THE Book of Going Forth by Day, as the Ancient Egyptians called it, or The Book of the Dead, as we know it today, is the most important religious book from the time of the Pharaohs.
It contains several spells to help the deceased overcome many obstacles in the afterlife, before being judged for his deeds against the truth.
He might then be found worthy to enter the paradise of the God of the other world, Osiris. If found to be unworthy, he will be devoured by a monster called Ammamet, with the head of a crocodile and a body of a lion.
There are many versions of this book, but the most well known is that of the scribe Ani who lived in Thebes in the New Kingdom period (around 1300 B.C). This version, certainly the most complete one, resides now in the Egyptian Antiquities department in the British museum.
The Book of the Dead of Ani is in the form of a roll of papyrus about 25m long. In order to work on it more easily, Sir Wallis Budge, the curator of the department, cut the roll into 37 sheets that are now framed behind glass at the museum.
The idea for the Book of the Dead can be traced back to the “Pyramid texts”, which were normally engraved on the inner walls of some of the pyramids, especially those of the fifth dynasty of the Old Kingdom. The most famous one is that of Ounas (about 2400 B.C).
A few hundred years later, the Egyptians started to use a group of new spells, known as the ‘Coffin Texts’, for anyone who could afford a sarcophagus. At the beginning of the New Kingdom these ‘Coffin Texts’ were replaced by the scrolls of papyri now known as the Book of the Dead.
All those religious texts concentrate mainly on the afterlife, but they also reflect the values that the Egyptians had at the time, such as the chapter in the Book of the Dead known as the ‘Negative confessions’.
Another important chapter is ‘The Weighing of the Heart’, which shows how the works of the deceased are weighed against the feather of justice to judge his purity.
In the next two articles we will take a closer look at these two illuminating chapters.
