The Egyptian Book of the Dead

Ancient Spells, Modern Book

Earliest record: 16th century BCEBook of the Dead spells on coffins and papyri from the Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Dynasties, around the sixteenth century BCE; the Papyrus of Ani (British Museum EA 10470) follows around 1250 BCE.
Said to date from: around 2500 BCEasserted by The corpus's own rubrics: the note appended to spell 30B says the spell was found by Prince Hordjedef in the reign of Menkaure — the Fourth Dynasty, around 2500 BCE, roughly a thousand years before the earliest surviving copy.

"Book of the Dead" is Lepsius's 1842 title and his spell numbering; Egyptians said going forth by day, and fixed the spells' order only in the Saite period.

Karl Richard Lepsius, Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter nach dem hieroglyphischen Papyrus in Turin (1842); R. O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (1985).

Egyptian funerary spells copied for the dead on coffins and papyri, about 1600 to 50 BCE.

More context

"Book of the Dead" is Karl Richard Lepsius's title, from Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter, Leipzig 1842. It was his name for a Ptolemaic papyrus at Turin whose chapters he numbered 1 to 165. Later editors carried the count to about 192. The Egyptians called them spells for going out in the day. They are a repertoire rather than a work: a scribe copied what a commission paid for, no two papyri agree, and a fixed sequence appears only from the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. Many of the spells descend from the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts, and many do not. The Papyrus of Ani, written at Thebes around 1250 BCE, carries the vignette everyone knows — the heart weighed against Maat's feather while Ani speaks spell 30B. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is no counterpart: Evans-Wentz coined that title in 1927 by analogy with this one.

Light

Spell 125 itemises where moral codes generalise: before forty-two assessors the dead deny each wrong, down to making no one weep.

Shadow

The judgement could be equipped for: spell 30B, on a heart scarab, tells the heart not to testify against its owner.

Sources8 sources

Primary source

Karl Richard Lepsius, Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter nach dem hieroglyphischen Papyrus in Turin, 1842, Leipzig: Georg Wigand; the papyrus of Iuefankh, Museo Egizio Turin 1791, a Ptolemaic manuscriptThe modern title 'Book of the Dead' and the chapter numbers 1-165 still in use are Lepsius's, taken from a single late papyrus at Turin rather than from any ancient canon.
R. O. Faulkner (trans.), ed. Carol Andrews, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, 1985, British Museum Publications; revised edition of the translation first published 1972The standard English wording of the spells, including 125 (the weighing of the heart and the declaration before the forty-two assessors) and 30B (the heart scarab spell instructing the heart not to testify against its owner). This is the translation that replaced Budge's.
E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead (British Museum guide), 1920, the Judgment scene and Chapters XXXB and CXXVThe wording of the declaration before the Forty-Two in spell 125, and Ani reciting spell 30B to his heart while it is weighed against the feather.
I have not caused pain. I have not let any man hunger. I have made no one to weep.

Scholarship

Erik Hornung (trans. David Lorton), The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West, 2001, Cornell University PressHow 'Egyptian wisdom' was constructed in Europe and America — hieroglyph mysticism, Rosicrucian and Masonic Egypt, Egypt in Theosophy. Cited for that line of reception, not for what any Egyptian text says.
Jan Assmann (trans. David Lorton), Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, 2005, Cornell University PressEgyptian conceptions of death and of the judgement of the dead, and the constituents of the person that the spells are addressed to.
Harold M. Hays, The Death of the Democratisation of the Afterlife, 2011, in Nigel Strudwick and Helen Strudwick (eds), Old Kingdom, New Perspectives: Egyptian Art and Archaeology 2750-2150 BC (Oxbow), pp. 115-130The familiar account by which an afterlife reserved for kings in the Pyramid Texts was 'democratized' into the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead is contested; Hays argues the events it supposes did not take place.

Where this claim originates

E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani, 1895, London: British Museum; the papyrus acquired by Budge in Egypt in 1888The translation through which the corpus reached English-language esoteric writing. Cited for what it made the Book of the Dead mean in the West, never as evidence of what the Egyptian text says: it is superseded throughout and free everywhere online, which is why it is still the version most often quoted.