Talk:Ancient Egyptian funerary practices

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 August 2020 and 5 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Payton.dawson. Peer reviewers: Dmitter.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 17:16, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Knl18.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 14:10, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Cleanup

Alright, this page DOES need some serious cleanup. The intro paragraph particularly looks disorganized. Some sentences sound very unencyclopedic or unprofessional. Also, a lot of information is repeated from Egyptian mythology, or should not conflict with that article. I'm putting a cleanup tag. 216.175.112.139 06:20, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

I added a little bit of info here and there. Will do more later. This time it genuinely isn't vandalism... 144.131.139.111 03:38, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Howdy folks, after taking a look through the article, I saw a few good pieces but a lot of crap that needed to go away. I did a huge rewrite, and please don't take offense if I removed something of yours, because I really want to keep the article focused on the main point.

Specifically, I removed the list of all the parts of the Egyptian soul. There is already an article (Egyptian soul) devoted to that which covers all these aspects in better detail. I removed a lot of the language that seemed stereotypical (e.g. "They devoted all of their entire lives to the afterlife") and which also isn't true. And I removed the stuff about "The Imperishables." I understand the concept you are trying to convey, but the section is badly written, some of it of suspicious academic merit, and mostly off topic. In my revision, I have presented the need for burial rituals etc. in a few, clear sentences in the intro.

I don't pretend that the editing work is finished. My major rewrite still needs a lot of work, which I will chip away at for awhile. I think this is a very important article, so please help in whatever way you can! Jeff Dahl 04:59, 14 September 2007 (UTC)

I am taking my time

• Added why they believe in what they believed in. -- Cat ^chi? 01:51, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I did a bit...

I am fairly new to Wikipedia, but I changed a few grammatical errors in the article. Even with the changes I have made, there are still major issues that need to be addressed. - P!3r(3

Merger proposal

I believe that Death in ancient Egypt should be merged into this article, because that article is quite clearly about Egyptian funerary practices, and therefore overlaps in subject with this one. In addition, the "Death in…" title format is atypical for Wikipedia; there don't seem to be equivalent articles for "death in" any other culture. The specific title "burial customs" might not seem broad enough to encompass everything about Egyptian funerary practices, but I think this article could eventually be renamed "Ancient Egyptian funerary practices" to encompass the whole post-death process. In any case, the material should be here, and not at "Death in ancient Egypt". A. Parrot (talk) 02:59, 12 July 2010 (UTC)

With no objections, I went ahead and merged the two. I split out a "Funerary texts" section, in which I combined material from this article and from "Death in ancient Egypt"; I also created a "History" section in which to put some "Death in ancient Egypt" material that seemed to fit into that heading. Not all of "Death in ancient Egypt" went into this article, though, as I cut out some material that seemed dubious. A. Parrot (talk) 22:24, 4 September 2010 (UTC)

Social class

I see this text deals with the upper class, and should be expanded to include detail of burials of those lower is the social structure, farmers, slaves etc. Enlil Ninlil (talk) 23:59, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

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Process

Maybe someone should create an section or article on the Egyptian mummification process, because it seems kinda important to the article. York12321 (talk) 22:01, 28 February 2017 (UTC)

Revision of lead section

The mention of preparation for judgement by the gods in the lead section seems irrelevant to the article as a whole. This idea is only mentioned towards the very end in the short Damnation section. More important and relevant information should be emphasized in the lead section, such as burial rituals and mummification. Knl18 (talk) 18:45, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Planning Edits

Hi everyone! I'm planning a few edits here and there, specifically in the sections regarding burial rituals, burial goods, mummification, as well as making clearer sections on judgement, the afterlife, and damnation/the underworld. Here is a list of sources that I'm planning to use to make my contributions. Let me know what you all think! Cheers. Knl18 (talk) 00:19, 3 March 2018 (UTC)  

Bibliography

Budge, E. A. (2014). Egyptian religion: Egyptian ideas of the future life. London: Routledge.

Grajetzki, W. (2009). Burial customs in ancient Egypt: life in death for rich and poor. London: Duckworth.

Harrington, N. (2013). Living with the dead: ancestor worship and mortuary ritual in ancient Egypt. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Hornung, E. (1999). The ancient Egyptian books of the afterlife. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. <https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=7j2PVRZ4ETUC&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=ancient+egyptian+afterlife&ots=VXIvy3WvTu&sig=q9k67kuhqiVhNxeJdmAaFxkNVf0#v=onepage&q=ancient%20egyptian%20afterlife&f=false>

Taylor, J. H. (2001). Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt. Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press.

Teeter, E. (2012). Religion and ritual in ancient Egypt. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Tomorad, M. (2009). Ancient Egyptian funerary practices. The Heritage of Egypt, 2, 12-28. <https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/5486514/Tomorad_-_Heritage_of_Egypt_May_2009.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1519958494&Signature=TrKEeErCwWShpuLPKVw6JOyTNQI%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DAncient_Egyptian_funerary_practices_from.pdf>

Hello, Knl18. I'm A. Parrot, a Wikipedian who has worked for a long time on articles about ancient Egyptian religion. I tend to concentrate on one article at a time and have never gotten around to this one, so your improvements are welcome.

You have a pretty good list of sources so far; Taylor, Harrington, and Grajetzki are indispensable. I recommend not using Budge very much, because his work is long out of date. A couple more books I suggest, if you can get your hands on them: Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity (1998) and The Tomb in Ancient Egypt (2008), both by Aidan Dodson and Salima Ikram. I'd like to recommend a book about the afterlife that has more detail than Taylor or Harrington, but the few books dedicated to the subject are very dense and probably more detailed than you want. I can, however, give you links to several relevant articles from the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology: "Osiris and the Deceased", "Judgment after Death", "Democratization of the Afterlife", "Funerary Rituals (Pharaonic Period)", and "Funerary Rituals (Ptolemaic and Roman Periods)". A. Parrot (talk) 01:16, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

@A. Parrot: Wow thanks A. Parrot! I really appreciate this. I will definitely take your recommendations into consideration when editing this article. Knl18 (talk) 16:10, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

@A. Parrot: @Jeff Dahl: Hi there, my name is Karina and I am a student editor. I've made some edits as well as many additions to a few sections on this page. If you wouldn't mind looking over what I've done and giving some feedback, I would really appreciate it! Thanks Knl18 (talk) 14:19, 31 March 2018 (UTC)

Hello again, Karina. Jeff hasn't edited Wikipedia in a few years, unfortunately, so I doubt he'll be responding, but I'll give you my thoughts. The article certainly covers mummification and afterlife beliefs more extensively than it did before you started working on it. Because you added text but didn't replace any of what was there before, it's created some redundancy within the article. I find it particularly odd that there's one section titled "Embalming" in addition to the preexisting section titled "Mummification". Maybe it's simply the nature of the assignment that you're adding content rather than rewriting and reorganizing it; I don't know what your instructions were. Certainly, rewriting and reorganizing is harder work, so I can understand not wanting to tackle it!

One other point, much more minor: the mention that Osiris achieved vindication in the afterlife "although he was a great sinner". The sources don’t say that Osiris was vindicated in spite of his misdeeds, so the article shouldn’t imply it. (Personally, although this touches on complex debates about the nature of Egyptian myth and religion and isn’t really relevant to this article, I suspect the details about Osiris’ actions before his death were storytellers’ embellishments that didn’t necessarily have any bearing on the afterlife beliefs about him.) I think this phrase can be removed from the article. Aside from that, I haven’t noticed any inaccuracies in the text you added. Your work has been an improvement. Thank you. A. Parrot (talk) 00:29, 6 April 2018 (UTC)