THE BOOK OF THE DEAD.

by E. A. Wallis Budge.




CHAPTER I

The Title.

"Book of the Dead" is the title now commonly given to the great
collection of funerary texts which the ancient Egyptian scribes
composed for the benefit of the dead. These consist of spells and
incantations, hymns and litanies, magical formulae and names, words
of power and prayers, and they are found cut or painted on walls of
pyramids and tombs, and painted on coffins and sarcophagi and rolls
of papyri. The title "Book of the Dead" is somewhat unsatisfactory
and misleading, for the texts neither form a connected work nor
belong to one period; they are miscellaneous in character, and tell
us nothing about the lives and works of the dead with whom they were
buried. Moreover, the Egyptians possessed many funerary works that
might rightly be called "Books of the Dead," but none of them bore a
name that could be translated by the title "Book of the Dead." This
title was given to the great collection of funerary texts in the first
quarter of the nineteenth century by the pioneer Egyptologists, who
possessed no exact knowledge of their contents. They were familiar
with the rolls of papyrus inscribed in the hieroglyphic and the
hieratic character, for copies of several had been published, [1]
but the texts in them were short and fragmentary. The publication of