The Egyptian Book of the Dead: spells for «going forth by day»

What we call the Book of the Dead was not, for the ancient Egyptians, a book with a fixed title. It was a set of funerary spells copied onto papyrus rolls to be placed in the tomb beside the deceased. The Egyptians called it «spells for going forth by day», an expression conveying the hope that the soul could move freely between the world of the dead and the light of the sun.

Origin and development

The Book of the Dead developed at the beginning of the New Kingdom, around 1550 BC, and remained in use until the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, for some fifteen hundred years. Its spells derive largely from older collections, the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts. The move to papyrus made the spells accessible to a larger number of people, provided they could afford a copy.

No two copies are identical. Each papyrus contained a selection of spells, larger or smaller according to the patron's means. Scholars know some two hundred different spells in all. In the Saite period, from the seventh century BC, a more regular sequence became established, called the Saite recension, which fixed the order of the chapters for later copies.

The modern name and the numbering

The title Book of the Dead is a modern invention. It was introduced by the German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius, who in 1842 published a long Ptolemaic papyrus kept in Turin under the title Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter. Lepsius numbered the spells as chapters, and that numbering, later expanded, is still used to refer to each spell.

Among the most famous papyri is that of the scribe Ani, datable to around 1250 BC and acquired by the British Museum at the end of the nineteenth century. More than twenty metres long, it is famous for the quality of its painted vignettes. Other important examples are kept in the Egyptian Museum in Turin, the Louvre and many other collections.

The weighing of the heart

The best-known spell is the one scholars number as chapter 125. It describes the judgement of the deceased in the hall of the Two Truths. Before Osiris and forty-two judges, the dead person pronounces a series of declarations of innocence, often called the negative confession, stating that he has not committed specific wrongs.

The accompanying vignettes show the heart of the deceased placed on a balance, weighed against the feather of Maat, symbol of justice and cosmic order. Anubis tends the scales, Thoth records the result and a monster called Ammit waits to devour the hearts of the guilty. Another spell, chapter 30, was often engraved on heart scarabs, asking the heart not to bear witness against its owner.

The Book of the Dead is a source of the first importance for understanding Egyptian religion and its ideas on the soul, judgement and the afterlife. It was not a secret text reserved for a few initiates but a product of funerary craftsmanship, prepared by scribes and illustrators for those who could pay. For that very reason it conveys, with an extraordinary wealth of images, the hopes of many generations of Egyptians.