What the Egyptians called the Book of Coming Forth by Day was not a book in the sense of a fixed text. It was a repertoire of spells, and a person who could afford one commissioned a selection, copied out and illustrated to whatever standard they were paying for. Most surviving examples are workmanlike: the spells written out competently, the vignettes sketched in outline, sometimes with the owner's name left blank to be filled in at the point of sale.
The Papyrus of Ani is at the other end of that market. It was made around 1250 BCE for Ani, a royal scribe at Thebes, and his wife Tutu, and it runs to about twenty-three metres. Its vignettes are fully painted, in strong colour, by artists working at the level of the tomb painters. That is why this particular copy, out of thousands, is the one everybody has seen.
Its most reproduced scene is the judgment. Ani's heart sits on one pan of a balance and the feather of Maat, truth and right order, sits on the other. Anubis adjusts the tongue of the scale. Thoth stands ready with his palette to record the verdict. Beside him waits Ammit, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus, who eats the hearts that fail. For most people outside Egyptology, that image is Egyptian religion, and this manuscript is where it comes from.