from
decaying.
■
Scholars still accept Herodotus’s description of the process of
mummification as one of the methods used by Egyptians.
■
Attendants placed the mummy in a coffin inside a tomb.
■
Then they filled the tomb with items the dead person could use in the
afterlife, such as clothing, food, cosmetics, and jewelry.
■
Many Egyptians purchased scrolls that contained hymns, prayers, and
magic spells intended to guide the soul in the afterlife.

Life in Egyptian Society
■
Like the grand monuments to the kings, Egyptian society formed a
pyramid.
■ The king, queen, and royal family stood at the top.
■
Below them were the other members of the upper class, which included
wealthy landowners, government officials, priests, and army commanders.
■
The next tier of the pyramid was the middle class, which included
merchants and artisans.
■
At the base of the pyramid was the lower class, by far the largest class. It
consisted of peasant farmers and laborers.
■
In the later periods of Egyptian history, slavery became a widespread
source of labor.
■ Slaves, usually captives from foreign wars, served in the homes of the rich
or toiled endlessly in the gold mines of Upper Egypt.

Egyptian Writing
■
As in Mesopotamia, the development of writing was one of the keys to the
growth of Egyptian civilization.
■
Simple pictographs were the earliest form of writing in Egypt, but scribes
quickly developed a more flexible writing system called hieroglyphics .
■
This term comes from the Greek words hieros and gluph, meaning “sacred
carving.”
■
As with Sumerian cuneiform writing, in the earliest form of hieroglyphic
writing, a picture stood for an idea.
■
For instance, a picture of a man stood for the idea of a man.
■ In time, the system changed so that pictures stood for sounds as well as
ideas.
■ The owl, for example, stood for an m sound or for the bird itself.
■
Hieroglyphs could be used almost like letters of the alphabet.

Egyptian Writing
■
Although hieroglyphs were first written on stone and clay, as in
Mesopotamia, the Egyptians soon invented a better writing surface—
papyrus reeds.