Book of the Dead

Around 2350 BCE, in the pyramid of King Unas at Saqqara, the royal cemetery of ancient Memphis, Egyptian craftsmen carved columns of tiny hieroglyphs onto the walls of the burial chambers, producing the oldest substantial religious texts anywhere on earth. These were the Pyramid Texts, nearly three hundred spells, hymns, and instructions meant to launch a dead king into the sky to join the gods, and for centuries they belonged to royalty alone. Then the privilege leaked downward. In the Middle Kingdom, around 2100 BCE, nobles and officials began painting similar spells, now called the Coffin Texts, onto the wooden sides of their coffins, along with maps of the underworld and guides to its gates. The message had changed: eternal life was no longer a royal patent. By the start of the New Kingdom, around 1550 BCE, the spells had moved onto papyrus, the paper of the ancient world made from river reeds, and the collection took the name the Egyptians themselves used, the Book of Coming Forth by Day, because it let a soul leave the tomb each morning and return each night, free as a bird.

The Book of the Dead was never a single book. It was a loose pool of roughly two hundred spells, and no two surviving copies contain the same selection in the same order. Priestly workshops kept master scrolls and produced copies to order, often writing the spells in advance and leaving gaps where the buyer's name and titles would later be inked in, sometimes by a different hand, sometimes never filled in at all. A fine copy was costly and could stretch twenty or thirty metres long, its columns of hieratic, the cursive priestly handwriting, broken by vivid painted scenes called vignettes: the dead man adoring a god, his ba, the human-headed bird of his personality, hovering over his mummy, his wife and children bringing offerings. Cheaper versions shrank to a few key spells on a scrap of papyrus, a linen shroud, an amulet, or a mummy bandage. What mattered was not beauty but presence. The words had to go into the grave with the body, close enough to be read in the dark.

The scrolls read like a traveller's manual for the Duat, the shadowy underworld that every soul had to cross. The early spells deal with the funeral itself, above all Spell 23, the Opening of the Mouth, in which a priest touched the mummy's lips with ritual tools so the dead could breathe, eat, and speak again. Others are passports and passwords. The soul must know the names of gates and the names of the doorkeepers who guard them, demons with names like He Who Lives on Snakes and He Who Eats the Excrement of His Own Mother, and must recite the right formula to pass. Some spells promised transformation: to become a falcon of gold, a lotus flower, a heron, a phoenix rising from the fire. Spell 30B, usually carved on the heart scarab, a beetle-shaped amulet laid over the mummy's chest, pleaded with the heart itself not to stand against its owner as a witness. Because ahead, at the end of the road, lay the one test that no spell could guarantee.

The climax of the book is Spell 125, the scene the whole world now knows. The dead man or woman is led into the Hall of the Two Truths, where Osiris, the green-skinned god who rose from his own murder to rule the dead, sits enthroned beneath a canopy. Before him stand forty-two judges, one for each crime, and the soul must address each by name with a denial: I have not robbed, I have not been violent, I have not made anyone weep, I have not dammed the floodwater. Then comes the weighing. Anubis, the jackal-headed god of mummification, sets the heart in one pan of the great scales and the feather of Maat, the goddess of truth and cosmic order, in the other. Thoth, the ibis-headed scribe of the gods, stands ready with his palette to record the verdict. Crouched beside the scales waits Ammit, the Devourer, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus, for if the heart sinks heavy with wrongdoing she will gulp it down and the soul will cease to exist, the only true death the Egyptians feared. If the scales balance, Horus, the falcon-headed son of Osiris, leads the vindicated soul to his father, and the dead are welcomed into the Field of Reeds, an eternal Egypt of ripe grain and cool water where life goes on as it did at its best.

Thousands of copies were made across fifteen centuries, and the most beautiful of all belonged to a man named Ani, a royal scribe and temple accountant at Thebes around 1250 BCE. His papyrus, more than twenty-three metres long and glowing with painted vignettes, was acquired in Luxor in 1888 by E. A. Wallis Budge, the British Museum's keeper of Egyptian antiquities, who spirited it out of the country and cut it into thirty-seven sheets for display. The Papyrus of Ani remains the most famous manuscript of ancient Egypt. Other masterpieces followed it into the light: the papyrus of Hunefer, a royal scribe whose judgment scene is reproduced in every schoolbook, the papyrus of the temple singer Anhai, and the Greenfield Papyrus of Nesitanebetashru, a priestess of the tenth century BCE, which unrolls to thirty-seven metres, one of the longest scrolls ever made. Copies grew cheaper and cruder in later centuries, and by the Ptolemaic period, when Greek kings ruled Egypt, some workshops were selling ready-made scrolls with the name spaces never filled in, stock merchandise for an anonymous grave.

The last Books of the Dead were written around the first century BCE, replaced in Roman times by shorter works called the Books of Breathing, and when the temples closed the art of reading them died with the priests. The title by which the whole world knows the book is modern, for the Egyptians never called it the Book of the Dead. The German scholar Richard Lepsius coined the name Todtenbuch in 1842 and numbered the spells from 1 to 165, a numbering later extended to 190 as new chapters surfaced. Champollion, the Frenchman who had deciphered the hieroglyphs in 1822, had been among the first to recognise that the funerary papyri flooding into Europe all belonged to one great work. Ever since, the book has fed the modern imagination of Egypt: the scales and the feather, the devouring monster, the mummy who rises, all descend from its painted pages. Every museum hall of Egyptian antiquities is, in a sense, its reading room.