The Judgement of the dead in the Presence of Osiris
The scene reads from left to right. To the left, Anubis brings Hunefer into the judgement area. Hunefer’s heart, represented as a pot, is being weighed against a feather. The ancient Egyptians believed that the heart was the seat of the emotions, the intellect and the character, and thus represented the good or bad aspects of a person’s life. If the heart did not balance with the feather, then the dead person was condemned to non-existence, and consumption by the ferocious “devourer,” the strange beast shown here which is part-crocodile, part-lion, and part-hippopotamus.
