BOOK OF THE DEAD. – This is the name given by the first Egyptologists to a collection of formulas, prayers, and religious hymns written on papyrus scrolls which, from the New Kingdom (16th century B.C.) down to the Greco-Roman period, the Egyptians placed in the coffins of their deceased. The *Book of the Dead* was commonly written in hieroglyphic and hieratic script, while in later times the demotic script was also used; in most cases, the text is accompanied by illustrative vignettes, often in color. Many specimens are true masterpieces of calligraphic precision and vivid pictorial art. The compilation consists of chapters or paragraphs arranged without any logical order of succession. The total number and often the sequence of the chapters vary from one specimen to another; textual variants are also numerous.
The purpose of the *Book of the Dead* was to provide the deceased with a manual enabling them to face the various contingencies of the afterlife. The title of the compilation is equivalent in Egyptian to “the emergence into the day” and implies the fundamental aspiration to emerge from the darkness of the tomb and see the light of the sun again. The antecedents of the *Book of the Dead* are to be found in the *Pyramid Texts* (funerary formulas found in the royal tombs of the 5th and 6th dynasties and composed solely for kings), which exalted the ascent to heaven of the deceased sovereign and his deification. Equally important for establishing the genesis of the *Book of the Dead* are the Middle Kingdom formulary known as the *Coffin Texts*, reserved for a wider circle of people.
The *Book of the Dead*, which reveals a more popular character, reserves a preponderant part for magical formulas intended to avert danger or procure a benefit.
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**BOOK – BROWN PAPER DEEPLY OXIDIZED WITH PARTIAL RESTORATION.**
Thus one reads the formulas to ensure food and provisions, to protect oneself from crocodiles and snakes, to preserve one’s limbs intact, to move freely in the realm of the dead, to “emerge into the day,” to be replaced in corvées, to identify oneself with certain deities, etc. Some invocations to the gods take the form of lengthy religious hymns: noteworthy among these are the so-called “Litanies of Osiris.”
But the chapter most interesting from a moral standpoint is devoted to the negative confession. The fundamental idea was that the deceased, in order to gain access to the realm of Osiris, had to “justify” himself before the god himself and a tribunal of 42 judges. The person undergoing judgment, having entered the hall of the tribunal, enumerated the sinful actions he had not committed, while the god Thoth verified the truthfulness of the confession on a scale bearing the name of the deceased on one side and the symbol of truth (ma’at) on the other (psychostasy).
Sins can be reduced to two categories: against the gods (e.g., not having blasphemed, not having stolen offerings from temples, not having profaned sacred places, etc.) and against men (e.g., not having killed, not having committed adultery, not having stolen, not having falsified weights and measures, etc.). If the verdict was favorable, the deceased was declared “true of voice” and admitted to the realm of the dead; otherwise, his soul was devoured by a monstrous animal and annihilated forever. Naturally, possessing the *Book of the Dead*, with the complete list of individual judges and the invocations relating to each of them, implied *de iure* the successful outcome of the judgment.
Some chapters finally describe and illustrate life in the realm of Osiris, where the “true of voice” are engaged in cultivating fields of miraculous fertility.
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BOOK OF THE DEAD – Papyrus of Nes-Min, with scene of the judgment of the soul (psychostasy. 5th century B.C. ca.) – Vatican, Egyptian Museum.