Papyrus of Ani

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.

The papyrus came to the British Museum in 1888 through E. A. Wallis Budge, who bought it at Luxor and whose own published account of the transaction is remarkably frank. He describes the Egyptian antiquities service having sealed the house where the papyrus was kept, and describes getting it out anyway. He was proud of it. Read today, the passage is one of the clearer statements of the collecting practices that Egypt has spent a century contesting, made by a man who saw nothing to conceal.

The second thing Budge did is less often mentioned and is arguably worse. The papyrus was intact when he acquired it, a single roll. He cut it into thirty-seven separate sheets, for ease of transport and of mounting, and that is how it has been kept ever since. The cuts cannot be undone. A roll is a sequence and the sequence carries meaning, in the order of the spells and in the way the vignettes are spaced along it, and something of that is lost when it becomes a set of framed panels.

Neither point diminishes the object. It remains the finest illustrated funerary papyrus known and the conservation it has had since has been careful. But the atlas records how a thing arrived as well as what it is, and in this case the arrival is part of a larger argument that has not finished.