The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead
Kenzy Fahmy
To the ancient Egyptians, life and death lay at the heart of their relationship with the world, and their pre-occupation with the afterlife is well-known. Each day, as the sun would rise and set, they were reminded of the never-ending cycle of death and rebirth. The two themes were so intricately woven into all elements of their existence and beliefs that they permeate everything that’s been left behind, from tombs and temples to an incredible number of scrolls and inscriptions, including of course, the infamous Book of the Dead.
Despite its name, the book, originally called the Book of Going Forth by Day, isn’t actually a book but a collection of funerary texts, spells and rituals that guided the dead on their journey through the underworld, the Duat, and to the afterlife. It was only very recently that they were compiled and published as a book. Prussian Egyptologist Karl Lepsius published a translation in 1842, coining the name “Book of the Dead”, or Todtenbuch in German. An English edition was published in 1867 by Samuel Birch, an Egyptologist who worked at the British Museum. All of this was of course in large part thanks to Champollion’s work deciphering and translating the Rosetta Stone in 1822, which allowed us to finally understand hieroglyphic scripts.
The ‘book’ as we know it today evolved from a much older tradition of mortuary scripts, the oldest of which were the Pyramid Texts, from the walls of the Pyramid of Unas dating back to around 2400 BCE, and the Coffin Texts from around 2030 BCE. It was from these that the Book of the Dead was eventually derived, and during the New Kingdom, around 1550 BCE, scribes began using scrolls of papyrus instead of coffins and tomb walls. Of all the surviving scrolls, the Papyrus of Ani, an Egyptian scribe who lived around 1250 BCE, is one of the best preserved and most commonly referenced. It was smuggled out of Egypt in 1888 by E. A. Wallis Budge and delivered to the British Museum where it remains until today.
While at first there was no particular order, by around 500 BCE scribes began dividing it into different chapters with each one denoting a specific spell (there are over 190 spells that we know of). The book depicts the journey one must make in order to reach the afterlife, a journey that is typically divided into four main phases: entrance to the underworld, resurrection, judgment, and finally, depending on the outcome, the deceased will either join the gods or perish forever.
The deceased would first have to make their way through the Duat, watched over by Osiris as they passed through a series of gates guarded by supernatural creatures, each one of which had to be appeased with the correct spell. They would be resurrected, rising again like the morning sun and travelling across the sky until they were brought by Anubis to Osiris for judgment, for the “Weighing of the Heart”. Here they would have to make their claim to have committed no sin, of which there were forty two, reciting a text called the “Negative Confession” before their heart is placed on the scales against the feather of Maat, the goddess of truth and justice. If the scales were balanced, it meant the deceased had led a good, honest life and they could advance to the afterlife. If the scales were not balanced, the heart was devoured by the crocodile-headed goddess Ammit and their ‘afterlife’ would come to a rapid and sudden end.
The Book of the Dead was intended not only as a spiritual guide to the afterlife, but also as a way to comfort the living and teach them about what happens to both body and soul after death. Spells and incantations were included that would help the deceased, both in life and in death. The words themselves, as well as the act of speaking them aloud, carried magic and power; to the Egyptians, to speak was an act of creation, and to know something’s name gave you power over it. They hoped that knowing the names of the gods they would face on their journey would give them a protective advantage.
There were spells to protect the body, the ka, and the heart. There were spells to help the dead remember their names, and spells to help the spirit, or ba, “go forth” out of the tomb and into the world. The shut, or the shadow, was also protected, and if all the different aspects of the person were preserved then they could live on with the gods in the form of an akh, a divine spirit that had made it safely into the afterlife.
The texts that make up the Book of the Dead were invaluable to the ancient Egyptians, and today, they are one of the most important sources of insight into the Egyptians’ beliefs surrounding life and death, body and soul, right and wrong. They show us in great detail the many rituals and practices that were performed in order to prepare the dead for their perilous journey through the underworld, expressing so clearly the importance the afterlife held for them, just as it does in the Egypt of today. Through them, we can trace social, cultural and political changes that took place over thousands of years. Each new translation brings forth new understanding, brings us closer to knowing our ancient counterparts.