Judgment of the Dead

Summary

The judgment of the dead is the story of a dead person who stands, after death, before a judge or a balance; what he did in life is examined, and that decides where he goes. Its oldest complete telling is chapter 125 of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, together with the picture of the weighing of the heart. Book of the Dead papyri appear at the beginning of the New Kingdom, about 1450 BCE.

The dead person arrives at a broad hall the text calls wsḫ.t-n.t-mꜣꜥ.tj, the Hall of the Two Maats, with the word Maat in the dual. He greets the great god, lord of the Two Maats, and says: I know you and I know your name, and I know the names of the forty-two gods who are with you in this hall, who live on the henchmen of evil and drink their blood on that day of reckoning characters before Wennefer, a title of Osiris. Then he lists what he has not done: I have not impoverished people, I have not robbed the orphan, I have not caused hunger, I have not caused weeping, I have not killed, I have not reduced the measuring vessel or the measuring cord, I have not encroached on the fields, I have not added to the pan of the scales or tampered with its plumb, I have not taken milk from the mouths of children, I have not held back water in its season. Then he faces the forty-two gods one by one, each with a name and a town he comes from, among them "Shadow-eater who comes from the cave", "Blood-eater who comes from the slaughterhouse" and "Breaker of bones", and before each he denies one wrong.

The papyrus of Ani, a royal scribe at Thebes about 1250 BCE, draws what happens in the hall. In the middle stands a balance, Ani's heart in its left pan and Maat's feather in the right, and on top of its post squats a small baboon, one of the forms of Thoth. Jackal-headed Anubis kneels, holding the cord of the pan and steadying the plumb, while ibis-headed Thoth stands with palette and reed to write down what appears. Behind him on a mat sits Ammit, with a crocodile's head, a lion's forepart and a hippopotamus's hindquarters, waiting to eat the heart if its owner fails. Above, the great gods sit on their thrones. Ani enters bowing, with his wife Tutu, and speaks to his heart in the pan: my heart of my mother, do not stand against me as a witness, do not oppose me in the tribunal, do not turn away from me before the keeper of the balance. Then Thoth tells the gods: I have judged the heart of this Osiris, his soul standing as witness for him; his deeds are true upon the great balance, and no evil has been found in him. The gods answer: he is without evil, we have nothing against him. On the next sheet Horus leads him to Osiris. In the papyrus of Hunefer, from the reign of Sety I, Ammit crouches below the balance, and the caption beside her says: her front is a crocodile, her rear a hippopotamus, her middle a lion; then Horus leads Hunefer to Osiris enthroned in his shrine with Isis and Nephthys. British Museum, papyrus of Ani, papyrus of Hunefer.

The text closes the scene at the door of the hall. Each part of the gate says: I shall not let you enter unless you tell my name. He names the beam "Plummet of the Place of Truth", the right leaf "Scale-pan that carries Maat", and the guard of the hall "Knower of hearts, Examiner of bellies". Then Thoth asks him why he has come and to whom he should be announced, and he answers: to him whose roof is of fire, whose walls are living cobras, and the floor of whose house is in the flood, that is, Osiris. At the end come instructions: the speech is said by one who is pure and clean, in fresh clothes and white sandals, his eyes painted, anointed with the finest myrrh. University College London's Digital Egypt notes that no written version of these denials is older than the New Kingdom, and that they may come from the oath of purity sworn on entering temple service.

The story recurs in other mythologies. In Iran Rashnu stands at the head of the Chinvat Bridge with a balance that does not tip by a hair, and Mithra presides over the tribunal with Sraosha. In India the dead go to Yama and meet the offerings and gifts they made in life, and in later books Yama becomes the judge of the dead, to whom his scribe reads out every soul's account. In Plato's myth Zeus makes three of his sons judges in a meadow where the road divides, one way to the Isles of the Blest and the other to Tartarus. In Mesopotamia the Anunna, the seven judges, give their verdict on Inanna before the throne of Ereshkigal, and after his death Gilgamesh is made governor of the netherworld, judging among the dead. In the Qur'an the scales are set up on the Day of Resurrection: whoever's scales are heavy will have a pleasing life, and whoever's scales are light, his abode is the Abyss. The versions agree on three things. The judgment happens at a border between this world and the house of the dead. What is judged is what a person did in life, not his descent or his wealth. And it has an instrument that cannot be deceived: a balance, a judge who sees the soul naked, or a scribe who keeps what was written. The idea it turns on is that a life is counted for and against a person after death by one measure, before which king and poor man stand alike: the Pahlavi Mēnōg ī Xrad says Rashnu's balance treats lord and monarch the same as the least of mankind, and Plato says that when Rhadamanthys takes hold of the Great King he does not know who he is, and sees his soul scarred all over with perjuries and injustice.

The name reads in the Arabic tongue as follows. The Egyptian text calls that day hrw pwy n ḥsb qdw, the day on which characters are reckoned. Ḥsb is Arabic ḥasaba with its three letters in order, ḥ for ḥ, s for s, b for b, and the Egyptian dictionary gives it as to count, reckon and distribute. Lane: ḥasabahu, he counted, reckoned it; ḥāsabahu, he called him to account; ḥasīb, a reckoner, a taker of accounts. Qd in Egyptian is nature, form and character, and the same root gives a verb, to form or build; it is Arabic qadd: the qadd of a thing is its measure and size, the qadd of a man his stature and figure, qadda is to cut leather into a shape, and "this is on the qadd of that" means it is of the same measure. On this reading that day is the day of reckoning the measures, the day a person is counted at his true size and his heart is laid in a pan so that his measure is known. The Qur'an itself, in its verse on the scales, says: "and We suffice as reckoners", ḥāsibīn. This is a reading proposed on the method; the detail is under Linguistic Root.

Linguistic Root

The Egyptian verb ḥsb joins counting, reckoning and distributing; from it comes ḥsb.w, reckoning, and an epithet the Egyptian dictionary records for a god, ḥsb-qd.w, he who reckons the forms. Its three letters are those of Arabic ḥasaba without substitution. Hebrew writes the verb with š, ḥāšab, to think, account, reckon, and the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon sets the Aramaic, Arabic and Ethiopic words beside it. Lane: ḥasabahu, he counted, reckoned it; ḥāsabahu, he called him to account; ḥasīb, a reckoner; and "the sun and the moon are by ḥusbān", they run by reckoning. The Egyptian dictionary translates the sentence in Nu's papyrus as "on that day of the evaluation of character before Wennefer".

Egyptian qd is nature, form and character, and the same root gives a verb, to form, fashion, build. Lane: the qadd of a thing is its measure, quantity or size; the qadd of a man is his stature, his figure, the justness of his form; "such a one was shaped with the shaping of the sword" means he was well formed; and "this is on the qadd of that" means it is equal to it in measure. Q is q, d is d, and in both languages the sense is the shape a thing was formed in and its measure. On this reading ḥsb qdw is in Arabic ḥisāb al-qudūd, the reckoning of measures, which is what the balance does: it finds the measure of the heart.

The Egyptian balance is mḫꜣ.t, the balance of the market too. The Egyptian dictionary quotes the Instruction of Amenemope: the baboon sits beside the balance, and his heart is the plumb line, so the image of Thoth stands by the balance of this world before the balance of the next. Arabic mīzān comes from wazana; in Lane it is a weighing-instrument, and also the weight of a thing. Whoever passes is called in Egyptian mꜣꜥ-ḫrw, true of voice, that is, justified, and the phrase is written after the name of every dead person.

Rashnu, the weighty one

The Encyclopaedia Iranica derives rašnu from the Avestan verb raz-, to move in a straight line, to direct; it is an adjective meaning just, upright, and his standing epithet is razišta, most just. The š of rašnu comes in Avestan from z before n, so the root letters are r and z. On the method we read it as razīn, from razana: in Lane razana al-shayʾa is to lift a thing in order to see its weight, razuna is to be heavy, and a razīn man is grave, steady and sound of judgment. On this reading the name is that of one who lifts a thing to learn its weight, which is Rashnu's work with his balance. Iranists, however, take the n from the suffix -nu, as they do in the name of the Chinvat Bridge, while in Arabic it belongs to the root r-z-n.

Minos, the one who allots

The project's Greek Semitic essay reads Mino-, once the Greek -s of Μίνως is removed, from Arabic manna in the sense "decreed and judged", making him the ruler and judge. In Lane, the sense "decreed" belongs to manā, not manna: manā is to decree, maniyya is death because it is decreed, and manāyā are the decrees of fate. The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon sets Hebrew mānâ, to count, number, reckon, assign, beside Akkadian manû, Aramaic, and Arabic in the sense of assigning, apportioning. In the Aeneid Minos shakes the urn of lots, and the lines say: "these seats are not given without lot, without a judge". On this reading Minos is the allotter who counts the dead and assigns them their dwellings, a reading proposed on the method that corrects the essay's root and keeps its sense. Minos is a Cretan name with no ancient analysis.

Attestations by Culture

Egypt: from the Teaching for Merikare to the Book of Gates

Centuries before the Book of the Dead, a king of Herakleopolis instructs his son Merikare: the court that judges the wretch is not lenient on the day of judging; do not trust in length of years, for they view a lifetime in an hour; when a man remains over after death his deeds are set beside him in heaps, and being yonder lasts for ever; whoever reaches them without having done wrong will exist there like a god. Lichtheim places the text in the reign of Merikare, of the Ninth or Tenth Dynasty, with its surviving copies from the Eighteenth Dynasty. Digital Egypt also notes a Twelfth-Dynasty stela from Abydos that sets out affirmations of innocence in a table anticipating the Book of the Dead.

Later the scene became part of the sun's night. In the Book of Gates carved on the sarcophagus of Sety I, about 1279 BCE, Osiris sits in the fifth hour of the night as Judge of the Dead on a dais of nine steps, and the heart is weighed against an ostrich feather; and in this book those who did not worship Ra are punished in the Lake of Fire and in boiling pools. The Global Egyptian Museum says Horemheb painted the judgment scene in the middle of the wall above his sarcophagus, and that private people of the Late Period took the judgment scene and part of the first hour onto their coffins. The place where all this happens is the Duat, the world Ra crosses every night.

Iran: Rashnu at the bridge

In the Gathas Zarathustra says he will cross the Bridge of the Separator with those who follow him, and that his opponents' own souls will torment them when they reach it. The Vendidad says the soul reaches the head of the bridge at dawn after the third night and is asked for the reward of what it gave, and the Hadokht Nask tells how the soul meets its conscience, the daēnā, as a beautiful or an ugly girl according to its deeds.

The Pahlavi Mēnōg ī Xrad sets out the tribunal. Sraosha leads the soul to the bridge, where enemies lie in wait, among them Astwihad, who devours creatures of every kind and knows no satiety; then it stands between Mithra, Sraosha and Rashnu, and Rashnu the just weighs it with the balance of the spirits, which favours no one, neither righteous nor wicked, neither lords nor monarchs, does not turn by a hair's breadth, and counts the monarch equal with the least of mankind. Arda Viraf, the priest who visited the other world in a vision, says: I saw Rashnu the just, who held in his hand the yellow golden balance and weighed the pious and the wicked. The Encyclopaedia Iranica also cites this weighing from the inscriptions of Kirdēr, the Sasanian high priest of the third century CE, older than the Pahlavi books. In the Avesta itself Rashnu judges the warah, the ordeal in which oaths are sworn over water and fire stands for truth.

India: Yama and his scribe

The funeral hymn of the Rigveda tells the dead man: go forth on the ancient paths our fathers took, and you will see both kings, Yama and Varuṇa; meet Yama and the Fathers, meet the merit of your sacrifices and gifts in highest heaven, and leave sin behind. Two four-eyed dogs of Yama guard the road and watch people. Monier-Williams then says that in later mythology Yama is the appointed judge and punisher of the dead, living in a region of the lower world called Yama-pura, where the soul's sentence is given after the recorder Citragupta has read the account of its actions, and that in this role he is called dharmarāja. The lexicon defines Citragupta as the recorder of every man's good and evil deeds, citing the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas.

Greeks and Romans: the three judges

In the house of Hades Odysseus sees Minos, son of Zeus, golden sceptre in hand, giving judgment to the dead from his seat while they sit and stand round him asking for his verdict.

Plato tells it as a full story in the Gorgias. In the time of Kronos there was a law that whoever lived justly and piously went to the Isles of the Blest, and whoever lived unjustly went to Tartarus. The living judged the living on the day they were to die, and Pluto and the guardians of the Isles complained to Zeus that people were reaching both places undeserving. Zeus said: the trouble is that they are tried in their clothes; many with wicked souls are clad in fair bodies, ancestry, wealth and witnesses. He had Prometheus take away their foreknowledge of their death, ordered them tried naked after death, and made the judge dead and naked too, looking with his own soul at the soul. He appointed three of his sons as judges: Minos and Rhadamanthys from Asia and Aiakos from Europe, sitting in the meadow where the road divides; Rhadamanthys tries those from Asia, Aiakos those from Europe, and Minos has the final decision when the other two are in doubt. Rhadamanthys marks each soul to show whether it can be cured, and sends a soul that lived in truth to the Isles. Plato adds that most of the incurable are kings and men of power, naming Tantalus, Sisyphus and Tityus from Homer.

In the Aeneid Aeneas sees Minos shaking the urn of lots, summoning the council of the silent and learning their lives and crimes; then he sees Rhadamanthys of Knossos ruling the harshest realm, punishing, hearing deceits and forcing every soul to confess what it put off atoning for until death.

Mesopotamia: Ereshkigal's judges and the assembly of fates

In Inanna's Descent Inanna makes her sister Ereshkigal rise from her throne and sits on it, and the Anunna, the seven judges, give their decision against her: they look at her with the look of death, speak to her with the speech of anger, shout at her the shout of heavy guilt, and she becomes a corpse hung on a hook. This is a judgment on a living goddess who entered the house of the dead and took a throne not hers, not on the deeds of a lifetime.

In the Sumerian poem The Death of Gilgamesh, in the Me-Turan version, the assembly of the gods recounts what Gilgamesh did: he travelled every road, brought cedar from its mountains, killed Huwawa, set up stelae, founded temples, reached Ziusudra in his dwelling, and brought back to the land the forgotten rites. Enki recalls that after the flood the gods made him swear that no human would be allowed to live for ever, and another god says: let Gilgamesh be a ghost below among the dead, governor of the netherworld, pre-eminent among the ghosts, passing judgments and rendering verdicts, his word as weighty as that of Ningishzida and Dumuzi. The Death of Gilgamesh, segment F, 1–41 and 82–86.

In Tablet X of the Babylonian epic Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh: the Anunnaki, the great gods, were in assembly, Mammitum, maker of destiny, decreed with them; death and life they established, the day of death they did not reveal. The Mesopotamian assembly decrees fate, šīmtu; it does not weigh each dead person's deeds.

The North: Nástrǫnd

For the most part the North does not judge its dead by their deeds: the slain in battle go to Valhalla, those who die of sickness and age go to Hel. Gylfaginning makes an exception after Ragnarök: good and moral men live in the halls Gimlé, Brimir and Sindri, while on Nástrǫnd, the Corpse-strand, stands a hall far from the sun with its doors facing north, woven of serpents' backs, whose venom runs in rivers that perjurers and murderers wade. Völuspá adds the man who beguiles another's wife, and says: there Níðhǫggr sucked the corpses of the dead.

The balance in the Qur'an

The project's Persian Semitic essay places Rashnu, who weighs deeds, in its table beside "the balance on the Day of Resurrection", and treats paradise, hell, the bridge, the balance and resurrection as an Iranian mould into which later religions poured their picture of the hereafter. The Qur'an says: "We shall set up just scales for the Day of Resurrection, so that no soul is wronged in anything; even the weight of a mustard seed We shall bring forth, and We suffice as reckoners"; "the weighing that day is the truth: those whose scales are heavy are the prosperous, and those whose scales are light have lost their own souls"; and "as for him whose scales are heavy, he shall have a pleasing life, and as for him whose scales are light, his abode is the Abyss". In the Qur'an the balance is set up for all people together on the Day of Resurrection after the raising of the dead, not at the hour of each person's death. The dates put Egypt's balance first: the picture of the weighed heart from about 1450 BCE, the earliest mention of Rashnu's balance in Kirdēr's inscriptions in the third century CE, so a transmission of the image from Iran alone would need an older witness.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

The balances of Egypt, of Rashnu and of the Qur'an share one image: two pans and a weight. What goes in the pans differs. In Egypt the dead person's heart faces Maat's feather, so the heart is measured against a standard outside it; with Rashnu good and evil deeds are weighed, so deeds are measured against one another; in the Qur'an the weight of a seed is weighed and the question is which pan is heavier. The heart Ani speaks to, begging it not to testify against him, answers the daēnā who meets the soul at the bridge: in both stories something of the person himself becomes a witness for him or against him. The scribe stands close to both: Thoth writes the result, Citragupta reads the account, and Plato makes the soul itself written over with the marks of what it did.

In most versions a devourer stands at the court: Ammit at the balance, Astwihad who knows no satiety at the bridge, Níðhǫggr who sucks the corpses of oath-breakers, and Yama's two dogs, whom the hymn calls insatiate. The difference is that Ammit eats the heart and nothing is left of its owner, while the wicked of Iran and the North live on in torment.

The versions part over the judge and what he knows. In Egypt the dead person knows the names of the forty-two judges and of the parts of the gate, and the knowledge itself opens the way. In Plato the judge does not know whom he is trying, and the dead man's ancestry and witnesses are no use to him. In Mesopotamia no one's deeds are weighed: the assembly recounts Gilgamesh's deeds to honour him, not to call him to account, and all the dead stay in the same house. The North sorts its dead by how they died before it asks what they did.

The living who entered the house of the dead and came back, among them the house of Ra and Osiris itself, are on the page Descent to the Underworld.

Symbolic Reading

The project's Egyptian essay reads the weighing of the heart against Maat's feather as a self-judgment: have you lived a balanced life? The heart is your deeds, the feather is the standard, and heavy deeds of injustice sink the heart; for the essay this is the first moral system built on personal responsibility. It reads the forty-two denials as the oldest moral law in history, a social charter that defines the good person by his acts. It reads Ammit as forgetting: whoever did not live by Maat is forgotten, and the greatest punishment is to be erased from memory. The structural comparison essay sets Maat beside Kittu and Mīšaru, Truth and Justice, who accompany Shamash in Babylon: in both civilizations justice is a necessity on which the world stands, and its collapse means a return to the waters of Nun or to Tiamat. The Persian essay reads the Chinvat Bridge as "a concept of accountability and justice".

The Egyptian text supports this reading in its details. The wrongs the dead person denies are wrongs of the field, the market and the household: the measuring vessel, the measuring cord, the pan of the scales and its plumb, the fields, water in its season, the dam on running water, cattle in their pastures, fish in the temple pools, milk in the mouths of children. The owner of the papyrus is a man who works with land, granaries and temple, and he is called to account for what his work does to his neighbours. That is why the balance was a tool every Egyptian knew from the market before seeing it in the hall, and the Instruction of Amenemope sets Thoth's baboon beside it. The chapter's own instructions ask for purity, fresh clothes and white sandals, the dress of one entering a temple, so the dead person enters the Hall of the Two Maats as a priest enters the house of the god.

In every version the man of power is questioned like anyone else, and more severely. The Mēnōg ī Xrad says Rashnu's balance counts the monarch equal with the least of mankind; Plato says most of the incurable are kings and potentates because they have a free hand for injustice; and the king of Herakleopolis tells his son, a king, that the judges view a lifetime in an hour. In these texts the talk of judgment is addressed above all to the powerful: they name wealth, ancestry and witnesses, and say that none of them helps before the last judge.