CHAPTER IV

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD


"Book of the Dead" is the name that is now generally given to the large
collection of "Chapters," or compositions, both short and long, which
the ancient Egyptians cut upon the walls of the corridors and chambers
in pyramids and rock-hewn tombs, and cut or painted upon the insides and
outsides of coffins and sarcophagi, and wrote upon papyri, etc., which
were buried with the dead in their tombs. The first modern scholar to
study these Chapters was the eminent Frenchman, J. François Champollion;
he rightly concluded that all of them were of a religious character, but
he was wrong in calling the collection as a whole "Funerary Ritual." The
name "Book of the Dead" is a translation of the title "Todtenbuch,"
given by Dr. R. Lepsius to his edition of a papyrus at Turin, containing
a very long selection of the Chapters,[1] which he published in 1842.
"Book of the Dead" is on the whole a very satisfactory general
description of these Chapters, for they deal almost entirely with the
dead, and they were written entirely for the dead. They have nothing to
do with the worship of the gods by those who live on the earth, and such
prayers and hymns as are incorporated with them were supposed to be said
and sung by the dead for their own benefit. The author of the Chapters
of the Book of the Dead was the god Thoth, whose greatness has already
been described in Chapter I of this book. Thus they were considered to
be of divine origin, and were held in the greatest reverence by the