The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: A Guidebook for Surviving the Afterlife

The say­ing “You can’t take it with you” may be a cliché to all of us here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, but it would hard­ly have made sense to an ancient Egypt­ian. One of the most wide­ly known qual­i­ties of that civ­i­liza­tion’s upper crust, after all, is that its mem­bers spared no expense try­ing to do just that. The most com­pelling evi­dence includes the tombs of the pharaohs, lav­ish­ly stocked as they were with every­thing from dai­ly neces­si­ties to reli­gious arti­facts to ser­vants (in effi­gy or oth­er­wise). And nobody who was any­body in ancient Egypt would be seen shuf­fling off this mor­tal coil — or what­ev­er the shape in which their poets cast it — with­out a Book of the Dead.

“A stan­dard com­po­nent in Egypt­ian elite buri­als, the Book of the Dead was not a book in the mod­ern sense of the term but a com­pendi­um of some 200 rit­u­al spells and prayers, with instruc­tions on how the deceased’s spir­it should recite them in the here­after,” writes the New York Times’ Franz Lidz.

“Com­piled and refined over mil­len­ni­ums since about 1550 B.C.,” the text “pro­vid­ed a sort of visu­al map that allowed the new­ly dis­em­bod­ied soul to nav­i­gate the duat, a maze-like nether­world of cav­erns, hills and burn­ing lakes.” Each of its “spells” addressed a par­tic­u­lar sit­u­a­tion the deceased might encounter on that jour­ney: a snake attack, decap­i­ta­tion, a turn­ing upside down that “would reverse your diges­tive func­tions and cause you to con­sume your own waste.”

We can cer­tain­ly under­stand why these high-sta­tus ancient Egyp­tians did­n’t want to take their chances. In the ani­mat­ed Ted-ED video above, you can fol­low the jour­ney of one such indi­vid­ual, a scribe from thir­teenth-cen­tu­ry-BC Thebes called Anees. After his body under­goes two months of mum­mi­fi­ca­tion, his spir­it makes its har­row­ing jour­ney through the under­world, call­ing upon the spells he’d thought to include in his Book of the Dead when alive. Then comes moral judg­ment by a bat­tery of 42 “asses­sor gods” and a weigh­ing of his heart, the final step before his admit­tance to a lush wheat field that is the Egypt­ian after­life. Whether Anees got that far remains an open ques­tion, but mod­ern phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal enshrine­ment of Books of the Dead (more of which you can see up-close at Google Arts & Cul­ture), has grant­ed him and his com­pa­tri­ots a kind of immor­tal­i­ty after all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Did the Egyp­tians Make Mum­mies? An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Ancient Art of Mum­mi­fi­ca­tion

Hear Lau­rie Ander­son Read from the Tibetan Book of the Dead on New Album Songs from the Bar­do

Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er that Ancient Egyp­tians Drank Hal­lu­cino­genic Cock­tails from 2,300 Year-Old Mug

When the Grate­ful Dead Played at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

Were the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Not Built Up, But Carved Down?: A Bold New The­o­ry Explains Their Con­struc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.