Regressus ad uterum

La mort comme une nouvelle naissance dans les grands textes funeraires de l'Egypte pharaonique

By (author) Marie-Lys Arnette

Book cover: Regressus ad uterum

Extent: 480, 480 pages

Publisher: Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale

Subjects: Ancient Egypt

Series: Bibliotheque d'etude

Series volume number: 175

Language: French

Hardback (Published)

(March 2020)

ISBN: 9782724707434

Price: $94.00

In stock

This work, stem from a doctoral dissertation, aims at demonstrating that referring to birth and its practical modalities is an essential aspect of Ancient Egypt’s funerary beliefs. From the Pyramid Texts to the books of the afterlife in the New Kingdom, funerary writings of Egypt are full of allusions to post mortem fate viewed as a


This work, stem from a doctoral dissertation, aims at demonstrating that referring to birth and its practical modalities is an essential aspect of Ancient Egypt’s funerary beliefs. From the Pyramid Texts to the books of the afterlife in the New Kingdom, funerary writings of Egypt are full of allusions to post mortem fate viewed as a second birth, which imitates more or less precisely the biological process of the first. Be he king or an ordinary man, the dead is carried in gestation by one or several divine mothers and is born again in the afterworld; there, his umbilical cord is cut, he is washed, fed and cared for like a newborn child. Numerous mythical elements join the purely practical ones, thus reinventing the biological model and showing the intermingling of both the worldly and the cosmic levels. Thanks to this cyclic process, not only does the deceased access the hereafter, but he is also eternally alive there.

  • By (author) Marie-Lys Arnette