Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt

Jan Assmann is among the leading Egyptologists of his generation specializing in Egyptian religion, and this Cornell University Press book is his standard scholarly synthesis of ancient Egyptian conceptions of death and the afterlife, covering mummification, the Opening of the Mouth ceremony and royal funerary cult across Egyptian history. Its strength is Assmann's command of the full range of Egyptian textual and archaeological evidence for mortuary belief, synthesized into a coherent account of how Egyptian ideas about death and salvation actually developed rather than presenting them as static across three thousand years. Its limit is exactly that broad synthetic scope, a claim tied to one specific dynasty's or period's particular funerary practice may need a source focused on that narrower period rather than this wide angle synthesis alone, a distinction the book itself is careful about.