Ashley Adams Driifields Travel Agent BOD

Established 1969

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Independent Travel Agent

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Ancient Egyptian Transcripts

“Book Of The Dead”

The Book of the Dead is not really a book. Rather, it is a collection of texts that appeared in various places within a tomb. It came into being in the Seventeenth Dynasty (around 1600 BCE) as a successor to the Pyramid Texts. No single tomb included every one of the texts or "chapters". Egyptologists, having collected and collated these texts from many different tombs called them a "book" although they were never actually in book form in ancient Egypt

The Book of the Dead is the name given by Egyptologists to a group of mortuary spells written on sheets of papyrus covered with magical texts and accompanying illustrations called vignettes. These were placed with the dead in order to help them pass through the dangers of the underworld and attain an afterlife of bliss in the Field of Reeds. Some of the texts and vignettes are also found on the walls of tombs and on coffins or written on linen or vellum rather than on papyrus.

The texts are divided into individual spells or chapters, nearly two hundred in total, though no one papyrus contains them all. Specific chapters could be selected out of the total repertoire. If the prospective owner of a Book was wealthy and his death not untimely, he might commission a scribe to write the text for him, based upon his personal choice of spells. Other less wealthy clients had to make do with a ready written text, a template, in which spaces had been left for the insertion of the name and titles of the buyer.

The earliest Book of the Dead on record dates to the mid-fifteenth century BCE, but some of the spells had their origins in the Pyramid Texts from the 5^th and 6^th Dynasties, carved more than 1000 years earlier. The Pyramid Texts themselves in part refer in their own turn to rituals and practices probably in common usage 1000 years prior to them.

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