My fascination, indeed, my love of, death began in my childhood when my mum took me to the British Museum to see the mummies. I was immediately entranced by all, but what entranced me most was EA 32751, “EA” meaning Egyptian Antiquities, though back in the day the object of my fascination was known to everyone as Ginger because of the tufts of ginger hair sprouting above his ears. He was in an air-conditioned glass case lying in the fetal position, that is to say, curled up like a baby inside a womb, which suggested to me, and perhaps to the ancient Egyptians who had laid him in that position, that he might be re-born any second, which was why there were pots surrounding him containing the food and drink that he’d obviously need in the afterlife.
Ginger wasn’t a mummy in the formal sense of the world, i.e., a corpse that had been drained of its vital fluids and had its organs removed, the mummification procedure which the Egyptians first undertook (ouch!) 5000 years ago. Instead, he’d been deposited in his altogether in the hot, dry sand, with the result that his body, though desiccated, had otherwise remained intact—a natural mummy, so to speak. There’s a heavy irony in the fact that the Egyptians went to such extraordinary lengths to preserve bodies by artificial mummification, because if they’d done what they did for Ginger, i.e., nothing, they’d all have survived much better.
Decades after I had been gazing down at Ginger, my sticky fingers touching his glass case, I began my Ph.D. on Greek burial customs. What proved to be a defining moment was when a fellow called Vic asked me about the topic of my research. On hearing my labored response, he smiled genially and said, “So what?” What, in other words, was the point of studying—in his eyes—such a pointless (sic) subject? His question dug deep into my soul, assuming I have one, and I decided that whatever I studied had to connect with people’s lives today. (Many years later, when I was giving a public lecture and told the story of Vic, who had recently died, a member of the audience called out, “So what?”)
Death, whether we’re talking about present-day America or the Middle Neolithic Period, is a subject that absolutely does not belong in the “so what?” category. It’s inescapably about who we are as human creatures, and unless you happen to be planning on having your brain frozen and stored in a cryogenic storage ewer filled with liquid nitrogen—best to have a private jet ready to transport you to the nearest cryogenic center if you are, and good luck because the procedure for revivifying you has yet to be developed—it’s ashes to ashes and dust to dust for all of us sooner or later, as statistics amply prove. And that’s true whether you’re the Pharaoh Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid, or the lowliest of the low. We’re all of us without exception linked to everyone who has ever lived, and every culture has something to tell us about mortality, our inescapable condition, beginning with our ancestors who lived 430,000 years ago and first began intentionally burying their dead, and our more recent ancestors who lived 120,000 years and first began placing objects in the tomb.
It’s mortality, irrespective of any hope of an afterlife, that makes life so infinitely precious. The opening scene in Homer’s Iliad is a shouting match between Agamemnon, king of kings, and his foremost warrior Achilles. Afterwards, Achilles withdraws from the fighting, which causes thousands of his comrades to die, including his best friend Patroclus. Homer contrasts the seriousness of this argument with the inconsequentiality of a shouting match between Zeus and his wife Hera at the end of the first book, which is playfully resolved by the lame god Hephaestus, who makes everyone laugh. What humans do matters profoundly because they pass this way once only. What the gods do doesn’t, because they live forever.
What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife is a cross-cultural survey, whose central point is the essential uniformity of the human response to death, combined with some highly notable variants. In most cultures we find a reluctance on the part of humans to believe that the universe can exist without them—a recent Pew Research exercise found that 70% of Americans believe in an afterlife—though apart from the Egyptians and before Christianity most people don’t seem to have believed that the afterlife amounted to much. There is a commonly shared belief that the dead need the assistance of the living to become fully incorporated in the next life and until they are buried, they can’t “rest in peace.” There’s a strong conviction, shared by atheists, that a corpse should be respected, even venerated, though this is hardly true of the Zoroastrians, at least from our perspective, who left bodies out in the open to be picked clean by beasts and birds. Finally, many humans in the past and some today cling to the belief that the dead reside concurrently in the tomb and in the world beyond. Death and logical thinking are worlds apart.
What the ancient world teaches us first and foremost is to respect and relish life to the full. Each of us knows that our life and the lives of those we love could end at any moment. Consider, then, a world where the life expectancy for men was the mid-forties and for women five to ten years lower, where your chances of surviving to your first birthday were no better than two in three, and where warfare, famine, floods, disease, earthquakes, etc., were constant visitors. Wouldn’t you consider life to be inexpressibly precious? Wouldn’t you make the most of it? The ancients certainly thought so, but nobody put it better than the Roman poet Horace:
Since life is short, act wisely, strain the wine, and cut back on hopes for the distant future. Even while we’ve been speaking, envious time has sped. Carpe diem! Seize the day! Put as little hope into tomorrow as you can.
Robert Garland is the Roy D. and Margaret B. Wooster Professor Emeritus of the Classics at Colgate University. He is the author of many books, including The Greek Way of Death, Wandering Greeks (91ĚŇÉ«), and Athens Burning. He has also recorded six courses for the Great Courses, most recently God against the Gods.