Book of the Dead

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The Book of the Dead is the modern name for a large, loosely organized body of ancient Egyptian funerary spells, copied onto papyrus and buried with the dead to guide and protect them on the journey through the afterlife. The Egyptians had no single title for it. Their own designation was closer to the Book of Coming Forth by Day — r(A) n(y) prt m hrw, the spells for going out into the light — a reference to the hope that the deceased might pass freely between the realms of the dead and the living, leaving the tomb at will to walk again under the sun. The familiar English name was coined in the nineteenth century, taken from the Arabic kitab al-mayyit used by the tomb robbers and dealers of Thebes, and it fits the burial custom better than it fits the texts. What the rolls actually offer is not a meditation on death but a set of provisions against it.

A corpus without a canon

There was never a fixed, canonical version. The compilation grew out of older mortuary traditions in a single line of descent that runs the length of ancient Egyptian history. The Pyramid Texts — the oldest body of religious writing from Egypt — were carved on the interior walls of the royal pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties at Saqqara, beginning with the pyramid of Unas around 2350 BCE, and were reserved for the king. In the Middle Kingdom this material was adapted and extended onto the wooden coffins of provincial officials and their households, becoming the Coffin Texts — the so-called democratization of the afterlife, the moment the privileges of the royal dead were opened to anyone who could pay for a painted coffin. By the New Kingdom, from roughly 1550 BCE, these had been gathered, reworked, and transferred onto papyrus rolls written for private individuals, and it is this papyrus tradition that carries the name Book of the Dead. A separate genre, the royal Underworld Books — the Amduat, the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns — was developing at the same time on the walls of the kings’ tombs in the Valley of the Kings, charting the sun god’s nightly passage through the twelve hours of the Duat; that royal genre is a cousin of the Book of the Dead, not the same thing, and the two should not be conflated.

Scribes drew on a common repertoire of roughly two hundred spells — modern editions count around a hundred and ninety-two distinct numbered chapters — but no two surviving manuscripts contain exactly the same selection in the same order. A copy was, in effect, assembled for its owner. A wealthy buyer might commission a long, finely illustrated roll with the spells he or she most wanted; a poorer one bought a short stock copy with blank spaces where the name would later be inked in. The selection, the sequence, the quality of the vignettes — the small painted scenes that accompany the text — and the length of the roll all varied with the purse. Only in the Late Period, under the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, did something like a standard sequence emerge, the arrangement Egyptologists call the Saite recension, which fixed the order that the older New Kingdom rolls had left fluid. Even then the corpus remained a library to be drawn from rather than a book to be reproduced whole.

The physical rolls reflect that economy. A Book of the Dead was made by workshop scribes who copied text and painters who supplied the vignettes, often working in separate hands and not always in agreement — a spell sometimes sits beside a picture that belongs to a different one, and names are frequently left blank to be filled in once a buyer was found, then inserted in a cruder hand or omitted altogether. Rolls range from a few feet to the great length of the finest examples; the Papyrus of Ani runs to some seventy-eight feet. The most celebrated example, that Papyrus of Ani — written for a Theban scribe of the royal estates around 1275 BCE, in the Nineteenth Dynasty, and acquired for the British Museum by Budge in 1888, who cut the long roll into sheets for transport and display — is the source for the translation the library holds. It is prized less for typicality than for the beauty of its hand and the richness of its scenes; among funerary papyri it is the standard against which others are measured, even though no single roll can stand for a corpus that was never meant to be uniform.

What the spells do

The spells served exact and practical ends within the Egyptian picture of death. The dead did not arrive in a settled paradise; they entered a hostile geography of gates, caverns, lakes of fire, and demon guardians, and they needed equipment to survive it. Some spells gave the deceased the words to answer hostile gatekeepers, who would not open until addressed by their secret names; to know the name was to hold the key. Some warded off the serpents and crocodiles and beheading demons that waited in the dark. Some restored the use of the mouth and the limbs, so that the dead could breathe, speak, eat, and move — the body in the tomb being understood as inert until the right words reanimated it. Others protected the heart, which had to remain in the body and loyal to its owner; the famous heart scarab, inscribed with a spell, was laid on the breast of the mummy precisely so the heart would not betray its owner at the judgment. The texts assume a person assembled from several parts — the ka, the life-force that fed on offerings; the ba, the mobile aspect that could leave the tomb and return; the akh, the transfigured spirit among the blessed; the shadow; and the name — and many spells are addressed to keeping these components intact and rejoined. This anatomy of the inner person, charted spell by spell, is one of the corpus’s deepest contributions to how a soul might be imagined.

The book’s best-known scene is the weighing of the heart, the matter of Spell 125. In the Hall of the Two Truths the heart of the dead is set on one pan of a great balance, against the feather of Maat — the goddess and principle of truth, order, and right measure — on the other. Anubis, the jackal-headed god of embalming, steadies the scale; Thoth, the ibis-headed scribe of the gods, records the verdict; Osiris, lord of the dead, presides on his throne; and crouched beside the balance waits Ammit, the Devourer, part lion, part hippopotamus, part crocodile, ready to swallow the heart that fails. Before the weighing the deceased makes the declaration usually called the negative confession: a long recitation addressed to forty-two divine assessors, each named, each governing one fault, in which the dead person denies one offense after another — I have not stolen, I have not killed, I have not lied, I have not silenced one who spoke rightly. It is a strange and exacting document, an ethics rendered as a list of crimes not committed, and it is the closest thing the corpus has to a moral code. A heart in balance with the feather meant the verdict of the assessors was empty; a heart heavier than truth — weighed down, in the Egyptian image, by the offenses its owner had committed — meant the jaws of Ammit and a second and final death, the annihilation of the person rather than any torment, for the Egyptian fear was not punishment but ceasing to be. The aim of the whole proceeding was to be declared maa-kheru, true of voice, justified, and so admitted to walk among the blessed and come forth by day. The scene is the most reproduced image to survive from Egypt, yet the balance and its presiding god are nowhere described in the words of Spell 125 itself; the judgment lives in the painted vignette as much as in the text, the two halves of the roll carrying between them what neither states alone.

For the people who commissioned these papyri, the texts were not literature but equipment: provisions for a real journey, as necessary as the wrapped body, the painted coffin, and the sealed tomb. A roll of the right spells was a kind of passport and a kind of armory at once, and it was meant to be used by its owner at the moments the journey demanded.

The Egyptian frame and its later readers

Within Egyptian religion the corpus presupposes the great theological systems of the temple — the creation by the heart and word of Ptah at Memphis, the nine gods of the Heliopolitan Ennead behind the Pyramid Texts, the Theban theology of Amun-Re — and it bears the marks of the long Egyptian preoccupation with the cult of Isis and Osiris, the murdered and restored god, and with Horus, their son and heir, whose own restoration was the model for the rebirth of every justified dead person. The figure who looms largest over the texts as a class is Thoth, reckoned the author of the words of power and the scribe who set them down — the god the Greeks would later identify with Hermes, and through whom Egyptian funerary wisdom entered the orbit of Hermes Trismegistus and the Corpus Hermeticum.

It is here that the work later drew interest well beyond Egyptology. Its imagery of judgment, of the soul’s ascent and its trials, of secret names that open closed gates and of knowledge as the instrument of salvation, found eager readers among the Hermetic and esoteric currents that took Egypt for the fountainhead of hidden wisdom — the Renaissance Platonists who read Hermes as an Egyptian sage, the Theosophists of the nineteenth century, the ritual orders of the twentieth that drew their godforms straight from the museum translations. That reception is a real chapter in the history of ideas, but it is a chapter of European thought, not of Egyptian religion, and the distinction matters. The funerary corpus is the documented ritual text of Egyptian elite mortuary practice, composed across the better part of two thousand years; the reading of it as an encoded initiatic system teaching universal mystical truths belongs to its modern interpreters. The most strident form of that projection — the claim, advanced by Gerald Massey and his successors, that Christianity is simply a recension of Egyptian myth — runs well past what the evidence supports and is rejected by Egyptology, however genuine the narrower iconographic questions (the Isis-and-Horus image behind the Madonna and Child, for instance) remain. The Egyptian material answers best to its own questions, and those questions are about the survival of a named individual through a perilous landscape, not about the secret unity of all religions.

Decipherment, editions, and scholarship

The texts were illegible to Europe until Jean-François Champollion announced the decipherment of the hieroglyphs in his Lettre à M. Dacier, read before the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres on 27 September 1822 — the event conventionally taken as the birth of Egyptology. Once the script could be read, the funerary papyri became the first large body of Egyptian religious writing available to study. The modern numbering of the Book of the Dead was fixed by Karl Richard Lepsius, whose Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter, published from the Turin papyrus in 1842, assigned the chapter numbers — including the famous Chapter 125 — still in use today. Édouard Naville’s three-volume Das aegyptische Todtenbuch der XVIII. bis XX. Dynastie (1886) gave the New Kingdom recension its critical edition, and E. A. Wallis Budge of the British Museum produced the first complete English translation, The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani, in 1895, enlarged in 1913. Budge’s renderings are the foundation of the English-language acquaintance with the corpus and are also thoroughly superseded: modern philology, from Raymond Faulkner onward, regards his translations as unreliable, and his work is best read as the historic gateway rather than the authority.

The standard modern English translation is Raymond O. Faulkner’s The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (British Museum Press, 1972; revised edition with Carol Andrews, 1985), which presents the spells of the Papyrus of Ani against photographs of the vignettes; Faulkner is the same scholar whose translations of the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts complete the English library of the three strata. The fullest recent treatment is Stephen Quirke’s Going Out in Daylight — prt m hrw: The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (Golden House Publications, 2013), which sets out the whole repertoire from the New Kingdom to the Ptolemaic period with transliteration and sources. The interpretive debate of the last century runs between Henri Frankfort, who read Egyptian religion as the expression of a changeless cosmos, and Jan Assmann, whose Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt reads the funerary literature as a cultural memory practice — two readings that the field has carried side by side rather than resolving in favor of either. The early public-domain layer that opened the corpus to general readers is anchored by Budge’s translation of the Papyrus of Ani and his companion volume Egyptian Magic, both held in the library; for the documentary record, Naville’s critical edition is available in the digitized scan of the University of Toronto copy at archive.org’s dasaegyptischeto00naviuoft, and Gaston Maspero’s editio princeps of the related Pyramid Texts, Les inscriptions des pyramides de Saqqarah (1894), survives in the digitized Bibliothèque nationale copy on Gallica. A concise scholarly overview of the corpus, its title, and its development is maintained at the World History Encyclopedia.

Read as its makers read it, the Book of the Dead is not a meditation on mortality but a working manual for getting through it — a set of words placed in the hands of the dead so they would not stand silent before the gatekeepers, nor mute before the balance, nor lost in the dark. Across two thousand years of copying, the Egyptians refined this charting of the country past death into one of the most detailed maps any people has drawn of what waits on the far side of the body — gate by gate, name by name, all the way to the moment the heart is laid on the scale and the dead one opens his mouth to speak the truth and come forth into the day.

→ In the library: Budge — The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani, 1913) · Budge — Egyptian Magic (1899)

→ Related: Pyramid Texts · Coffin Texts · New Kingdom Underworld Books Amduat Book Of Gates · Ancient Egypt · Horus · Isis · Thoth · Soul · Dendera · Gnosis · Dhammapada · I Ching