Egyptian Amduat: The Book of the Hidden Chamber Hardcover – Illustrated, 1 Feb. 2010

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.

Absolutely Fantastic, if somewhat overwhelming. I was expecting this book to be about 20 pages of translation and the rest commentry... Well, I was wrong.This is a phenomenal piece of work and I adore it, thank you to the kind fella who translated it for us all, and thank you publisher for an excellent quality book. Well worth the price, I'll be picking up the book of Gates next considering the quality here.

One of the leading authority in the study of the ancient Egyptian religion is Erik Hornung, Professor Emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Basel. His book Der Eine und die Viele(Darmstadt, 1971, translated by D. Lorton, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: the One and the Many, Cornell University Press, 1996) had a considerable impact on better understanding of the phenomena of religion in the Pharaonic civilization. Professor Hornung, beside his didactic activities, undertake an enormous task to study and publish especially the New Kingdom Books of the Netherwold. One of the first such a composition appeared in the King Valley tomb of Tuthmosis I, being named by the Egyptians "Writings of the Hidden Place". Due to the French Egyptologist E. Lefébure, the corpus will be named "Amduat"(after the title of a papyrus from the Late Period),i.e. "(The Book of)what is in the Duat". From that time on, the whole collection of such texts are named Amduat, which describe the journey of the sun god Re(and of the Pharaoh also) in the realm of Osiris, during the 12 hours of the night, after which he became the morning Khepri, the rebirth Sun. After the New Kingdom, the inscriptions with the Amduat preserved on tombs wall and papyri will no longer represent a royal prerogative. Through with the text of the Amduat, the deceased person will be provided with useful information, he needed for his rebirth: about the mysteries of World after dead, the topography of the Underworld, his gates, the names and manifestations acquired by the solar deity during his nocturnal wanderings. If the dead king, and later private persons, will be able to get this information, they will have the possibility to live forever. The first draft on the present book was done by the Egyptologist D. Warburton, later revised by Prof. Hornung. The resulting volume, "The Egyptian Amduat. The Book of the Hidden Chamber", is an impressive book recommended to Egyptologists, libraries, and why not, for every learned person. The text of the Amduat is presented hour by hour, with hieroglyphic text, transliteration, and translation accompanied by pictures related to the texts, which follows the versions established by Prof. Hornung in his Texte zum Amduat, I-III, Geneva, 1987.

A nicely produced book but I was disappointed to find very little commentary and no psychological analysis as I expected. Its basically a translation with parallel lines of english text beneath the hieroglyphs.