The «Book of the Dead» is perhaps the most famous Egyptian text, yet its name is modern and somewhat misleading. It is not a single book with a fixed order, nor a sacred scripture comparable to the Bible. It is rather a flexible collection of spells, chosen and combined case by case, which accompanied the deceased on the journey beyond death.
The authentic title
The Egyptians called these collections by an expression usually translated as «spells for coming forth by day». The central idea was not to remain shut in the tomb but to be able to go out into the light, move freely, receive offerings and join the cycle of the sun. The dead person is not a motionless shade: he or she is a traveller who must know roads, gates and names.
The name «Book of the Dead» comes from the German Todtenbuch, the title chosen by the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius when in 1842 he published a long papyrus kept in Turin. Lepsius divided the text into chapters and numbered them: that numbering, later extended with spells found in other copies, is still the scholars' reference system today.
Where it comes from
The Book of the Dead did not come out of nowhere. It is the last phase of a long tradition:
| Corpus | Period | Main medium |
|---|---|---|
| Pyramid Texts | Old Kingdom | Walls of royal burial chambers |
| Coffin Texts | First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom | Interior of wooden coffins |
| Book of the Dead | From the Second Intermediate Period and above all the New Kingdom | Papyrus rolls, but also bandages and objects |
Many Book of the Dead spells take up, rework or abridge older texts. The great novelty of the New Kingdom is papyrus: a portable roll placed beside the deceased, which made these spells available not only to kings but to a wider circle of well-to-do people.
How a roll was made
No two copies were identical. A client, or the family, could turn to scribal workshops that prepared partly pre-written rolls, leaving blank spaces in which to insert the owner's name. Other rolls were made to order, with painted vignettes of high quality.
Typical elements were:
- text in cursive hieroglyphs or in hieratic, with titles and key words often in red ink;
- vignettes, illustrations that accompany and sometimes replace the text;
- the name and titles of the deceased, repeated many times, because the spell had to apply to that precise person.
The use of red deserves attention: besides highlighting titles, red was associated with dangerous forces, and in some cases the names of hostile beings were written in red precisely to mark and contain them.
What the spells contain
The chapters cover very different needs. Some well-known examples:
- spells to avoid losing the heart or to prevent it from testifying against the deceased;
- spells to repel snakes, crocodiles and other creatures of the afterlife;
- spells to transform into a falcon, a heron, a lotus flower;
- spells to know the names of the gatekeepers and be able to pass through;
- the famous judgement chapter, with the declaration of innocence before the gods;
- spells to animate the funerary figurines meant to work in place of the deceased.
Knowledge is the dominant theme. The deceased must know: the name of a gate, the name of a ferryman, even the names of the individual parts of the boat. Whoever knows the name may pass.
The papyrus of Ani
Among the best-known examples is the papyrus of Ani, a New Kingdom scribe, acquired for the British Museum in the late nineteenth century by Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge. It is long, splendidly illustrated and has therefore been reproduced in countless books. Its very fame, however, has created a misunderstanding: many believe that the Book of the Dead is «the papyrus of Ani», whereas it is only one of many personalised versions.
Late use and transformations
The tradition continued into the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. In the Saite period priests established a more regular order of chapters, the so-called Saite recension, and the Turin papyrus studied by Lepsius belongs to a copy of this kind. Later, new funerary texts appeared, such as the Books of Breathing, which partly replaced the Book of the Dead.
A symbolic reading
For those approaching the esoteric tradition, the Book of the Dead offers a powerful image: death as a journey of knowledge, in which every threshold requires awareness and every danger is overcome by knowing its name. It is an inner reading, not a promise; but it is also the reading that has made this text so present in the modern Hermetic imagination.
In short
- The Egyptian title means roughly «spells for coming forth by day».
- The modern name goes back to Lepsius, who in 1842 published and numbered a Turin papyrus.
- The Book of the Dead inherits spells from the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts.
- Each roll was personalised, with vignettes, red ink and the name of the deceased.
- The central theme is knowledge of names as the key to crossing thresholds.
