A modern name for an ancient practice
The Egyptians did not call it the Book of the Dead. The modern title comes from the nineteenth-century German name Totenbuch, applied by the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius when he published a late papyrus in 1842. The Egyptian phrase is usually translated as the Book of Coming Forth by Day, which suggests the idea of leaving the tomb and moving freely in the world of the living and the gods.
It is also not a book in the modern sense. There was no standard text that every scribe copied from start to finish and no single author. It was a loose repertoire of spells, from which individual papyri were assembled, and no two early copies are identical. It was a funerary spell collection that grew out of older traditions rather than a scripture to be read by the living.
Where it came from
The Book of the Dead drew on spells found in the Pyramid Texts, carved in royal pyramids from about 2350 BCE, and the Coffin Texts that followed on coffins of the Middle Kingdom. The first papyri that are generally recognised as Book of the Dead material date to the early New Kingdom, from about 1550 BCE. Over several centuries the contents changed. Later, in the Late Period, particularly the Saite era after about 664 BCE, the spells were arranged in a more regular order, and numbering was eventually applied by modern editors.
Many spells have older ancestors and some carry a reputation for ancient origins. For instance, a line in a spell may say it was found in the time of an earlier king, a way of giving it authority, which should be read as tradition rather than strict history.
What the chapters are
Modern editors number the spells, usually called chapters, and about two hundred are known, though no one papyrus has them all. They are not arranged as a story. Instead, they cover the needs of the dead person at different stages:
- spells to keep the body and its parts together, including the heart, mouth, breath and name
- spells for movement, to leave the tomb, to transform into a bird, a falcon or a lotus, and to travel on the sun’s barque
- spells to pass dangerous gates and guardians in the Duat, the underworld
- spells for food, water and air
- hymns to the sun god and to Osiris
- the judgement spells, including Spell 125, in which the deceased declares their innocence before the divine judges
Perhaps the most famous is Spell 125, because it accompanies the scene of the heart weighed against the feather of Maat. Spell 30B is another well-known one, addressed to the heart, asking it not to testify against its owner. Spell 6 concerns the ushabti figurines, small servants who would do the labour required of the dead.
How a person used it
The Book of the Dead was not a manual that the dead read aloud. The spells took effect through being written correctly, and by being placed in the burial, often inside the coffin or in the burial chamber. In some cases the text was probably recited at the funeral. It fits into the wider set of Egyptian afterlife beliefs, and it sat alongside the mummification ritual that prepared the body. The purpose was to give the deceased the words and knowledge they would need, so the papyrus worked as a kind of insurance, sometimes known as a passport for the afterlife.
Papyri could be commissioned from scribal workshops, and the quality varied with the buyer. Wealthy owners ordered long scrolls with fine illustrations, sometimes in colour. Buyers could choose which spells to include, and a blank space was sometimes left for the owner’s name, which was filled in when a papyrus was sold, as some examples show. Poorer people could not afford a papyrus and relied on shorter texts, amulets, or nothing at all.
Vignettes
Many spells are accompanied by small illustrations, called vignettes. In a fine copy, these form a continuous visual narrative, showing the owner praising the gods, passing guardians, ploughing in the Field of Reeds or standing at the scales. The pictures were part of the spell and not merely decoration. For a society where many could not read, the images communicated the main points, and the text often runs in columns of cursive hieroglyphs or hieratic script, a style of the Egyptian hieroglyphic script, which could not be read at all until the Rosetta Stone helped scholars decode Egyptian writing in the early nineteenth century.
The Papyrus of Ani
The Papyrus of Ani is probably the best-known example. It was made for Ani, a scribe connected with temple offerings, in Thebes, around 1250 BCE, in the Nineteenth Dynasty. It is more than twenty metres long, and its elaborate illustrations show Ani and his wife Tutu before the gods. It was acquired in Egypt in 1888 by E. A. Wallis Budge for the British Museum, a transaction that would be handled very differently today.
The scroll contains many standard spells, and the judgement scene is among its most reproduced images. Ani and his wife are shown with the gods, with Anubis checking the balance, Thoth recording and the devourer Ammit waiting. Its colours and fine drawing make it a benchmark for the genre, but it is only one papyrus from a large group, and scholars compare many copies to understand the tradition.
Beyond papyrus
Although papyrus is the best-known form, the same spells were written on linen shrouds, coffins, tomb walls and amulets such as the heart scarab, which carried part of Spell 30B. This variety shows that the spells were adapted to different media and budgets.
Decline
Use of the Book of the Dead continued in Ptolemaic times, when the text was sometimes copied in shortened or modified forms. By the Roman period, other funerary texts replaced it, and the practice faded as the traditional religion and the hieroglyphic tradition declined. Its rediscovery in the nineteenth century brought it back to attention and made it an important source for Egyptian religion.