The Egyptian Book of the Dead

The Papyrus of Ani was painted in Egypt about 1250 BC. It represents the best preserved, longest, most ornate, and beautifully executed example of the form of Mortuary Text known as the Egyptian Book of the Dead.Ani was a well-to-do scribe (or accountant) within the Temple hierarchy who, as he approached middle age, decided it was time to order his personalized selection of the prayers and invocations designed as a guide to the Egyptian afterlife. Compiled from the oldest religious culture on earth, these spells (known as the Pyramid Texts) had originally been engraved on the walls of the tombs of kings or pharaohs). As time went on, they began to be more widely available, carved and painted on the wooden sarcophagi of great nobles (where they are known as Coffin texts). Finally, they became even more widely available, painted on scrolls and available to the upper middle class. Ani’s papyrus measured 78 feet long by 15 inches high.

The prayers are connected to certain archetypal images. Thus an
invocation to Osiris, the Lord of the Underworld, will be written within a painting (or vignette) of that deity. The meaning of the passage is a marriage of word and image, reaching well beyond the merely verbal level of the brain. One of the best known examples of these breathtaking unions of text and image is the Weighing of the Heartscene. Here, the heart (the moral integrity of the deceased, the conscience) is weighed against the feather of Truth and Justice. If the cumulative effects of
the person’s past have allowed his soul to be as light as the feather of Truth, he or she is judged pure and admitted to the presence of the Lord of the Dead in preparation for the journey through the Afterlife. However, if the person’s heart is weighted down with the burden of sin, his soul is flung to the great monster who awaits the recording of the verdict and is no more

As a magical, polytheistic religion, the Egyptian spiritual path was alive with creativity and energy. The spiritual dignity afforded the
observant Egyptian was an invigorating state. One who had led an upright moral life, who had shown respect to the Gods, and, who had been strong enough to persevere through the awesome dangers of the path of the afterlife, was then invited to feast with his Gods, playing board games in beautiful fields, drinking beer and enjoying related pleasures, The successful adherent would reach a stellar glory of his own, at last a member of that hierarchy his life had been spent in honoring. The impact of Ancient Egypt on modern western culture is of course ubiquitous. Egypt is known as the Mother of Western Civilization. The 42 part Negative Confession is a source of our own Ten Commandments. (The additional ancient statute against the bringing of law suits might be worth revisiting!) Egyptian religion is the source of the Judaeo-Christian belief in the after death resurrection promised to mankind as a reward for righteous living.The Egyptian religion was a magical religion that involved a continuous interaction between the individual and the various deities who constituted its elaborate and exalted pantheon. Initiates were required to memorize magical formulas and spells, and to demonstrate their
proficiency therein; tests of courage and honor were administered by the officers of the Temple. Possession of secret knowledge, along with a highly developed moral character, were necessary to penetrate the deeper levels of Egyptian spirituality. Egypt’s moral teaching presented in its Wisdom literature and Mortuary texts attain to the highest levels of sacred awareness. Egypt’s temples, statues, frescoes, carvings, jewelry, painted scrolls and sarcophagi stand as mute witnesses to a brilliant and lofty spiritual culture that has never been equaled on earth. The silent and stationary images of The Egyptian Book of the Dead continue to speak and move today, some four millennia after their creation.

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The story of the securing of the Papyrus of Ani combines elements of fate and tragedy, even slapstick, and marks the very end of European
colonialism in North Africa. Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, assistant Keeper of
the Egyptian Collection at the British Museum, and author and editor of
many books on ancient Near Eastern civilizations, arrived in Egypt in 1887 with funds for the purchase of antiquities for the Museum. There had recently been a series of extraordinary finds in Upper Egypt. The Egyptian government, seeking to preserve the finds, had appointed police/military units to seek out native Egyptians in possession of these antiquities and to prevent Europeans from buying them. Budge was personally threatened with arrest should he attempt to purchase anything.

At Luxor, Budge found a papyrus he described as the largest such roll he had ever seen. “… I was amazed at the beauty and freshness of the colours of the human figures and animals, which in the dim light of the candles and heated air of the tomb, seemed to be alive.” In fact Budge was obsessed with the papyrus. He arranged for a tin smith to make a cylindrical box to protect the roll. He evaded the chief of police of Luxor, who was carrying out orders from the Director of the Service of Antiquities. The Ani papyrus was stored in a small building nearby the old Luxor Hotel, where it had been placed under government guard. Budge and the antiquities dealers first attempted to get the guards drunk, then to bribe them to leave their posts for an hour. Finally they arranged for a crew to quietly dig under the wall. A substantial supper was arranged for the guards and while they feasted, the conspirators removed the papyrus of Ani along with numerous other finds through the two foot square hole they had dug for the purpose earlier in the evening. Secreting the papyrus aboard a steamer at midnight, Budge arrived in Cairo, and with the help of members of the British army, managed to get the papyrus off to London.

* * * * *
Here’s where the real trouble began. Budge cut the papyrus into 37 nearly equal lengths for ease of handling. The sheets were glued onto
wooden boards to keep then rigid. Fortunately Budge immediately commissioned a facsimile to be prepared. An exquisite limited edition
was produced by color lithography in 1890 preserving forever the awesome beauty of the ancient original. Meanwhile the translation began which took five years and a companion volume of translation was released in 1895. Meanwhile, the extraordinary nature of the find encouraged the British Museum to display the sheets under a large skylight in a central hall. The glue and direct sunlight damaged the papyrus beyond repair. The translation had also revealed that many of the cuts were made in the wrong places, thus chapters were interrupted, vignettes were split, and text was left far from its accompanying image.

Book designer James Wasserman arranged to photograph his extremely rare copy of the British Museum facsimile of the papyrus. Utilizing the modern magic of computers and state-of-the-art production techniques, the images were scanned, reassembled, and electronically recut to best display the 78 foot papyrus as a book. A team of Egyptologists was led by Dr. Ogden Goelet of the Department of Near Eastern Studies at New York University, who wrote an overall commentary on the work along with a plate by plate The bulk of the translation used is that of the late Dr. Raymond O. Faulkner, whose work is universally acknowledged as the most authoritative. It was updated by Dr. Goelet to reflect advances in Egyptian philology. Carol Andrews of the Department of Antiquities of the British Museum wrote the Preface and facilitated access to the original papyrus. Eva van Dassow acted as overall project editor. The work of these scholars made this publication as intellectually accurate as it is visually beautiful.The translation of the text of each image is placed on the page directly below the image, allowing the reader, for the first time in 3500 years, to gaze on the images while reading the words of the papyrus. Uncluttered with footnotes or other extraneous matter, the papyrus is displayed with the intent of allowing the modern reader to experience the full depth of the original. The restoration of the unity of word and image in this publication of the Papyrus of Ani has brought to life one of the most important early spiritual treasures of mankind.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead
The Book of Going Forth by Day

The First Authentic Presentation of the Complete Papyrus of Ani
Featuring integrated text and full-color images
$29.95 Paperback ISBN 0-8118-0767-3
Chronicle Books

Written and painted some 3500 years ago, The Papyrus of Ani is the most complete, ornate, and best-preserved example of Ancient Egyptian philosophical and religious thought. Presented here for the first time in its original form, with the hieroglyphic images matched to what has been acknowledged as the finest English translation of the text, The Egyptian Book of the Dead opens the door to one of humanity's earliest and finest spiritual treasures.

Selections from the Foreword

I began working at Samuel Weiser's Bookstore in New York in 1973. There I came upon the "elephant folio" (14-3/4 x 21 inches) facsimile of the Papyrus of Ani. Published by the British Museum in 1890, this magnificent volume overwhelmed me with the intensity and beauty of its mysterious imagery. My interest in occult philosophy naturally led me to study the text of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. I first used the virtually unreadable 1895 translation by Budge in the ubiquitous Dover reprint. The original edition had been released as a companion to the facsimile. One was expected to view the images in the facsimile while reading the separate translation.

In January of 1979, I purchased the facsimile and soon after found myself literally "watching" a vision of this book - that is, the exquisite papyrus in full color running along the top of the page, with a readable, uncluttered English translation below. Now that vision has been realized - the rendition of an ancient Egyptian papyrus that comes the closest in 3500 years to approximating the feeling of the original, where the words and images are again treated as a unity.

There are three key issues regarding the creation of this book. The first is the text. My original idea, developed in detail over several years, was to follow the Ani Papyrus word for word. I planned to use Budge's translation, with his excellent key to the hieroglyphics as my guide, to present the text and images together on the same page. Dr. Goelet, however, made clear, first, that Budge's translation falls far short of modern standards, and second, that the hieroglyphic text of the Ani Papyrus itself is of uneven quality, often much inferior to the excellence of its vignettes. He proposed that we use Faulkner's translation of the "ideal text" of each chapter below the images of the Ani Papyrus, supplemented by his own translations where necessary. Our text would then represent the best translation from the best Egyptological sources for the specific chapter of the Book of the Dead illustrated in the Ani Papyrus.

Thus this volume combines the finest modern scholarship with the most beautifully illuminated surviving ancient papyrus.

The second concern is my "recutting" or electronic reorganization of thepapyrus. The medium of a scroll is vastly different from that of a book, and I have sought to restore the integrity of the images at all costs. Budge unfortunately cut the original papyrus using the basic "yardstick" method -dividing it into thirty- seven sheets of relatively even length. The result was to disfigure the flow of the original scroll. On the other hand, the facsimile volume he published looks more like a book, with images of uniform width across pages of uniform width. In this edition, you will find some few images occupying just over a third of the page in width, while others have first created. The sole purpose of the extensive electronic retouching that we have devoted to the papyrus, has been to bring the images even closer to their original form - in fact, to recreate the original Papyrus of Ani in book form three and a half millennia after the scroll was first painted. We have literally spanned the ages by making use of state-of-the-art modern electronic technology to reclaim one of the most beautiful treasures of antiquity.

I believe the power, wisdom, and spiritual vision offered in the following pages can be greatly beneficial to our modern culture. Perhaps in searching out our spiritual roots, we can rediscover the golden thread all but lost today. The ancient Egyptians taught that the individual who led a pure life and persevered against deadly trials would then feast with the Gods. This is an altogether refreshing assessment of our inherent human divinity. Were we, as a culture, to be reminded of such an elevated spiritual condition, might not the true pride so engendered help end the irresponsibility endemic to our world? After all, noblesse oblige!