deitiesofduat:

In DEITIES verse, Divine weapons are crafted and carried by deities as symbols of status, and as tools in combat. Divine weapons can be used for physical combat against opponents and threats, and as a methods for deities to channel their magic for various means, including combative or protective purposes.

All deities learn how to use weapons […] for their own self-defense, but many adopt a divine weapon and carry one on hand, summoning and storing them with magic as needed. […] Divine weapons are highly important to deities and often considered an essential component of their full regalia.

Final-fricking-ly– The reason these notes took a bit longer was because I wanted to draw a lot of divine weapons – both as visual reference, and also for prop practice. These examples are not at all exhaustive, just a general idea of the wide variety of weapons and instruments that deities use. They are all largely based on the weapons available in different periods of Ancient Egypt, with admittedly some artistic interpretation thrown it for DEITIES verse… I like sleek and colorful weapons shhhhh–

More information about these weapons, include overly detailed notes on their different categories and uses can be found in the new notes for Divine Weapons: Introduction and Weapon Varieties /o/ Some additional extended notes are also on Patreon!

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peashooter85:

Royal weapons from the Pharaoh Tutankhamen.

thatlittleegyptologist:

We don’t really know and can never know. The Egyptians didn’t really have a concept of a body coming back to life after the person had died. Corpse reanimation is much later concept. I guess, from an Egyptian mindset pov, they might not mind so much as the Egyptian afterlife was basically Egypt all over again, just with no work, so to be back in the land of the living might not be so terrible. Though this is merely speculation on my part.

They do, however, have ghost stories of a soul being trapped in the plane of the living, which you can read about in an ask I answered here.

ancient-egypts-secrets:

The Egyptian Book of the Dead: A guidebook for the underworld - Tejal Gala

thatlittleegyptologist:

Egyptian art conforms to convention. Everything had to be in accordance with Ma’at (cosmic order), and has to reflect previous periods art styles, usually the Old Kingdom, this is known as archaism. 

The Egyptians are big up on archaism as they liked to view the time of the Pyramids (the Old Kingdom) as the best period of Egypt, and would seek to match their current art to it. Quite often you’ll find that during the Late Period (c.2500 years after the end of the Old Kingdom) that while they look similar there are a lot of mistakes in the style (particularly with the addition of Amarna paunch stomachs, which the Egyptians had previously attempted to eradicate). In fact the Grid System that the Egyptians used to create their art for most of their history, was erroneously made larger during the Late Period, resulting in distorted figures. 

(Image Source)

Another deviation comes during the Middle Kingdom and the reigns of Senwosret (I, II, & III) where the statues of the Pharaohs go from this:

(Statue of Khafre and his wife - Image Source and resource on the Egyptian body in art)

to this:

(Senwosret III (aka: I has a sad) - Image source)

Khafre’s statue is indicative of the art convention following the laws of Ma’at which require the king to be constantly in control of the kingdom lest it fall to the enemy. The king is young, strong, powerful, and happy. This king is a good ruler and will serve the Egyptian people well and defeat their enemies. If the king projects this image of strength then Egypt will prosper, or so the convention says. 

Senwosret’s statue is a break from the art convention, but not in the way one might expect. Instead of demonstrating happy and in charge, though the body itself still indicates strength, the face of Senwosret depicts a tired ruler, with a down turn mouth and ears that stick out. This is not a depiction of the king himself, but rather what he wants the Egyptian people to see i.e. a man who is weary from rule (works hard), mouth down turn (sad at the poor harvest during his reign), and sticky out ears to represent how he is listening to the Egyptian people. This is still in line with Ma’at, but does project a slightly dimmer view of the country as a whole.

Then you have the Amarna period in which the art changes drastically, for reasons Egyptologists still debate today. (Eg. Akhenaten just wanted to distance himself from convention, he was suffering from Marfan Syndrome etc). I’ll leave this link here to explain it further because that’s a whole clusterfuck of it’s own. But an example is:

(Image of Amarna princesses - Source)

So, overall, Egyptian representations of their Kings/Pharaohs are not really true to life.

As for the regular Egyptian, the conventions remain pretty much the same. Most depictions of the Egyptians on the walls are stylised, as again this is supposed to portray the idealised version of the deceased in the Afterlife. As I’ve said before in relation to depictions of offerings, the Egyptians believed that images were magic and could come to life thus a good image being beneficial and a bad image causing destruction (hence why Apep is always depicted as being stabbed so that he can’t come to life). So with this convention you have several things in evidence: men and women are painted either a deep brown (men - symbolising work outside) or a pale yellow (women - symbolising that they spent most of their time inside), a fishing and fowling scene, and depictions of the deceased farming or taking part in the job they held in life if it was a high enough office.

It should be noted that the painting of ‘skin colour’ is not indicative of the actual skin colour of the Egyptians in real life, but an idealised and religious depiction. Women were not pale yellow…seriously. But they do paint individuals from different countries with different skin colours, primarily to distinguish them, alongside hair and dress, from the Egyptians themselves. There is one example of an Egyptian self portrait of the tomb owner with his friends emerging from the reeds in a boat that’s a very small addition to the overall scene, where the tomb owner is painted stood up and light brown, one friend is a darker brown, and the other friends are much darker. This, most Egyptologists believe is an accurate depiction of the tomb owner as he has self inserted himself and his friends into the scene. I am very annoyed with myself that I cannot remember which tomb it is, but my research (over a couple of hours) I believe it’s the tomb of Ipuy from Deir el Medina: 

Fishing scene from the tomb of Ipuy - Source)

Related to this are the most common scenes most of you will have seen if you like Ancient Egypt: Fishing and fowling scenes, and farming scenes. Fishing and fowling scenes are, on the surface, depictions of just that; fishing and fowling. However, it’s more complicated than that. Just as with the Pharaohs, these images are designed to keep Ma’at i.e. keeping order over chaos. Let’s look at this tomb scene from the tomb of Nebamun:

(Tomb of Nebamun - Source: The British Museum)

You can see while it’s chaos, it’s ordered chaos. Nebamun is fully in control of the scene, with even his cat helping to attack the birds. His wife and daughter are also present, which is not normal, and neither is the fact that they’re all wearing their finest clothes. 

They even wear their finest clothes during the farming scenes:

(Tomb of Sennedjem - Source: Met Museum)

The tomb of Sennedjem was painted by the owner before he died, so it’s likely that his depictions of himself are truer to life than most, but he is still idealised. 

Bottom line is most depictions of Egyptians in art are idealised depictions of themselves, often trying to show outwardly the image of themselves that society or religious conventions require, while also falling in line with the art conventions and archaism of the civilisation. Do they depict the real life Egyptians? In some instances, yes. But overall, these images are not truly what the real Egyptian populace or its Pharaohs looked like.

ancient-egypts-secrets:

The Egyptian Book of the Dead: A guidebook for the underworld - Tejal Gala

thatlittleegyptologist:

Ahh see the thing is you’re imagining that bodies in Ancient Egypt were left to decompose without care. There’s really no such thing. There’s also no concept of the ‘soul’ in Ancient Egypt either.

Let’s start at the beginning. 

Most people believe that every Egyptian was mummified after death. This is simply not true. 99% of all Egyptians were never mummified, either because the practice was not yet invented (seriously, it took them a while to get it right), or because they simply could not afford it. It’s the age old adage of the 1% getting all the bells and whistles and the 99% getting nothing. Most of our surviving record is the burials of the elite, with little known about the regular citizens. It’s a bummer for Egyptologists.

What did happen was that when someone died they were placed in a dug out hole, given grave goods, and then re-covered. However, the body would not decompose but instead dry out, thus forming a natural mummy, leaving most organs intact. This was an acceptable form of burial for the Egyptians and they would still get into the afterlife even though they’ve been left to ‘decompose’.

Here’s an example:

(The Gebelein Man - Source: The British Museum) (Learn more about the Gebelein PreDynastic mummies here)

Both manually mummified and naturally mummified individuals would be able to enter into the afterlife as they still had the one organ that mattered in all of this: the heart. 

You’ve probably heard of the ‘weighing of the heart’ whereby the heart was believed to be the seat of emotion and intelligence (as they hadn’t figured out what the brain did yet), and it was weighed against Ma’at (the feather of truth). Before this point the deceased had to go before 42 ‘judge’ gods and speak Negative Confessions to state they have not broken the laws of Ma’at. The heart is then weighed to make sure they’re telling the truth. Read more about the Judgement process here.

(Weighing of the Heart scene from Ani’s Book of the Dead - Source: British Museum)

If you balanced with Ma’at you could progress into the Field of Reeds; the Egyptian afterlife that is essentially just Egypt all over again, but this time with no manual labour. If you failed, and your heart was heavy with lies, then your heart was eaten by Ammit. Here she is looking as beautiful and as terrifying as all women wish to be when they enter a room. Get it girl:

(Thoth and Ammit from Ani’s Book of the Dead - Source: British Museum)

If Ammit ate the heart you fall into Nun (pronounced Noon) or ‘Chaos’, thus achieving ‘Second Death’ and ceasing to exist entirely. (Though this was preventable with the use of a Heart Scarab, which you can read more on here)

I’m gonna go on a slight detour before I explain Second Death, so I can address the concept of the ‘soul’ in Ancient Egypt. 

There isn’t such a thing as a ‘soul’ in Ancient Egypt. Modern influence on the Ancient record has led us to impose the concept on the Egyptians as a way of explaining the religious implications of the Egyptian concept of self to the general public. Basically there are 5 parts to the Egyptian concept of self:

ib - (eeb) the heart - seat of knowledge and emotions

rn - (ren) the name - important for being remembered and accepted into the afterlife. No name, you don’t exist. This is why they scrubbed names off monuments of people like Akhenaten. Read more about Damnatio Memoriae. Oddly for the Egyptians, being on display in a museum wouldn’t be the worst thing as their name would continually be being said by visitors, thus causing them to live on forever. They even had inscriptions on their tomb walls asking visitors or passers by to say their name and say an offering of bread and beer to help them continue existing. Odd how that works out. Read more about the Egyptians and their interactions with the dead.

Swt - (sheut) the shadow - since it was always present the Egyptians believed is was an intrinsic part of the self.

bA - (bah) the personality -  comes into existence after death and is corporeal, eats, drinks and copulates. It can fly between the living world and the afterlife communicating with the gods and the living. It is thought that the Ba is not a part of the person but the person in their entirety, so very much unlike the Abrahamic religions concept of a soul. 

kA - (kah) the vital spark - this is what distinguishes between a living and dead person. When a person died the Ka left the body and remained in the afterlife. It needed to be sustained by offerings of food and drink from the living otherwise it would die and go into ‘Second Death’. This could be worked around by having carvings or paintings of tables piled high with food on your tomb walls (because images were magic and came to life in perpetuity), or burying yourself with food. 

So basically what you refer to in your ask is the Ka of the deceased dying if the body is left to decompose. As I’ve already stated, decomposition isn’t really a thing in Egypt if the body was buried, so the Ka of the deceased would live on as long as it was tended to. I’ll get on to what happens when it isn’t in just a bit. 

The only way you could get a ‘decomposed’ body is through something catastrophic happening meaning that your family would be unable to retrieve it for burial. No body. No burial. No Afterlife. This is relatively rare, but would usually occur through things like drowning in the Nile and being swept away, being eaten by an animal (usually a Crocodile), or dying outside of Egypt. There’s a reason a lot of the curses you find in Ancient Egypt have to do with drowning or being eaten by Crocodiles, mainly because it was an excellent way of wiping the existence of a person from the face of the Earth. Read more about curses in this PhD thesis.

And finally back to Second Death…

So now we know that to achieve Second Death in Ancient Egypt was to either have no body or an abandoned Ka. What exactly was ‘Second Death’? It’s a bit of a tricky concept to get across, but essentially with second death the person dies again and falls into Nun. Nun (noon) is the deification of the primordial waters of chaos that the Egyptian’s believe the world originated from. So essentially, if a person is unfortunate enough to be subjected to ‘second death’ then their Ka falls into the waters of Nun and ceases to exist entirely. There is no comeback from this. When a person falls into Nun due to second death they can never comeback to the Afterlife and they are forgotten. That’s it. Gone. Kaput. It’s not Hell or Purgatory (there’s no such thing in Ancient Egypt), it’s just complete non existence. You either achieve the afterlife, and have used all within your power to maintain your Ka (family provides offerings/tomb wall carvings/heart scarab), or you get Second Death and cease to exist. 

That, my friend, is what happens to an Egyptian when their body is lost and their Ka is not sustained.