Welcome to an Egyptian history podcast mini episode.

This is an Egyptian horror story, a special Halloween mini episode for all your ghoulish joys.

Today we explore some of the Egyptian experiences of the dead through tales that they themselves wrote and through the evidence they left behind.

The Egyptians did not have Halloween like you and I did.

Halloween comes from and I did.

Halloween comes from the ancient Celtic festival of Soan.

This marked the beginning of their new year.

For the Egyptians, the New Year began under entirely different circumstances,

when the waters of the Nile began to rise in anticipation of the annual flood.

The Egyptian Festival of the Dead was also a far more somber occasion than that which we are used to or which we might associate with the Celts.

The festival was the great festival of Osiris, Lord of the

of the underworld and one of Egypt's first mythical kings. That festival took place in the ritual

necropolis of Abidos, and it is a festival that we described way back

in episode 40, which was dedicated to feasting and laughing and dancing.

The Egyptian Festival of the Dead, the Festival of Osiris, was a much more somber affair than Halloween is today in the Western world.

For the Egyptians, the dead were an ever-present part of life, and their stories tend to reflect

this aspect.

They could be spooky for the ancients, but they don't necessarily

have the horror element that we might be used to from a traditional ghost story. In this episode,

I try to present the stories as the Egyptians themselves might have told or received

them, and how they engaged with the dead on a practical day-to-day basis.

Obviously, it has some elements of the spooky, and it also has some elements of the spooky and it also has some elements of a good old-fashioned fable with a nice moral to wrap everything up.

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