Judgement Of Hunefer Analysis

The Judgement of Hunefer Before Osiris (3-35)1 is a panel taken from a Nineteenth Dynasty Egyptian Book of the Dead, circa 1285 BCE. The illustration is painted on a papyrus scroll, which would have been rolled up and placed in the tomb of the mummified body of Hunefer, the man depicted in the image. The illustration itself is composed of several horizontally stacked registers, with the narrative being read from left to right, first on the lower register, then moving up to the higher one. The style of illustration is clearly recognizable as Ancient Egyptian: in Old Kingdom Egypt, which lasted from approximately the years 2575 to 2150 BCE, a standardized artistic canon of human proportions was instituted which was intended to portray an ideal human form. This convention was carried, albeit with modifications, throughout Egyptian art and can be seen at work in the

For 13th century BCE Egyptians, funerary art and rituals were a kind of necessary magic that worked to ensure the deceased a peaceful and eternal afterlife. The embalming practices ensured that the spirit of the dead, the ka, would be able to live on and enjoy its eternity in Heliopolis. The fear, as seen in the Judgement of Hunefer, was that the deceased might not make it into the sacred city at all—if Hunefer had not lived a virtuous life, he would have been thrown to Ammit and would perish completely. The role of these funerary images was to will the dead along on their journey, to help them achieve eternal life. It is not dissimilar to Paleolithic cave paintings which depicted herds of sleeping bison: by painting such an image, there was a sense in which it was believed that the situation could be brought to pass in real life, a moment of sympathetic magic. By portraying Hunefer being received by the gods, his family is attempting to make it