Book of the Dead

About Book of the Dead

The Book of the Dead (Egyptian: r3w nw prt m hrw, 'spells for going forth by day') is the modern name for a body of about two hundred funerary spells that the Egyptians copied onto papyrus rolls, linen shrouds, and coffins from the early New Kingdom (c. 1550 BCE) into the Roman period. It was never a fixed book in the sense of a sealed canon. Each manuscript was a customized anthology, selected and arranged for an individual purchaser from a fluid repertoire, so that no two surviving papyri carry exactly the same set of spells in the same order. The modern title comes from the German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius, who published the long Ptolemaic Papyrus of Iufankh (Turin Museum) in 1842 under the title Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter and assigned the chapter numbers (1 through 165, later extended) that scholars still use, even though those numbers reflect one late manuscript rather than any ancient sequence.

The corpus grew directly out of earlier mortuary literature. The Pyramid Texts (Old Kingdom, c. 2400-2300 BCE) were carved on the chamber walls of royal pyramids; the Coffin Texts (Middle Kingdom, c. 2100-1700 BCE) adapted and expanded that material onto the coffins of officials and commoners. The Book of the Dead inherited spells from both — Spell 17, for instance, derives from Coffin Texts Spell 335 — while adding new compositions, vignettes (illustrative pictures), and a distinctly New Kingdom theology centered on the judgment before Osiris. The spells equip the deceased to leave the tomb, breathe and eat, repel hostile serpents and demons, transform into various birds and divine beings, pass the gates and caverns of the Duat by naming their guardians, and emerge vindicated from the weighing of the heart.

The most famous illustrated manuscripts come from the Theban necropolis. The Papyrus of Ani (British Museum EA 10470, c. 1250 BCE), nearly twenty-four meters long, contains the canonical vignette of the heart-weighing and is the source most reproduced in modern publications. The Papyrus of Hunefer (BM EA 9901, c. 1280 BCE) preserves an equally celebrated judgment scene with Anubis adjusting the balance and Thoth recording the verdict. The Papyrus of Nu (BM EA 10477, c. 1400 BCE) is among the earliest extensive copies. By the Late and Ptolemaic periods, scribes produced the rolls semi-commercially, leaving blank spaces for the buyer's name to be inserted, which confirms that the Book of the Dead functioned as a manufactured product within a wider mortuary economy.

The spells are not prayers in the devotional sense. They are operative texts — instructions and declarations that take effect through heka, the magical power inherent in correct speech. Knowing a guardian's name, reciting the forty-two denials of the Negative Confession (Spell 125), or pronouncing the formula for becoming a divine falcon (Spell 77) changed the deceased's situation in the afterlife. The Book of the Dead is therefore best understood as a portable toolkit for the transformation of the dead into an akh, a glorified and effective spirit, carried into the tomb so the spells would be available at the precise moments the journey demanded.

The Story

No single myth runs through the Book of the Dead; instead the corpus narrates, spell by spell, the dead person's passage from the sealed tomb to the Field of Reeds. Read in the rough order that the journey implies, the spells tell a coherent story of transformation.

The sequence begins at the moment of burial. Spell 1, recited on the day of interment, identifies the deceased with Osiris and asks for entry into the Duat 'in peace.' The opening spells (1-16) accompany the funeral procession and the placement of the body, while the great hymns to Ra and Osiris that often stand at the head of the roll align the dead person with the two cosmic powers whose union sustains the universe — the solar god who is reborn each dawn and the underworld king who guarantees resurrection. Spell 17, a long and deliberately cryptic theological poem, opens with the declaration 'I am Atum when I was alone in Nun' and proceeds through a series of riddling statements, each followed by a gloss giving alternative explanations. The spell teaches the deceased the secret structure of creation, knowledge that is itself protective.

The central crisis of the corpus is the threat of a 'second death' — annihilation in the Duat, from which there is no recovery. Many spells address specific dangers. Spell 33 repels snakes; Spell 34 guards against a snake that would steal the magic of the dead; Spell 39 defeats Apep, the chaos-serpent who attacks the solar bark. Spells 30A and 30B, inscribed on the heart scarab placed over the mummy's chest, command the heart not to testify against its owner: 'Do not stand as a witness against me, do not oppose me in the tribunal.' This is the corpus at its most psychologically acute — the dead person fears betrayal by his own conscience.

The climax is Spell 125, the judgment in the Hall of Two Truths. The deceased enters the hall, greets Osiris and the forty-two assessor-gods, and recites the Negative Confession — a list of denials: 'I have not done falsehood, I have not robbed, I have not killed, I have not caused weeping, I have not stolen the bread of the dead.' Each of the forty-two assessors governs one sin, and the deceased addresses each by name. The heart is then placed on one pan of the great balance and weighed against the feather of Maat, the principle of truth and cosmic order. Anubis adjusts the plumb; Thoth records the result; the monster Ammit, part lion, part hippopotamus, part crocodile, crouches ready to devour the heart of anyone who fails. If the heart balances true, the deceased is declared 'true of voice' (maa-kheru) and admitted to the realm of the blessed.

Beyond the judgment, the transformation spells (76-88) grant the vindicated dead the power to assume forms at will — a golden falcon (Spell 77), a divine hawk (Spell 78), a heron, a lotus, a serpent, a crocodile, the ba of various gods. These transformations express the freedom of the akh, who is no longer bound to a single body or place. Spell 110 describes and pictures the Field of Reeds, the agricultural paradise where the blessed plow, sow, and harvest grain of supernatural height. Because eternal labor was unwelcome, Spells 6 and 472 provide for the shabti — small mummiform figurines who answer the summons to work in the deceased's place, replying 'Here I am' when called.

The corpus closes, in many manuscripts, with spells for protective amulets (Spells 155-160: the djed-pillar, the tyet-knot of Isis, the heart, the headrest) and with offering formulas ensuring the perpetual supply of bread, beer, oxen, and fowl. The narrative arc is thus complete: from the sealed tomb, through the perils and naming-rituals of the Duat, across the decisive judgment, into transformation and the eternal abundance of the Field of Reeds. The Book of the Dead reenacts, for every purchaser, the resurrection that Osiris underwent first — death becoming not an ending but the gateway to an effective and unending existence.

The corpus also worked at the level of the individual spell's physical placement, for many chapters were tied to specific amulets and objects laid on or within the mummy. Spell 30B was inscribed on the green heart-scarab set over the breast; Spell 156 accompanied the red tyet-knot, the 'blood of Isis,' placed at the throat; Spell 155 went with the golden djed-pillar at the spine; Spell 151 belonged to the funerary mask and the four magical bricks set in the tomb walls. The text and the object were a single instrument, the spell activating the amulet's protective power. This integration of word and thing shows that the Book of the Dead was not merely a roll to be read but a script coordinated with the whole equipment of burial, each chapter assigned its moment, its place on the body, and its accompanying object, so that the spells and the material apparatus of the tomb worked together to carry the deceased safely through the Duat and into vindicated existence.

Symbolism

The Book of the Dead is the most heavily illustrated body of text from the ancient world, and its vignettes are themselves a symbolic language. The heart, weighed against Maat's feather, encodes the Egyptian conviction that the heart (ib) was the seat of thought, memory, and moral character — not a metaphor but the organ that recorded a life and could testify to it. The feather, the hieroglyph for Maat, reduces the cosmic principle of order, justice, and truth to a single image light enough to balance against a guiltless heart. The balance itself visualizes a worldview in which judgment is exact and quantitative: the heart either balances or it does not.

The recurring monster Ammit, 'the Devourer,' compounds the three most dangerous animals known to Egyptians — the crocodile's jaws, the lion's forequarters, the hippopotamus's bulk. Her presence beside the scales makes annihilation visible. To be eaten by Ammit was not punishment in an afterlife of torment but the obliteration of the person entirely, the 'second death.' Egyptian theology offered no eternal hell, only the binary of vindicated existence or non-existence, and Ammit embodies the latter.

The transformation spells encode a distinctive idea of postmortem identity. The vignettes show the deceased as a golden falcon, a heron, a lotus opening at dawn, a serpent — each form carrying its own associations. The falcon is the form of Horus and of the free-flying ba; the lotus, which closes at night and reopens with the sun, is a symbol of daily rebirth; the heron is the bennu, the self-renewing solar bird the Greeks called the phoenix. To possess these forms is to share in the renewal of the cosmos itself.

The physical roll carried its own symbolism. Placed inside the coffin, wound around the body, or tucked into a hollow statuette of Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, the papyrus was not merely a record but an active object — a battery of heka stored against need. The blank spaces left for the owner's name in mass-produced copies reveal a striking idea: the spells were generic machinery that became personal only when the name (ren, itself one of the components of the self) was inscribed. The vignette of the deceased adoring the rising sun, common at the head of New Kingdom rolls, places the individual within the daily solar cycle, asserting that the dead person now participates in the eternal return of Ra rather than merely awaiting an end. The vignettes also encode a theory of the image as an effective thing. A picture of the deceased eating, plowing, or adoring the sun was not a record of a wish but a guarantee of its fulfillment, the depicted act made real in the afterlife by the same magic that animated the spells. The illustrated roll was therefore a machine of images as well as words, each vignette a working component, and the care lavished on the finest manuscripts reflects the conviction that the picture, correctly made, secured the reality it showed. This is why the judgment vignette was so often elaborated: to depict the heart balancing true was, in some measure, to help make it so.

Cultural Context

The Book of the Dead emerged from a long development of Egyptian mortuary literature and reflects a decisive social shift. The Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom were a royal monopoly, inscribed only in the chambers of kings and, later, queens. The collapse of central authority in the First Intermediate Period (c. 2181-2055 BCE) coincided with the spread of mortuary spells to provincial officials, who had them painted on their coffins — the Coffin Texts. By the New Kingdom this 'democratization of the afterlife' was complete: anyone who could afford a papyrus roll could acquire the means to a vindicated eternity. The Book of the Dead is the material expression of that opening, and its commercial production by the Late Period shows how thoroughly the afterlife had become a purchasable good.

The corpus was produced by a specialized scribal industry concentrated in the Theban necropolis, where the great cemeteries of the New Kingdom elite lay opposite Karnak and Luxor. Workshops kept master copies from which scribes copied spells to order, sometimes well, sometimes carelessly — many surviving rolls contain scribal errors, omitted lines, and vignettes that do not match their accompanying text, evidence of rapid production for a wide market. Prices varied with length, quality of illustration, and the prestige of the scribe; a long illuminated roll like Ani's represented a major investment, while shorter rolls served humbler buyers.

The theology of the corpus is fundamentally Osirian, organized around the judgment and the promise of resurrection through identification with Osiris, yet it is interwoven with the solar theology of Heliopolis. The hymns to Ra, the transformation into the bennu and the falcon, and the imagery of the rising sun reflect the New Kingdom synthesis in which the dead person hoped both to be vindicated as an Osiris and to join Ra's daily voyage across the sky. This dual orientation — underworld resurrection and solar renewal — runs through the entire corpus and mirrors the broader religious culture of the period, in which Amun-Ra of Thebes and Osiris of Abydos were the two poles of state religion.

The spells also document Egyptian ethics. The Negative Confession of Spell 125 is among the earliest extended codes of moral conduct, listing prohibitions against theft, violence, deception, sexual misconduct, blasphemy, and the diversion of temple offerings. Whether the confession reflects sincere moral aspiration or a magical evasion of judgment has been debated, but the text demonstrates that Egyptians of the New Kingdom expected their conduct in life to be assessed after death by a standard articulated as Maat. The corpus thus links ritual technology to a developed sense of personal moral responsibility, applicable to every person regardless of rank. The corpus also documents the long afterlife of Egyptian funerary religion under foreign rule. The Book of the Dead continued to be copied through the Persian, Ptolemaic, and Roman periods, adapting to new conditions even as Greek and then Roman customs spread, and the latest manuscripts shade into the Demotic and hieratic funerary literature of Roman Egypt. The persistence of the corpus across these centuries, copied for Egyptians who lived under Greek and Roman rulers, shows the durability of the hope it served and the conservatism of Egyptian burial practice, which preserved the ancient spells long after much else in Egyptian life had changed.

Cross-Tradition Parallels

The Egyptian Book of the Dead belongs to a family of traditions that treat the afterlife as a territory requiring navigation — a place with zones, obstacles, guardians, and protocols where the dead succeed or fail according to what they know and how they speak. What makes each tradition's answer distinctive is the question it poses: Is the dead person equipped in advance, guided in the moment, or judged against a pre-existing standard?

Tibetan Buddhist — The Bardo Thodol (c. 8th century CE)

The closest structural twin to the Book of the Dead is the Tibetan Bardo Thodol (Liberation Through Hearing in the Intermediate State), attributed to Padmasambhava and compiled in the 14th century CE by Karma Lingpa. Both texts treat the afterlife as navigable territory with distinct zones and challenges where correct knowledge is the passport. The divergence is the central inversion: the Egyptian funerary papyrus was placed in the tomb, its spells physically present for the deceased to use alone. The Bardo Thodol is read aloud by a living guide, because the ear is the last sense to fade and the consciousness requires an external voice. Egypt trusts the individual equipped with spells; Tibet trusts the transmitted guidance of a teacher. Same question — how does the dead person navigate? — opposite answers: alone with a toolkit, or accompanied by a voice.

Zoroastrian — The Chinvat Bridge (Avesta, Vendidad Fargard 19, c. 6th-4th century BCE)

At death the Zoroastrian soul crosses the Chinvat Bridge at the peak of the cosmic mountain Hara Berezaiti, facing a tribunal of Mithra, Sraosha, and Rashnu. The bridge widens for the righteous and narrows to a razor's edge for the wicked — the landscape enacts the verdict. Both traditions stage a moment at which the whole life is measured against an absolute standard, precise and immediate. The revealing divergence: Egypt requires the deceased to speak forty-two denials, to name each assessor, to deploy correct speech through heka; Zoroastrian judgment requires no performance — the tribunal reads the account, and the bridge acts. Egyptian judgment is participatory; Zoroastrian judgment is administrative.

Chinese Han — The Bureaucratic Afterlife (c. 2nd century BCE-3rd century CE)

In Chinese Han-dynasty funerary practice, the dead entered an underworld modeled on the imperial bureaucracy, with magistrates, registries, and documents. Archaeological finds from Mawangdui (Changsha, c. 168 BCE) include inventory lists that may have assisted the deceased in navigating it. Egyptian funerary documentation established the moral standing of the deceased against a cosmic standard of truth. Chinese Han documentation established entitlements and possessions — what they were owed, not what they had to prove. Egypt asks whether you deserve eternity; China's administrative afterlife tracks what you own within it.

Greek — The Judges of the Dead (Plato, Gorgias 523e-524a, c. 380 BCE)

Plato's Gorgias describes souls arriving before Minos, Rhadamanthus, and Aeacus — assessed naked, without wealth or status, the soul's moral markings visible directly. Egyptian judgment is adversarial in a specific sense: the deceased speaks, denies, and must not be contradicted by the heart, which might testify against its owner. In Plato the soul is a passive object being read by others. Egypt makes the dead person an active, speaking defendant; Plato makes the soul a text to be interpreted.

Mesopotamian — The Kur and the Dust-Diet (Descent of Inanna, c. 1800 BCE)

The Sumerian underworld Kur has no manual for the dead, no spells, no test of moral worth — the dead eat dust and clay regardless of how they lived. Mesopotamian death produces a silence in which no knowledge helps and no speech matters. Where the Book of the Dead promises that the correctly equipped dead can pass gates, transform, and reach the Field of Reeds, the Kur strips every identity and offers only residue. The Egyptian refusal to accept this silence is a defining feature of its religion, expressed in every line of a corpus that insists the dead person can and must speak.

Modern Influence

The Book of the Dead entered Western consciousness through Lepsius's 1842 edition and, more powerfully, through E. A. Wallis Budge's heavily reprinted translations and facsimiles of the Papyrus of Ani, published by the British Museum from 1890 onward. Budge's editions, though now superseded on philological grounds, fixed the corpus in the popular imagination and made 'the Egyptian Book of the Dead' a household phrase. The very title is a modern imposition: Egyptians called the work the spells for 'going forth by day,' an affirmation of mobility and renewal rather than the morbid emphasis the English name suggests.

The judgment vignette of Spell 125 — the heart on the balance, Anubis at the scales, Ammit waiting, Thoth recording — has become the single most recognizable image of ancient Egyptian religion, reproduced in textbooks, museum displays, documentaries, and popular fiction. It supplied a visual template for the idea of a postmortem moral reckoning that resonates across cultures, and it is regularly invoked in modern discussions of conscience and judgment.

The corpus shaped the Western esoteric tradition. Nineteenth-century occult movements, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and later Theosophy, drew on the Book of the Dead as a source of supposed ancient wisdom, treating its transformation spells as initiatic teaching. This reading, though unhistorical, fed a durable strand of Egyptianizing mysticism that persists in modern esoterica and tarot symbolism.

The title has been borrowed across world literature. The Tibetan Bardo Thödol was rendered into English by Walter Evans-Wentz in 1927 as 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead,' an explicit analogy to the Egyptian corpus that has since become standard, encouraging comparative study of guidebooks for the afterlife across traditions. The phrase recurs in fiction, film, and music, almost always evoking esoteric danger or hidden knowledge.

In scholarship, the Book of the Dead remains central to Egyptology. Critical work since the late twentieth century — the synoptic editions and the long-running Book of the Dead Project at the University of Bonn, which catalogues and digitizes manuscripts worldwide — has replaced Budge's composite text with careful study of individual papyri, restoring the corpus's actual variability. Raymond Faulkner's 1972 translation established a reliable English text, and the 1994 Chronicle Books illustrated edition — with commentary by Ogden Goelet and a full-color reproduction of the Papyrus of Ani — brought the corpus to a wide general readership. The corpus also feeds modern grief studies and comparative religion, where its detailed mapping of the afterlife journey offers a uniquely articulated ancient answer to the question of what becomes of the person after death.

Primary Sources

Pyramid Texts (Old Kingdom, c. 2400-2300 BCE; ed. R.O. Faulkner, Oxford, 1969; James P. Allen, SBL Writings from the Ancient World 23, 2005) — the royal mortuary corpus inscribed on pyramid-chamber walls from which the Book of the Dead ultimately descends. Key utterances bearing on the later corpus include Utterance 600, which calls on Atum and the creator's emergence on the primordial mound, and the sequences addressing the dead king's ascent to the stars and his identification with Osiris. The Pyramid Texts represent the oldest surviving stratum of Egyptian funerary thought; their imagery of the solar bark, the Field of Reeds, and the king's identification with the gods was inherited and adapted in the later corpora.

Coffin Texts (Middle Kingdom, c. 2100-1700 BCE; ed. Adriaan de Buck, The Egyptian Coffin Texts, 7 vols, Oriental Institute Publications 34-67, 1935-61; trans. R.O. Faulkner, 3 vols, Aris & Phillips, 1973-78) — inscribed on the wooden coffins of private individuals. Spell 335 of the Coffin Texts is the direct ancestor of Book of the Dead Spell 17, among the most theologically dense compositions in the corpus. The Coffin Texts document the 'democratization' of the afterlife that made the Book of the Dead possible: as the royal mortuary tradition spread to commoners, the spells were adapted and expanded, and the theological categories — the ba, the ka, the Field of Reeds, the judgment — were made available to a wider audience. The Book of Two Ways, found on the floor of some Middle Kingdom coffins, anticipates the navigational character of the later corpus.

The Book of the Dead itself survives in several hundred papyrus manuscripts, the most important of which are the major illustrated rolls from the Theban necropolis. The Papyrus of Ani (British Museum EA 10470, c. 1250 BCE) — almost twenty-four meters long, containing the canonical Spell 125 judgment vignette, Spell 17, Spell 110, and many transformation spells — was published in facsimile with translation by E.A. Wallis Budge (British Museum, 1895; superseded by R.O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, British Museum Press, 1985, ed. Carol Andrews). The Papyrus of Hunefer (BM EA 9901, c. 1280 BCE) preserves an equally celebrated judgment scene with Anubis at the balance and Thoth recording the verdict; the Papyrus of Nu (BM EA 10477, c. 1400 BCE) is among the earliest extensive copies. Karl Richard Lepsius, Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter (Leipzig, 1842), published the long Ptolemaic Papyrus of Iufankh (Turin Museum) and assigned the chapter numbers (1-165, later extended) still in use.

Book of the Dead Spell 125 — the Negative Confession and the Weighing of the Heart — is the most extensively copied and illustrated text in the corpus, present in virtually every major manuscript from the Eighteenth Dynasty onward. It documents the forty-two denials addressed to the assessor-gods of the Hall of Two Truths, the weighing of the heart against the feather of Maat, and the judgment by Osiris; it is the primary source for Egyptian moral theology and for the image of the postmortem judgment. Faulkner's translation of the corpus (British Museum Press, 1985) remains the standard accessible English version; Thomas George Allen, The Book of the Dead or Going Forth by Day (Oriental Institute Publications 37, University of Chicago, 1974) provides a more philologically complete translation.

The Books of the Netherworld — the Amduat, the Book of Gates, the Book of the Earth — form a parallel royal afterlife literature inscribed in the tombs of the Valley of the Kings; they share the Book of the Dead's goal of navigating the Duat but were restricted to royal use. Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (Cornell University Press, 1999), is the standard English study. The Book of the Dead corpus continued to be copied through the Roman period, the latest manuscripts dating to the first and second centuries CE, attesting more than fifteen hundred years of continuous use.

Significance

The Book of the Dead is the fullest surviving map any ancient civilization made of the journey after death. Where other cultures left scattered hints of the underworld, Egypt produced a detailed, illustrated, spell-by-spell itinerary — naming the gates, the guardians, the dangers, and the destination, and supplying the exact words required at each stage. For the study of ancient religion it offers an unmatched window into how a society imagined the survival of the person and the conditions of a good eternity.

The corpus marks the culmination of the 'democratization of the afterlife.' What had been a royal prerogative inscribed in pyramid chambers became, by the New Kingdom, a product available to any literate or wealthy household. This shift carried social and ethical weight: if every person faced the same judgment and could attain the same vindication, then the standard of Maat applied universally, and moral responsibility extended beyond the king to all. The Negative Confession of Spell 125 stands among the earliest articulated ethical codes in human history, predating comparable formulations elsewhere.

The Book of the Dead also reveals the Egyptian theory of language and power. The spells worked through heka — through the precise utterance of names and formulas — so that knowledge itself became salvific. To know the name of a gatekeeper was to pass the gate; to recite the correct denial was to escape the corresponding sin. This equation of correct speech with effective action connects the corpus to the broader Egyptian conviction that the cosmos responded to ritual words, a conviction that shaped temple liturgy, medicine, and magic alike.

The material history of the corpus matters as much as its theology. Because each roll was individually assembled, the surviving manuscripts collectively document the variability of Egyptian religious practice across a millennium and a half — the spells that fell in and out of fashion, the regional preferences, the rise of new compositions, the careless commercial copies of the Late Period. No other Egyptian text-tradition is so richly attested across so long a span, making the Book of the Dead a primary instrument for tracing the development of Egyptian belief from the New Kingdom into the Roman era. Its persistence — copied, adapted, and reillustrated for fifteen centuries — testifies to the depth of the Egyptian refusal to accept death as the end of the person. The corpus further illuminates the relationship between religion and the economy: because each roll was a purchased product, its quality and length reflected the buyer's means, and the semi-commercial production of the Late Period — rolls written in advance with blank spaces for names — shows how thoroughly the hope of an ideal afterlife had been woven into a market in funerary goods, a market that employed scribes, illustrators, and amulet-makers across Egypt.

Connections

Osiris — Judge and king of the Duat with whom every deceased is identified, the figure toward whom the entire corpus is oriented and whose resurrection it promises to repeat for each purchaser.

Anubis — Embalmer-god who preserves the body the spells presuppose and who tends the balance in the judgment scene, leading the deceased into the Hall of Two Truths.

Thoth — Divine scribe and mythological author of the spells, recorder of the judgment verdict, whose wisdom underlies the entire funerary tradition.

Maat — Principle of truth and order whose feather measures the heart and whose standard defines the Negative Confession.

Weighing of the Heart — The central judgment episode of Spell 125, the dramatic climax around which the corpus is organized.

Hall of Two Truths — The setting of the judgment, where the forty-two assessors hear the Negative Confession and Osiris presides.

Negative Confession — The list of forty-two denials recited before the assessor-gods, the ethical core of Spell 125.

Duat — The underworld through which the spells guide the deceased, with its gates, caverns, and guardians.

Field of Reeds — The agricultural paradise of the vindicated dead, described and pictured in Spell 110.

Akh — The transfigured spirit the deceased becomes through successful use of the spells, the goal of the whole corpus.

Heka — The magical power of correct speech through which the spells take effect.

Pyramid Texts — The Old Kingdom royal mortuary corpus from which the Book of the Dead ultimately descends.

Book of the Dead (object) — The physical papyrus roll as a funerary object, the material vehicle of the spells.

Canopic Jars — The vessels protecting the internal organs, guarded by the four sons of Horus who recur among the corpus's protective figures.

Book of the Dead — The reference-text treatment of the corpus among the ancient texts.

Mummification — The preservation of the body the spells presuppose, the physical foundation on which the funerary corpus operates.

Opening of the Mouth — The ritual restoring the senses of the deceased, addressed in Chapter 23 and necessary for the dead to recite the spells.

Coffin and Sarcophagus — The containers within which the roll was often placed, sharing the corpus's purpose of securing the afterlife journey.

Heart Scarab Amulet — The amulet inscribed with Spell 30B, commanding the heart not to testify against its owner at the judgment.

Coffin Texts — The Middle Kingdom corpus from which many Book of the Dead spells, including Spell 17, directly descend.

Further Reading