This dissertation focuses on the Letters to the Dead, a small body of correspondence sent by living people to their deceased relatives. Eighteen of these Letters have been identified dating from the late Old Kingdom to the New Kingdom, with one known piece from the Late Period. Thus, few examples of these Letters exist despite the longevity of this practice, but they probably derive from a well-established tradition that may have been oral in origin. Although ancient Egypt offers a wealth of materials for study, and analysis of artifacts, texts, monuments, and other evidence provides a basis for studying ancient religious conceptions and views of the afterlife, surviving materials derive largely from the elite and so tend to reflect a top-down perspective, much of it documented in standardized funerary and religious conventions. The Letters to the Dead, some of which may have been dictated rather than written by their senders, are first-hand documents and provide a level of immediacy not present in official religious texts; essentially, these Letters record the voices of the living.
Previous studies interpret the Letters to the Dead as products of the religious, social, and political milieux in which they were written, studying them as a sub category of religious practice rather than a category in its own right. Since most of these Letters are brief and their sentences are short, scholars use translations without examining their language and content closely. This dissertation offers an approach to the senders of the Letters to the Dead and their beliefs of the afterlife as gleaned from close lexical semantic analysis of these texts without attributing them to a specific sector of Egyptian religion. This approach places the contents of the Letters, and thus their senders, under the microscope as the focal point of study. By treating each Letter as distinct while bearing in mind that their underlying premises are similar, information is presented about the individual senders of the Letters and their overarching beliefs and practices.

In Ancient Egyptian Letters to the Dead: The Realm of the Dead through the Voice of the Living Julia Hsieh investigates the beliefs and practices of communicating with the dead in ancient Egypt through close lexical semantic analysis of extant Letters. Hsieh shows how oral indicators, toponyms, and adverbs in these Letters signal a practice that was likely performed aloud in a tomb or necropolis, and how the senders of these Letters demonstrate a belief in the power and omniscience of their deceased relatives and enjoin them to fight malevolent entities and advocate on their behalf in the afterlife. These Letters reflect universals in beliefs and practices and how humankind, past and present, makes sense of existence beyond death.