Inside the Egyptian Underworld
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Listener, never fear, it is I, Dr. Anthony Delaney from the After Dark podcast. And I am possessing your phone or your car radio or whoever it is that you listen to podcasts to ask you to vote for us in the Listener's Choice Award at this year's British Podcast Awards. Ooh, it's that time of year again. You can vote for us while you're folding laundry or learning about mass poisonings, or while you assemble furniture and contemplate mutiny, which I would mutiny if I was assembling furniture, or while you're lost in a graveyard that you thought was going to be a shortcut, but now you find yourself in the bowels of hell. Either way, you can simply go to www.britishpodcastawards.com forward slash voting and search After Dark.
Okay, off you go and do that.
And I promise we'll stop possessing your phone. Thank you, love you, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.
As night falls, a soul begins its journey to the beyond. Freed from its newly deceased body, they drift into the Duat, a realm of darkness, fire, and monsters. Guided by spells from the Book of the Dead, they must make their way across this perilous landscape. Finally, they stand before Osiris, god of the dead, where they face a test of judgment. If they pass, paradise awaits. If not, oblivion. This was the path that all ancient Egyptian souls would undertake after death. The ancient Egyptians, one of the most fascinating civilizations of the ancient worlds, devoted to gods obsessed with death and bound by ritual. For them, death marked the beginning of a new chapter, a journey through a shadowy realm of trials, monsters, and divine judgment ruled by the god Osiris.
They preserved their dead, spoke spells from the Book of the Dead, and prepared for eternity with extraordinary care. To the Egyptians, survival was not guaranteed. It had to be earned. So now, from the depths of the ancient Egyptian underworld, welcome to After Dark.
Hello there and welcome to After Dark. I am Anthony and if you've been watching for the last few months, you know that Maddie is somewhere in the world at the moment trying to solve that problem with, you know, when the caps come off fizzy bottle drinks, but they still attach and it's really annoying. She's just trying to solve that. It's God's work she's doing. But she will be back very soon. But until then, we are treating you to some incredible After Dark episodes. And today is no different. We are exploring the ancient Egyptian underworld. And who better than friend of the pod to help us through this than Dr. Campbell Price. He is an Egyptologist, as you know, if you've been listening to After Dark before, and is curator of Egypt and Sudan at Manchester Museum and Honorary Research Fellow at the
He's our go-to ancient Egypt expert. And he is also an author of a new book, by the way. Well, his newest book, Brief Histories, Ancient Egypt, and a children's book that he's written with Greg Jenner, which I advise you to go out and get all of those things and get to know Campbell even better. Campbell, thank you so much for coming back. Thank you, Anthony. What a thrill to be back.
Sorry, Maddy's not here, but thank you also for the plugs.
Oh, listen, pluggety, plug, plug, plug. We're all out here trying to... Enlighten the masses to all these different types of history. Now, today we're going to be talking about the ancient Egyptian underworld. OK, we're going to say that for now and then we can talk about the nuances to that. As historians so often do. But I have a very big question for you and you can distill it down as much as you like. Uh-huh. What did the ancient Egyptians believe?
We do not know what the ancient Egyptians believed. Even if you had an ancient Egyptian sat at this table, I don't think... You know, it's the problem of anthropology. If you ask the question, you condition the answer. Ancient Egyptians didn't say in their own language they believed. They said they knew. I know my magic. I know my spell. They didn't need to believe anything. They had to know.
Hmm. And we're talking about a real pantheon of belief.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–6:05
2
What is the ancient Egyptian Duat and why did the episode start with it?
6:05–16:21
3
Who is Dr. Campbell Price and what makes him an expert on Ancient Egypt?
16:21–25:48
4
How did ancient Egyptians experience divinity in daily life and temples?
25:48–57:21