The Egyptian Book of the Dead

Ancient Spells, Modern Book

First attested
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.
Claimed
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.

The claim runs about a thousand years ahead of the evidence.

"The Book of the Dead" is Lepsius's 1842 title for a repertoire of about 192 spells copied to order — no two papyri agree, and the numbering is his, not Egypt's.

An ancient Egyptian collection of spells and guides to help the deceased safely navigate the underworld and pass the Weighing of the Heart.

"Book of the Dead" is Karl Richard Lepsius's title — Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter, Leipzig 1842 — 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 — spell 125, the heart weighed against Maat's feather. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is no counterpart: Evans-Wentz coined that title in 1927 by analogy with this one.

Light

Spell 125 is itemised where moral codes are general: before forty-two assessors the deceased denies the wrongs one at a time — I have not caused pain, not made another weep, not dammed water in its season, not tampered with the grain measure.

Shadow

The judgement could be equipped for: spell 30B, cut on a heart scarab and laid on the body, tells the heart not to testify against its owner. And most readers meet Budge's 1895 English — free everywhere, quoted everywhere, superseded by Faulkner's, revised 1985.

Sources and verification7 sources · 10 links

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.

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

Further reading

  • Stephen Quirke, Going Out in Daylight - prt m hrw: The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: Translation, Sources, Meanings, 2013, Golden House Publications, GHP Egyptology 20A complete current translation of the whole corpus with its sources, by the Egyptologist Stephen Quirke; its title renders the Egyptian prt m hrw as 'going out in daylight'.

Linked entries

  • Derives fromThe Pyramid TextsAttested

    Many of its spells descend, through the Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts, from the Pyramid Texts cut for Unas around 2350 BCE — though the familiar story that this opened a royal afterlife to everyone is now contested.

  • Often confused withThe Bardo ThödolA modern connection

    W. Y. Evans-Wentz titled the Bar do thos grol 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead' in 1927 by analogy with the Egyptian, and the pairing has been read ever since as evidence of a shared ancient science of dying that neither text claims.

  • Transmitted intoAnkhAttested

    Its vignettes are among the commonest ancient settings for the ankh — held out to the dead by the gods who receive them, which is the funerary context most modern wearers have never been told about.

  • Set againstThe Corpus HermeticumTraditional

    Ficino's readers took the Corpus for the wisdom of Thoth, whom the Greeks identified with Hermes; the Egyptian literature of Thoth, including the funerary spells collected as the Book of the Dead and in use from about 1550 BC, is in Egyptian and far older. Fowden argued in 1986 for a real Egyptian substrate behind the Greek dialogues, not for an Egyptian original.

  • Set againstThe Nag Hammadi LibraryDisputed

    The Book of the Dead was written for the grave; these codices were not, and why they ended in the ground is unsettled — Denzey Lewis and Blount argued in 2014 that they were grave goods in the same long Egyptian manner, Lundhaug and Jenott in 2015 that they were monastic books.

  • Set againstThe Epic of GilgameshAttested

    Both re-entered reading through nineteenth-century excavation, but "Book of the Dead" is a modern title for a body of spells no two papyri agree on, while Gilgamesh is a single poem with a fixed sequence of tablets and a critical edition.

  • Often confused withThe Pyramid TextsA modern connection

    Popular writing runs the two together; the Book of the Dead is New Kingdom papyrus from about 1550 BCE, some eight centuries later, and its spells reach it through the Coffin Texts.

  • Set againstThe Popol VuhAttested

    Neither carries the title it was written under: 'Book of the Dead' is Lepsius's 1842 name for spells the Egyptians called the going forth by day, and 'Popol Vuh' was the K'iche' authors' name for the older book behind theirs until Brasseur de Bourbourg made it the title of the whole in 1861. The Egyptian spells survive in hundreds of papyri; no Maya original of the Popol Vuh survives at all.

  • Set againstThe Greek Magical PapyriAttested

    Both titles are modern impositions on Egyptian ritual writing, but the funerary papyri equip the dead, while these handbooks served the living — fever, rivals, lawsuits, desire.

  • Set againstXibalbaAttested

    Egypt's spell 125 puts the dead before a tribunal and weighs the heart against the feather. Xibalba's lords hold court too, but the Popol Vuh convicts the court: their offerings are cut to broken pots and they may take only the guilty.

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