Book of the Dead

A typical roll is a sequence of spells, each usually headed by a rubric naming its purpose and accompanied by a vignette, a coloured illustration that is often the first thing a modern reader notices and was sometimes the only part a cheap copy could afford. The spells are not narrative and are not doctrine. They are operative texts: things the dead person says, or has said on his behalf, to achieve a specific result.

Three are close to universal. Spell 125 covers the judgement in the Hall of the Two Truths, where the heart is weighed and the deceased recites the negative confession, a list of offences he declares he has not committed. It is the single most reproduced passage in Egyptian religious writing, and its vignette of scales, Anubis, Thoth and the waiting Ammit has become the visual shorthand for Egyptian belief generally.

Spell 30B is inscribed on the heart scarab, a stone amulet laid on the chest, and asks the heart not to testify against its owner at exactly that weighing, an unusually candid admission that the Egyptians expected their own hearts to know things the confession denied. Spell 6 is written on the shabti, the small mummiform figure that agrees to answer the summons and do the dead man's compulsory labour in the next world; wealthy burials contain hundreds of them.

Beyond these the range is wide: spells for not dying a second time, for not walking upside down, for keeping the head attached, for turning into a falcon or a lotus, for breathing air and drinking water, for passing gates guarded by named demons whose names must be known and spoken. The long spell 17, a dialogue with commentary embedded in it, is the closest the corpus comes to theology.

The material has a traceable ancestry. The Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom were royal. In the Middle Kingdom much of that stock, reworked and greatly expanded, appears painted inside the coffins of officials and their families as the Coffin Texts. From the Coffin Texts, and from newer compositions, the Book of the Dead emerges on papyrus in the Second Intermediate Period and Eighteenth Dynasty. The direction of travel is downward through society: what had been the prerogative of a dead king became available to anyone who could pay a scribe.

New Kingdom copies are collectively called the Theban recension. The label is a convenience rather than an edition, because in this period there is no fixed order and no fixed contents, the selection and sequence vary from roll to roll, and the hieroglyphs may run in either direction. That changes in the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, ruling from Sais, when a standard sequence and a standard selection settle into place and persist with little variation into the Ptolemaic period. This is the Saite recension, and it is what makes a numbered edition possible at all.

Lepsius worked from a late papyrus of that standardised type, Turin 1791, and assigned numbers 1 to 165 to the spells he found in it. Later scholars extended the numbering as further spells turned up outside his manuscript, taking the total past 190. The numbers are therefore an artefact of nineteenth-century editing imposed on a corpus that never had them, and an Egyptian owner of a New Kingdom roll would not have recognised the ordering of any modern translation of his own text.

The Book of the Dead was a commercial product. Copies were written in advance by workshop scribes with blank spaces left where the owner's name and titles would be filled in on purchase, and unfilled blanks survive in finished rolls, along with names inserted in a second, cruder hand and occasional insertions of the wrong name or the wrong gender. Quality tracked price: some rolls are careless, abbreviated, or carry vignettes with no text at all, while others are among the finest painting to survive from the ancient world.

The best known is the Papyrus of Ani, made for a Theban scribe of the accounting offices around 1250 BCE and now in the British Museum. It is some twenty-three metres long and its vignettes are exceptional, which is why its version of the weighing of the heart illustrates most popular accounts of Egyptian religion.

Ani is also the source of the translation most people have read. E. A. Wallis Budge published a hieroglyphic transcription and English rendering of it in the 1890s, and because that text passed out of copyright it has been reprinted, anthologised and posted online ever since. Budge's Egyptian was already behind the scholarship of his own day and his English is deliberately archaic; Egyptologists have criticised the translation for well over a century. It remains, by a wide margin, the version in circulation. Readers who want what the spells actually say are better served by the modern translations of Raymond Faulkner or Thomas Allen, and by remembering that the papyrus they are reading is one man's selection rather than a scripture.