Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt

«When it comes to the importance of death, this culture is admittedly an extreme example.» — Assmann admite que Egipto es un caso extremo, no el caso medio, para la importancia de la muerte.

«Few cultures in this world exclude death and the dead from their reality as radically as we do.» — el contraste con el que abre: pocas culturas excluyen la muerte tan radicalmente como la nuestra.

«Living with the dead and with death is one of the most normal manifestations of human culture, and it presumably lies at the heart of the stuff of human existence.» — sostiene que convivir con los muertos y con la muerte es la manifestación normal de la cultura humana, no la excepción.

«I want to reach beyond the world of tombs, funerary rituals, and funerary texts and into other areas of Egyptian thought, action, and conduct, such as ethics, historical consciousness, cosmology, conceptions of the divine, and so forth and inquire to what extent these areas were stamped by the typically Egyptian preoccupation with the theme of death.» — el segundo propósito declarado: salir del mundo de las tumbas y los textos funerarios hacia la ética, la conciencia histórica, la cosmología y la idea de lo divino.

«My interest here lies not in ancient Egypt for its own sake, but rather in what we can learn about the essence of culture more generally through the study of this extremely early, long lived, and richly documented culture, one linked to our own through various avenues of transmission.» — declara que su interés no está en Egipto por sí mismo sino en lo que el caso egipcio enseña sobre la cultura en general.

«I feel that one—and not the least important—task of Egyptology is to contribute to general cultural theory.» — adjudica a la egiptología la tarea de contribuir a la teoría general de la cultura.

«I thus pose, in the sense of a working hypothesis, the question of whether and in what sense death and the way a culture articulates it, treats it, and copes with it might perhaps not constitute the center of the consciousness of that culture and thus of culture generally speaking.» — enuncia como hipótesis, no como resultado, que la muerte pueda ser el centro de la conciencia cultural.

«Culture, it is said, is man’s second nature, which he needs because his first nature insufficiently provides him with the competencies and instincts he requires to survive as a living being.» — recoge la fórmula corriente de la cultura como segunda naturaleza del hombre.

«This negative anthropology, which defines man, along with other living beings, as defective, needing to compensate for his natural defect through cultural achievements, goes back to classical antiquity, for instance, Plato’s Protagoras; in the eighteenth century of our own era, it was represented especially by Herder, was taken up in the nineteenth by Nietzsche, and then in the twentieth constituted the fundamental principle of various thinkers and researchers, such as Martin Heidegger, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen.» — la antropología negativa que define al hombre por su carencia, cuya línea Assmann traza de Platón y Herder a Nietzsche, Heidegger, Plessner y Gehlen.

«Anyone who defines man as defective understands the function of culture as a project of supplementary and compensatory amendment.» — la consecuencia que extrae de esa antropología: quien define al hombre como defectuoso entiende la cultura como enmienda compensatoria.

«Thus, from necessity springs virtue, and from lack comes advantage.» — la fórmula con que la resume: de la necesidad brota la virtud, de la carencia la ventaja.

«In some ancient Near Eastern myths, we encounter another picture of man.» — señala que los mitos del Próximo Oriente antiguo ofrecen otra imagen del hombre, no la del ser deficiente.

«They are not, however, compensation for a lack; rather, they represent a human surplus that stems from the world of the gods and alienates man from the world of living beings.» — el giro de esa otra imagen: los dones del hombre no compensan una falta, son un excedente de saber divino.

«At the center of this surplus, divine, alienating, and thus problematic knowledge stands death.» — en el centro de ese saber excedente y problemático coloca la muerte.

«The immortal gods, however, need much more, they must know everything.» — el reverso: los dioses inmortales necesitan mucho saber precisamente porque no mueren.

«It must be noted that in this myth, it is not the case that Adapa knew about his own mortality and could not live with this knowledge, but rather that he had the knowledge of the gods, which was not fitting for a man.» — lo que Assmann subraya del mito de Adapa: el saber divino no le convenía a un hombre.

«Here, Siduri acts as spokesperson for a point of view that was widespread throughout the ancient world, one that closely linked death and merriment.» — lee a Siduri como portavoz de una sabiduría que enlaza estrechamente muerte y alegría.

«The life which thou seekest thou wilt not find; (For) when the gods created mankind, They allotted death to mankind, (But) life they retained in their keeping. Thou, O Gilgamesh, let thy belly be full; Day and night be thou merry; Make every day (a day of) rejoicing. Day and night do thou dance and play. Let thy raiment be clean, Thy head be washed, (and) thyself be bathed in water. Cherish the little one holding thy hand, (And) let thy wife rejoice in thy bosom!» — según la Epopeya de Gilgamesh que Assmann cita en la introducción, el consejo de Siduri al héroe: los dioses repartieron la muerte a los hombres y se quedaron la vida, así que conviene llenar el vientre, hacer de cada día una fiesta y gozar de la esposa; el volumen imprime los mismos versos otra vez, abreviados, en la plana 135.

«Man’s surplus knowledge does him no good. He must find his happiness in what is granted him, not in what is forever withheld from him.» — el saber excedente no le sirve al hombre de nada: su felicidad, dice Assmann, está en lo que le toca, no en lo que se le niega para siempre.

«Gilgamesh is unable to accept this advice to resign himself to his fate, and eventually, he finds Utnapishtim, the Mesopotamian Noah, the only man who survived the Flood, and not only that, who was also accepted into the circle of the immortals.» — Gilgamesh no acepta el consejo de Siduri y llega hasta Utnapishtim, el único mortal admitido en el círculo de los inmortales.

«Thus, even here, there remained the human dilemma of knowing too much and living too briefly.» — el dilema humano que, según Assmann, queda en pie: saber demasiado y vivir demasiado poco.

«It was withheld from man, like all other mortal beings for good reason: it was not, as Nietzsche put it, “knowledge useful to life.”» — Assmann toma de Nietzsche la fórmula del saber útil para la vida, que es justamente el que al hombre se le niega.

«But over and above this, be it the secrets of sky and earth or of good and evil, man, and only man, knows that he must die.» — lo que distingue al hombre en su cuadro: solo él sabe que ha de morir.

«The gods do not know it, for they are immortal, and animals do not know it, for they have not eaten from the tree of knowledge.» — ni los dioses ni los animales conocen la muerte: los primeros porque son inmortales, los segundos porque no comieron del árbol del conocimiento.

«He who is mortal should not have this knowledge, for it is the knowledge of the gods.» — la contradicción que enuncia: el mortal no debería tener ese saber, porque es saber de dioses.

«The fifteenth-century Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino characterized man in precisely this sense, as an intermediate, hybrid being.» — atribuye a Marsilio Ficino la caracterización del hombre como ser intermedio e híbrido.

«Ficino calls this condition a disquietude of the soul, inquietudo animi.» — el nombre que Ficino da a esa condición: *inquietudo animi*, inquietud del alma.

«In doing so, he takes up a concept of Saint Augustine, who spoke in his Confessions of a disquietude of the heart, inquietudo cordis:» — Ficino retoma, según Assmann, la *inquietudo cordis* de san Agustín.

«This disquietude, thought Augustine, comes from God, who created man in his image, with the result that he can find no satisfaction in what is earthly, while Ficino astutely related it to death and explained it as a longing for immortality.» — lo que Agustín ponía en el origen de esa inquietud, leído aquí como anhelo de inmortalidad.

«This is the disquietude that drove Gilgamesh along, with the result that he rejected the well-intentioned advice of Siduri, the divine barmaid, to enjoy the brief lifetime allotted to him as best he could, and instead pressed on to the end of the world in search of immortality.» — la misma inquietud es la que, según Assmann, echó a andar a Gilgamesh.

«These ancient Near Eastern myths characterize the problem of human existence as a “too much” rather than a “too little.”» — los mitos del Próximo Oriente plantean el problema humano como un exceso, no como una falta.

«Of course, both anthropological traditions are correct, and they are in no way mutually exclusive.» — Assmann no arbitra entre las dos antropologías: la de la carencia y la del exceso le parecen compatibles.

«According to the latter tradition, culture arises from knowledge of death and mortality.» — según la segunda tradición, la cultura nace del conocimiento de la muerte y de la mortalidad.

«Culture represents the attempt to create a space and a time in which man can think his way out of the bounded horizon of his life and project the features of his action, experience, and plans out into broader horizons and dimensions of fulfillment, in which the needs of his mind can find gratification, and the painful, even unbearable consciousness of existential boundedness and fragmentation can find rest.» — define la cultura como el intento de crear un espacio y un tiempo donde el hombre piense más allá del horizonte de su vida.

«Man cannot live without fantasies of immortality, or at least of a certain continuation beyond the all too narrow horizon of our existence on earth: such fantasies create a horizon rearranged by illusions, in which human activity can be experienced as meaningful,» — sostiene que el hombre no puede vivir sin fantasías de inmortalidad, que reordenan el horizonte con ilusiones y hacen que la actividad humana se experimente como significativa.

«Understanding kills action, for in order to act we require the veil of illusion; such is Hamlet’s doctrine, not to be confused with the cheap wisdom of Johna-Dreams, who through too much reflection, as it were a surplus of possibilities, never arrives at action.» — según el pasaje del Nacimiento de la tragedia que Assmann cita, el conocimiento mata la acción porque para obrar hace falta el velo de la ilusión; el troceo del EPUB imprime Johna-Dreams donde Nietzsche escribe John-a-Dreams.

«What, both in the case of Hamlet and of Dionysiac man, overbalances any motive leading to action, is not reflection but understanding, the apprehension of truth and its terror.» — cierre de la misma cita: lo que desequilibra el motivo de la acción no es la reflexión sino el conocimiento, la aprehensión de la verdad y de su terror.

«I caused mortals to cease foreseeing doom. Chorus What cure did you provide them with against that sickness? Prometheus I placed in them blind hopes.» — según el diálogo de Prometeo y el Coro que Assmann cita, el titán quitó a los mortales la previsión de su ruina y les puso en cambio esperanzas ciegas.

«The “doom” whose precise anticipation was beneficently veiled by Prometheus was man’s future suffering, and especially the means and the hour of his death.» — glosa la ruina velada por Prometeo como el sufrimiento futuro del hombre y, sobre todo, el modo y la hora de su muerte.

«Only when veiled in this manner is knowledge about death bearable.» — solo velado de esa manera resulta soportable el saber sobre la muerte.

«The only healthy and noble and indeed, let me expressly point out, the only religious way in which to regard death is to perceive and feel it as a constituent part of life, as life’s holy prerequisite, and not to separate it intellectually, to set it up in opposition to life, or, worse, to play it off against life in some disgusting fashion—for that is indeed the antithesis of a healthy, noble, reasonable, and religious view.» — el epígrafe del volumen, tomado de La montaña mágica, enuncia la posición desde la que Assmann lee a Egipto: la muerte como parte constitutiva de la vida y no como su contrario.

«Death is to be honored as the cradle of life, the womb of renewal.» — segunda parte del mismo epígrafe, con la fórmula que el libro convertirá en tesis: la muerte honrada como cuna de la vida.

«Once separated from life, it becomes grotesque, a wraith—or even worse.» — cierre del epígrafe: separada de la vida, la muerte se vuelve grotesca.

«Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, translated by John E. Woods (New York, 1997), p. 197.» — la atribución del epígrafe, que el volumen imprime en la plana siguiente y que remite a la traducción de John E. Woods.

«PART ONE. IMAGES OF DEATH CHAPTER 1. DEATH AS DISMEMBERMENT» — el índice divide el libro en dos partes y abre la primera con las imágenes de la muerte.

«PART TWO. RITUALS AND RECITATIONS CHAPTER 10. MORTUARY LITURGIES AND MORTUARY LITERATURE» — la segunda parte del índice, dedicada a los rituales y las recitaciones.

«Permit me, permit me, my good engineer, to tell you something, to lay it upon your heart.» — el arranque del epígrafe, que interpela a un ingeniero; el volumen no nombra a los personajes de la novela.

«Abridged and updated by the author CORNELL UNIVERSIT YPRESS Ithaca and London» — la portada declara que el propio Assmann abrevió y puso al día la versión inglesa; el troceo del EPUB parte el nombre del sello y lo imprime CORNELL UNIVERSIT YPRESS.

«AFTER WORD: EGYPT AND THE HISTORY OF DEATH Notes» — el índice cierra con el epílogo sobre Egipto y la historia de la muerte, y con el aparato de notas.

«In this book, the following conventions have been followed in the citations from ancient texts:» — la nota del traductor, firmada D.L. por David Lorton, abre declarando las convenciones con que se citan los textos antiguos.

«Parentheses () enclose words or brief explanations that have been added for clarity. Square brackets [ ] enclose words that have been restored in a lacuna.» — las convenciones de paréntesis y corchetes que fija Lorton: los primeros para aclaraciones añadidas, los segundos para lo restituido en una laguna.

«An ellipsis . . . indicates that a word or words in the original text have been omitted in the citation. An ellipsis in square brackets [. . .] indicates the presence of a lacuna for which no restoration has been attempted.» — los dos usos de la elipsis que distingue Lorton: sola, para lo omitido en la cita; entre corchetes, para la laguna sin restituir.

«A question mark in parentheses (?) indicates that the translation of a word or phrase is uncertain.» — el signo con que Lorton marca la traducción incierta.

«English-speaking Egyptologists have no single set of conventions for the rendering of ancient Egyptian and modern Arabic personal and place names.» — Lorton señala que la egiptología angloparlante no tiene un solo juego de convenciones para transcribir nombres egipcios antiguos ni árabes modernos.

«Most of the names mentioned in this book occur in a standard reference work, John Baines and Jaromír Málek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt (New York, 1980), and the renderings here follow those in that volume.» — la obra de referencia que Lorton adopta para las transcripciones: el Atlas of Ancient Egypt de John Baines y Jaromír Málek.

«The principal exception is the omission of the typographical sign for ayin; this consonant does not exist in English, and it was felt that its inclusion would serve only as a distraction to the reader.» — la única excepción que se permite: omitir el signo del ayin, consonante que el inglés no tiene.

«In this volume, biblical passages are cited from the New Revised Standard Version.» — la versión bíblica que el volumen usa en sus citas.

«For a long time now, there has been no comprehensive book on Egyptian mortuary religion.» — el balance bibliográfico con que cierra la introducción: hace mucho que no hay un libro abarcador sobre la religión mortuoria egipcia.

«The fundamental and oft-cited book by Hermann Kees, Totenglauben und Jenseitsvorstellungen der alten Ägypter, which has achieved the status of a classic, is a rich and especially philological collection of material, but it is without contour or perspective, and it is essentially confined to the Old and Middle Kingdoms.» — lo que dice del clásico de Hermann Kees, Totenglauben und Jenseitsvorstellungen der alten Ägypter: colección de material rica y filológica, sin contorno ni perspectiva, y limitada al Reino Antiguo y al Medio.

«The first edition of 1926 must now be viewed as outdated, for many important sources were not yet published at the time of its appearance. As best he could, Kees worked the Coffin Texts, which began to be published in 1938, into the second edition of 1956, though in the process, his account lost much of its readability.» — fecha las dos ediciones de Kees, 1926 y 1956, y observa que al incorporar los Textos de los Sarcófagos publicados desde 1938 el libro perdió legibilidad.

«The useful dissertation by Gretel Wirz, Tod und Vergänglichkeit im alten Ägypten, deals only with literary sources, omitting the rituals and recitations of the mortuary cult, which stand at the center of this volume.» — de la disertación de Gretel Wirz, Tod und Vergänglichkeit im alten Ägypten, dice que trata solo fuentes literarias y deja fuera los rituales y recitaciones que este volumen pone en el centro.

«A. J. Spencer’s Death in Ancient Egypt treats the theme exclusively from the perspective of archaeology.33 In its pages, customs are dealt with in terms of their archaeological and architectonic traces, omitting the world of texts.» — de Death in Ancient Egypt de A. J. Spencer dice que trata el tema solo desde la arqueología y omite el mundo de los textos.

«Quite comprehensive, but also concentrated on the material culture of the Egyptian religion of death, is the recent book by John H. Taylor, Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt, which unfolds all the riches of the world of objects in which Egyptian mortuary belief is manifested with the help of examples from the British Museum.» — del libro de John H. Taylor, Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt, dice que es bastante abarcador pero concentrado en la cultura material, con ejemplos del British Museum.

«The present book, however, seeks to venture into the realm of the cultural semantics on which this rich array of customs once fed. In this regard, Erik Hornung has paved the way more than any other scholar in the introductions and commentaries of his various text editions and anthologies.» — sitúa el propósito propio en la semántica cultural, y adjudica a Erik Hornung haber abierto ese camino más que ningún otro en las introducciones y comentarios de sus ediciones y antologías.

«The essays by Alan Gardiner,35 Constantin Sander-Hansen,36 Philippe Derchain,37 and many others38 are confined to individual aspects.» — de los ensayos de Alan Gardiner, Constantin Sander-Hansen, Philippe Derchain y otros dice que se limitan a aspectos particulares.

«There is no lack of literature on the theme,39 but there is no comprehensive treatment of this phenomenon, which is not only important in and of itself, but which also opens the way to insights, insights with wide-ranging consequences, into the relationship between death and culture.» — el cierre del balance: no falta literatura sobre el tema, falta un tratamiento abarcador que abra paso a lo que la muerte enseña sobre la cultura.

«Jan Zandee’s book Death as an Enemy is a lexical study» — de Death as an Enemy de Jan Zandee dice que es un estudio léxico; la frase se corta en el salto de plana y sigue en la 29 diciendo que se limita a una sola de las muchas imágenes de la muerte.

«Brunner-Traut postulates a psychological, cognitive basis for certain especially striking peculiarities of Egyptian art, which she sets in parallelism with other phenomena in Egyptian culture, as well as with the art of other primitive peoples and with forms of children’s art.» — a Emma Brunner-Traut le adjudica una base psicológica y cognitiva para las peculiaridades del arte egipcio, comparadas con formas del arte infantil.

«According to her theory, Egyptians cast a dissecting glance at the world, one that perceived only individual details and was incapable of seeing larger unities.» — resume su teoría: los egipcios echaban una mirada disectora y no veían unidades mayores.

«Brunner-Traut qualifies Egyptian society as an “aggregated” society that had no structure but was rather an aggregated mass of individuals, an agglomeration of individual persons.» — ella califica la sociedad egipcia de masa agregada, aglomeración de personas individuales.

«The hierarchic construct was not fitted together into a “structure” but merely into an aggregate, an “aggregation (Latin grex, “herd”) of individuals but not into an organic body in which all the parts are reciprocally related to one another and thus woven into a whole by means of warp and weft.» — en esa lectura la jerarquía es un agregado y no un todo tejido por urdimbre y trama.

«It is true that the Egyptians cast a dissecting gaze on the world; but at the same time, there was always a question of connective principles, and these were what mattered most to them.» — Assmann concede la mirada disectora pero objeta el peso que se le da: lo que más importaba a los egipcios eran los principios conectivos.

«What Emma Brunner-Traut rightly notes is the absence of the organic model, in which the relation between the one and the many is conceived after the model of an organism, whose parts are functionally interdependent.» — le concede con nombre que acierta al notar la ausencia de un modelo orgánico de partes funcionalmente interdependientes.

«This model seems in fact to have played no special role in Egypt.» — y añade que ese modelo orgánico no parece haber tenido papel especial en Egipto.

«We do not encounter collective identities such as clan, tribe, kinship group, or people, which are regarded as organically predetermined.» — otra negativa: no aparecen identidades colectivas tenidas por orgánicamente predeterminadas.

«But that did not mean that the individual was to be understood as an isolated element in an “amorphous” or “aggregated mass.”» — su límite a la tesis de Brunner-Traut: eso no significa que el individuo estuviera en una masa amorfa o agregada.

«The French physician and Egyptologist Thierry Bardinet has been able to supply a conclusive answer to this question.» — adjudica al médico y egiptólogo francés Thierry Bardinet la respuesta concluyente sobre la teoría egipcia del corazón.

«Thierry Bardinet has found a plausible explanation for this terminological doubling or distinction.» — a Bardinet le atribuye una explicación plausible del doblete terminológico entre las dos palabras para corazón.

«Bardinet understands jb as the “insides” and as a collective term for the internal organs, such as the lungs, the heart, the liver, the spleen, and the stomach.» — Bardinet entiende *jb* como las entrañas, órgano colectivo que abarca también el bazo y el estómago.

«Scholars once thought that the dead were in fact carved into pieces, presumably to render them harmless and to protect posterity from revenants.» — lo que los estudiosos creyeron en su momento: que a los muertos se los descuartizaba de veras, para proteger a la posteridad de los apar.