The Egyptian Book of the Dead

Open Budge's volume and the title page carries a second name under the famous one: The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day. The first chapter of the roll opens the same way, announcing that here begin the chapters of coming forth by day.

That is the Egyptians' own label, and it says two things at once. It is a set of chapters, plural, not one book. And it is named for what it does — getting the dead man out — rather than for the people who used it.

“Book of the Dead” is a modern name. It stuck after Richard Lepsius published a late papyrus from Turin in 1842 as Das Todtenbuch der Aegypter, and it has coloured every reading since: one gloomy volume about death. The thing itself was neither one volume nor, in its own eyes, about death.

Budge's account of how it all began is practical. The Egyptians embalmed their dead, and experience taught them that even the most carefully built tomb could not stop damp-rot, dry-rot and decay. Some other power had to be called in, and so the priest was.

He spoke words over the body, probably with ceremonies, and those formulae, Budge argues, became the foundation of the later Book of the Dead. For a very long time they were only recited. They were written down late, when the priests themselves began to be unsure what some of them meant and how they ought to be written.

So the oldest layer of this text is not literature and not doctrine. It is speech made at a graveside, fixed on the page by people who were already afraid of losing it.

What did the Egyptians themselves call the texts we know as the Book of the Dead?

• The Book of the Dead of Egypt
• The Ritual of the Mummy
• The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day✓Correct answer
• The Book of Breathings

The roll opens by announcing “the chapters of coming forth by day”. “Book of the Dead” is the modern label that stuck after Lepsius's 1842 edition, and the Book of Breathings is a separate, later funeral text that Budge also prints.

Each copy was made for one person, and you can hear it in the grammar. The spells are not spoken in a general voice. In Ani's roll the first chapter begins with “Osiris the scribe Ani” as the speaker, and his name keeps returning, spell after spell, as the one who says the words.

What made this possible was a change of material. Texts carved inside a pyramid or painted on a coffin were for kings and wealthy families. A roll of papyrus, Budge notes, cost very little by comparison, especially if an ordinary scribe did the writing.

Cheaper did not mean generic. A papyrus was a copy made for one burial: how long it ran, which chapters went in and how many pictures it carried were settled for that burial by the scribe and the artist.

Put three famous rolls from the British Museum side by side and the idea of a fixed text falls apart.

The Papyrus of Nebseni is about 77 feet long and holds seventy-seven chapters, not counting the ones copied twice or three times. The Papyrus of Nu is shorter, about 65 feet, yet holds a hundred and thirty-one, because its writing is smaller and its lines closer. The Papyrus of Ani runs 78 feet and holds only sixty-six, because it is the most lavishly painted of them all.

Budge, who worked through all three, found that in the best papyri neither the selection of chapters nor their order is ever the same. His shortest way of saying it: “each papyrus had a plan of its own.” In the Theban period there was no standard edition for a copy to depart from.

Even in the finest Theban papyri, a scribe could copy the same chapter into one roll more than once.

True✓Correct answer

True. The Papyrus of Nebseni carries duplicates and even triplicates of some chapters, and Ani's roll holds two slightly different copies of Chapter 18. Budge takes this as proof that even the best scribes followed no single plan.