Daimon Egyptian Amduat: The Book of the Hidden Chamber

Está muy bien, pero para mí que lo he comprado más bien por acceder a las ilustraciones me parece caro. Buena presentación y formato.

This is a very nicely printed and bound volume of an ancient Egyptian spell for the dead. It is printed in hieroglyphics and with a translation. The book is expensive but nicely made. It is probably meant more for serious students. I am enjoying it, though, as an amateur student of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The Amduat comes to us as a mythical description of the night journey of the sun god Re and his rebirth, though presumably at the time of being written it was considered an article of religious faith. However, even then it was also viewed as a metaphorical treatise that enabled the Pharoah to be resurrected in the afterlife and some have suggested that it may have had wider significance and contained instructions to the living for entering shamanic or transcendental states of mind. In the last twenty years it's also been seized upon by Jungian psychoanalysts, in particular, who recognise that it offers considerable insight into the human psyche and constitutes the perfect symbolic representation of the process of individuation. This wonderful book offers you the chance to make up your own mind about it's significance. It contains close up photos of the murals taken from the representation of the Amduat found on the walls of the tomb of Tuthmosis III and a clean line drawing graphic of them. It has a complete line by line translation of these into English and each line also contains the glyphs and Hornung's translation into Egyptian for those of you who want to test the veracity of what he says. However, there is no commentary or any explanatory notes and contrary to what is stated in the Book Description above, there is no synopsis. Hornung has spent a lifetime studying this and if you're so inclined you could too! The text is by turns colourful, intriguing, profound and incomprehensible. Be prepared for some serious head scratching, as you try to tease out the meaning of it all. You may wonder is it worth the effort? Well the text itself says that its efficacy for the living has been proved many many times and knowledge of all this is of crucial importantance. Who am I to say they were wrong? All I can say is that parts of it still resonate strongly with my interests in mythology and psychology. I'll try and let you know if it came in handy after my death. I read this in conjunction with two other superb books. Knowledge for the Afterlife: The Egyptian Amduat - A Quest for Immortality, which is a cut down version of this with a commentaries by Hornung and a Jungian analyst, Theodore Abt. This is probably the best place to start before you shell out big money for this book. There's also The Sungod's Journey Through the Netherworld by Andreas Schweizer and Hornung which contains a far more extensive Jungian commentary.

The book is very well laid out using the version of the Amduat from the tomb of Thutmosis III. Every scene is reproduced and every hieroglyph is transcribed for clarity and translated. The Ancient Egyptians cannot be properly understood without understanding their religious thought, and a great deal of that is contained in the Amduat. A full interpretation of what each scene means from the first to the twelfth hour is lacking, that would need the book to be twice as long, though brief descriptions of what is happening are given, including the identification of the very many gods who appear. However, for those who would like a full analysis of what is occurring in each hour, a good companion for this book is "The Sungod's Journey through the Netherworld" by Andreas Schweizer. His book is laid out hour by hour, though only some of the scenes are replicated and none of the hieroglyphs as they are really not needed in his book. Schweizer approaches his analysis from a Jungian perspective.

I am also confused as to why the book was reviewed in such a negative light.. sloppy and disappointment are certainly not words I would use to describe this publication, not even close. This book has a nice heft to it, it is printed on quality paper, very sturdy dust jacket, the hardcover is a beautiful emerald color with silver metallic font, and the layout inside is quite pleasing, black font and color pictures. I am currently building a library on ancient Egypt, and I was specifically looking for photos of the actual chamber walls of Thutmosis III, and this is the only book so far that I have found containing them. It displays photos of each of the hours, all three registers, and while the pictures are smaller than what you see in the some of the larger Egyptology tomes (the book does measure 9x6), I am able to clearly identify all of the hieroglyphs and images on the walls. I use a magnifying glass for some of the tighter spots in the photos, but I think that kind of adds an extra dimension of fun and mystery to the text. There are also ink diagrams or schemas of each of the hours, and the glyphs are laid out nicely with the transliteration directly underneath, and the English translation below that. I'm not sure why people dislike this presentation, I actually find it to be quite useful. But then again, I'm not all that interested in other people's translations of Egyptian hieroglyphs anyway.. I see them more as guidelines than anything else. So if you are seeking, get this book! It is important, and a solid addition to the personal library. And even if it doesn't grab you when you first lay eyes on the contents, by all means hang onto it for future use. You'll be glad you did :-)