The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Complete Papyrus of Ani

Originally published in 1895 by order of the Trustees of the British Museum.

First Clydesdale Press Edition 2020

Foreword © Skyhorse Publishing

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020930858

Cover design by Kai Texel

Print ISBN: 978-1-945186-65-3

eISBN: 978-1-949846-24-9

Printed in China

CONTENTS

Foreword, by Dr. Foy Scalf

Preface

Introduction

The Versions of the Book of the Dead

The Legend of Osiris

The Doctrine of Eternal Life

The Egyptians’ Ideas of God

The Abode of the Blessed

The Gods of the Book of the Dead

The Principal Geographical and Mythological Places in the Book of the Dead

Funeral Ceremonies

The Papyrus of Ani

Table of Chapters

The Book of the Dead: The Hieroglyphic Text of the Papyrus of Ani, with Interlinear Transliteration and Word for Word Translation

Translation

Bibliography

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION TO THE SKYHORSE PUBLISHING EDITION

By Dr. Foy Scalf

The Book of the Dead. Immediately evocative, this phrase arouses our imagination and conjures in us ideas of magic, mystery, antiquity, and exoticness. The popularity of the book you hold in your hands—one of the best-selling books in the history of Egyptology, having been in continuous print since its original publication in 1895—can in some way be attributed to its title.i Yet this title and the mental images it evokes are very much a legacy of the nineteenth century, deriving from the early years of Egyptology after the discipline had only just been born. After Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) deciphered the hieroglyphic script in 1822, and thereby founded the modern study of Egyptology, Egyptian religious texts captivated him. In Champollion’s grammar and notes, he often referred to what we call the Book of the Dead as the funerary ritual (rituel funéraire), but he never published a complete translation.ii His successor, a Prussian scholar named Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–1884) who carried on the decipherment of Egyptian, produced the first full-length study of what we now call the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead.iii His volume, published in 1842, was called in his native German Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter, or The Book of the Dead of the Egyptians, which may very well derive from an Arabic quip used by villagers who knew of kutub al-amwāt books of the dead found in nearby tombs.iv Thus, this phrase was used because the books were found with the dead and not because the books were about death. It is from Lepsius’s book title that our English counterpart was born when a British Egyptologist named Samuel Birch (1813–1885), who had been one of E. A. Wallis Budge’s teachers, first translated it into English in 1867. He hedged his bets by entitling his contribution The Funerary Ritual or Book of the Dead, thus invoking both Champollion and Lepisus with a single stroke.v Once subsequent English publications followed Birch’s lead, and with Budge’s popular translation embedding the phrase into the public vocabulary, the name Book of the Dead has stuck, becoming a common part of scholarly discourse as well as household conversation.

The Book of the Dead is largely a conception of our modern imagination. For the ancient Egyptians, it was not very much like a book as defined today. What scholars call the Book of the Dead consists of nearly two hundred individual spells—also called chapters—that are found written on any available surface, including famous examples on the walls of Ramses II’s tomb, the stelae of the general Kasa, the coffin of the priest Nesbanebdjed, the sarcophagus of Queen Hatshepsut, the mummy cloth of Tuthmosis III, the mask of Tutankhamun, the funerary figurines (often called ushabtis) of Amenhotep III, the heart scarab of king Sobekemsaf, and, most notably, the papyrus of Ani. The Egyptians often called these collections the Spells of Going Out in the Day, explicitly using the plural designation spells (r .w), as well as Book of Going Out in the Day, using the ancient term for a papyrus scroll (m .t). However, this is not a technical title for what we call the Book of the Dead. The Egyptians could use the designation to refer to any composition, and even individual spells could carry the title,vi which had the purpose of aiding the transition to life after death, for going out in the day refers to the soul’s journey out from the tomb at dawn. Therefore, you may find it surprising that, while the Egyptians often labeled what we call the Book of the Dead with the description Spells of Going Out in the Day, they had no specific title for the compilation.

The copies on papyrus most closely resemble the modern book in physical appearance with their individual papyrus sheets, much like our pages, bound together from end to end to form a long scroll of papyrus. Such scrolls could run over 30 meters in length.vii However, the so-called Book of the Dead written on these scrolls was not a distinct narrative composition telling a single story. Rather, each scroll contained an idiosyncratic compilation of individual spells. Each manuscript was a unique, handmade object; no two manuscripts are exactly the same. Some manuscripts contain a single spell, while others contain well over one hundred. The order of the spells is flexible, although there is some standardization in the sequencing, especially in the so-called Saite Recension, a version of the Book of the Dead produced in the Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Sixth Dynasties around 700 BC. For his translation, Budge used the Papyrus of Ani, a Nineteenth Dynasty papyrus from around 1200 BC. Because Ani’s papyrus came from the region near the city of Thebes in the south, and due to how much variation is found in the Book of the Dead manuscripts from the Nineteenth Dynasty (as opposed to the somewhat standardized Saite Recension), Budge applied the term Theban Recension to the papyrus of Ani and those like it (as you will see in his introduction to the text). Budge knew well that using the name Book of the Dead could be misleading. Despite the popularity of his books, many misunderstandings persist because the compilations of spells do not form a book in the typical sense, the Egyptians did not have an exclusive title for them, and they were not about death in the way many people believe.

Reading Budge’s translations of the spells demonstrates how variable their content is. Inside the Book of the Dead, the reader finds hymns to gods; a hymn to the sun god Re (spell 15) opens Ani’s papyrus (pp. 246–249 in Budge’s translation) and a hymn to the underworld god Osiris (spell 185) closes it (pp. 367–368). These two spells bookend the papyrus, perfectly complementing the ancient Egyptian theology of the solar-Osirian cycle. The solar-Osirian cycle refers to the circuit of the sun and its continuity with Osiris, the god of the dead. Each morning the sun is born into the eastern horizon, emerging as the god Khepri, whose name means he who comes into being. At the height of his powers at noon, the sun takes on its mature manifestation as Re, the king of the gods whose fierce rays both create and destroy. In the evening it becomes Atum, whose name means the complete one, as he descends into the underworld, which is envisioned in Egyptian mythology as the sky goddess Nut swallowing the sun. In Egyptian cosmology and the mythic episodes told about the god Osiris, Nut is the mother of Osiris. After Re enters Nut, he passes through numerous caverns and gates on his way to the womb of Nut and union with Osiris, who personifies for the Egyptians the power of resurrection. By uniting with Osiris, they merge into a solar-Osirian unity (a union of the gods Re and Osiris), and through Osiris’s force of rejuvenation, the sun god regains the ability to be born into the sky again the next morning. With the help of the spells in the Book of the Dead, each ancient Egyptian person wished to join this solar-Osirian cycle after their mortal death, to find a place in the following of the gods, and to live out immortality with the sun. Ani’s papyrus, a masterpiece of ancient Egyptian art and literature, physically mimics this cycle with the layout of the spells, thereby ensuring Ani’s fellowship with the gods.

In addition to hymns, Book of the Dead spells include a wide range of other genres and topics. A series of transformation spells, based on the concept of kheper coming into being and the same root word from which the name of the god Khepri derives, promised to turn the dead into various entities symbolic of particular powers, including spell 83 for transforming into a phoenix (p. 339), spell 80 for turning into a god (p. 341), and spell 82 for becoming the god Ptah (pp. 337–338). Many spells make important contributions to Egyptian theology, such as spell 89 for causing the soul to join with the corpse, which is what happens each night after the sun sets and is the corollary to spell 92, the spell of opening the tomb for the soul and the shadow, of going out in the day, of having power over the legs—yet another reference to the theme of the soul leaving the tomb during the daylight hours. The collective purpose of all these spells is the rejuvenation and divinization of the deceased, ensuring the transition into a powerful spirit which the Egyptians called an akh; akh-spirits became part of the entourage of gods, and they had the power to affect life on earth and intercede on behalf of both the living and the dead. Book of the Dead spell 1—which occurs in the papyrus of Ani after the introductory hymn to the sun (spell 15), a hymn to Osiris, and the heart scarab spell (spell 30B)—summarizes the collective purpose of the spells in a rubric (section written in red in the original papyrus) as: Beginning of the spells of going out in the day, of the praises and glorifications of going out and coming back in the necropolis—what is effective in the beautiful west, which are recited on the day of burial and of entering after going out.

To gain an intimate understanding of the Book of the Dead, it is necessary to read its texts and study its images. Outside of a relatively small field of professional scholars and a growing cadre of dedicated amateurs, few will have the time to learn how to read ancient Egyptian. For most people then, a translation is the only option. The translation of Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge (1857–1934), knighted in 1920,viii was not the first English translation of the Book of the Dead, but it was certainly the most prominent of its day. It continues to be one of the best-selling translations available. From an early age, Budge had been fascinated with the ancient world, particularly with Assyria and Egypt. As a boy, he learned Egyptian from Samuel Birch, the Keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, who also allowed the young Budge access to the library at the museum.ix He went on to study at Cambridge and, like his mentor Birch, eventually became Keeper at the British Museum himself from 1894–1924. It was in his capacity as Assistant Keeper that Budge aided the museum in acquiring the now famous papyrus of Ani in 1887. The acquisition remains a scandal to this day, although at the time Budge famously bragged about it, and his promotion to Keeper suggests that his contemporaries at the British Museum appreciated his efforts.

Budge purchased the papyrus while on a trip to Egypt, but by this time his reputation for unscrupulous dealings had long preceded him. Budge and the antiquities dealers were all placed on house arrest while waiting for officials from the antiquities service to inspect what they were doing.x While waiting, Budge treated their guards to a sumptuous rooftop meal while hired hands tunneled beneath the building and squirreled away a mass of antiquities, including the seventy-eight-foot papyrus, which Budge cut into thirty-seven individual sheets to make smuggling it out of the country easier, which he was able to do with collusion from sympathetic Britons in the army, police, and a shipping company.xi Although Budge attempted to defend his actions as necessary to save the objects from another fate—perhaps the obscurity of a private collection or worse, given his distrust of the antiquities service—it is clear that he knew exactly what he was doing in circumventing the authorities, dominated at the time by the French. This legacy was largely a result of colonialist policies and imperial conflicts in an Egypt being fought over by the French and British as their empires waxed and waned. Budge and other collectors took the opportunity to fill their coffers.xii In the process, and partially as a result, the British Museum today has the finest collection of Book of the Dead manuscripts outside of the Cairo Museum, including the justly acclaimed papyrus of Ani.

The British Museum moved quickly to publicize and popularize their new masterpiece, publishing in 1890 a facsimile edition with an introduction by Birch’s successor as Keeper, Peter le Page Renouf.xiii Renouf was working on his own translation of the Book of the Dead, but his work was cut short when he was forced into retirement. He was succeeded, against his resolute wishes, by Budge, whom Renouf detested, calling him a cowardly, mendacious, and dishonorable scoundrel, and accusing him of being a charlatan and plagiarist.xiv Despite Renouf’s objections, Budge was appointed to Keeper and immediately went on to produce his own translation of the Book of the Dead, published in 1895, based on the recently acquired papyrus of Ani. Budge’s translation has been described (accurately according to one noted historian) as virtually unreadable and not a good translation.xv James Henry Breasted (1865—1935), the first American to hold a PhD in Egyptology and founder of the Oriental Institute in Chicago, was quoted as saying, . . . Dr. Budge is so ignorant of the Egyptian language that he cannot translate from it correctly, and that Budge was . . . perhaps the most outstanding example of incompetence in the whole range of British official scholarship; although, in print, Breasted offered a positive review of the work, calling it a useful book and highly recommended to the layman.xvi

The merit of Budge’s work has often been lost in discussions of his unpopular personality and illicit activities. There is no question that Budge worked extremely fast, being perhaps the most prolific scholar in Egyptological history, but his speed came at the price of careful accuracy and scholarly rigor. His prodigious output has had its benefits; many ancient texts—Egyptian papyri, Coptic manuscripts, and cuneiform tablets—would likely have languished in obscurity for decades, and potentially could lay in obscurity still, without Budge’s indefatigable efforts to publish. Yet, it cannot be denied that Budge was not a cutting-edge scholar. In terms of understanding the Egyptian language, Budge lagged far behind the scholars associated with the Berlin school, founded by Adolf Erman (1854–1937), whose students like Kurt Sethe (1869–1934), Alan H. Gardiner (1879–1963), and James Henry Breasted went on to transform the following generations of Egyptology. Budge did not take much notice of their linguistic insights and he employed an antiquated transliteration scheme; as a result, his publications are often full of amateurish blunders made in haste for which contemporary scholars knew better.

Certainly, the content of the Book of the Dead can appear to the uninitiated reader as impenetrable, but the avoidable errors committed by Budge caused friction in the field, as can be seen by the quotes about Budge by his contemporaries. However, there has also been unwarranted confusion about Budge’s translation of the Book of the Dead. It is important to understand what you find when you look at his work in the following pages. Most prominently, there is a long section of hieroglyphic transcription with interlinear transliteration and English translation found on pages 1–242. In this section, the reader will find many passages that read almost as gibberish, for example: Not may be repulsed my hand and arm by the divine chiefs of god any, (page 25) or Now Yesterday Osiris is, now To-morrow Rā is, on day that of the destruction of his enemies of Neb-er-tcher in it (page 30). Passages such as these have led to the aforementioned comments about the translation being virtually unreadable. I have often heard graduate students derisively refer to this as Budge speak, a reference to the Yoda-like, verb-first word order found in the interlinear translation. Yet this is not Budge’s translation. These interlinear notes are a gloss to the hieroglyphic text. The actual translations, which are absolutely comparable to, and just as comprehensible as, those of his peers, can be found after page 243, where these same passages appear as: May my hand and my arm not be forced back by the holy ministers of any god, (page 274) and Yesterday is Osiris, and Tomorrow is Rā, on the day when he shall destroy the enemies of Neb-er-tcher (page 282).xvii Thus, much of the popular derision for Budge speak is based on mistaking Budge’s glosses for his translations. In fact, if Budge’s actual translation is placed side by side with that of Birch (1867) and Raymond Faulkner (1994), it becomes clear that, while unquestionably problematic in certain respects, his translation is within the standards of Egyptological expectation for its time.

The confusion resulting from the misunderstanding of Budge’s glossing is compounded by autodidacts and researchers on the fringe who are often looking to confirm their own biases about various topics (be it ancient aliens, lost civilizations, prehistoric cosmonauts, occult mysteries, or psychic revelations) through ancient Egyptian texts in order to lend their theories the authority of antiquity and the imprimatur of Egyptian wisdom. The practice is not new; it had already happened in ancient Egypt, when texts were pseudonymously attributed to earlier eras, and authors writing in Greek and Latin in classical antiquity often considered a visit to Egypt obligatory for any learned men, whether they ever physically stepped foot in Egypt or not. Nonetheless, with his interlinear gloss Budge helped expose the Book of the Dead to wild interpretations by unwittingly implying to many readers that Egyptian grammar was an impenetrable morass to which each interpreter could apply their own rules. Glossing is meant to aid the reader in understanding how the original editor interpreted the various hieroglyphic signs as well as relationships between words. Today, Egyptologists have largely adopted a glossing practice based on what is called the Leipzig Glossing Rules.xviii A typical edition of an Egyptian text includes transliteration and translation; transliteration is simply the practice of using roman characters to indicate the sounds of the Egyptian words.xix Glosses are generally only added in linguistic work to indicate for non-specialists the grammatical roles of words in the text. Here is a passage from the opening of the papyrus of Ani (spell 15), comparing Budge’s treatment with a more modern approach to editing ancient Egyptian texts:

Notice that Budge’s glosses are mostly rough English definitions with only the minimum explanation about the grammatical relationships between the words, whereas modern glosses aim to make explicit the linguistic constructions as interpreted by the editor. Budge’s antiquated English imitating the King James Bible, featuring the verbal suffix -st and the pronouns thee and thou from early modern English that meant to lend an air of religious grandeur to the work, further conditioned reactions to the text while his very dated transliteration scheme added a layer alienating it from contemporary Egyptology.xx It is easy to see how someone could be confused by this convoluted apparatus of glossing and translation. A further confusion for readers of this reprint will be Budge’s references to Plate followed by a roman numeral. These plates refer to the facsimile plates originally published in 1894, reproducing in a revised form the facsimile published by the British Museum in 1890 shortly after acquiring the papyrus of Ani.xxi Budge provided a hieroglyphic transcription of the cursive hieroglyphs from the texts on Ani’s papyrus, plate by plate, and along with the translation at the end of the volume, he offered descriptions of the scenes accompanying the texts. One unfortunate consequence of the many reprints of Budge’s translation is the lack of attention paid to the images on the papyrus, which for the ancient Egyptians were certainly as important as the texts—not to mention their striking beauty surely appreciated by today’s audience, for the scribes who produced Ani’s manuscript were skilled masters.

The caveats above should help the reader situate Budge’s translation in its late nineteenth century context as well as provide some guidelines for how to thoughtfully approach and use it. Despite its limitations, Budge’s translation is a real classic.xxii Hopefully, this introduction will help to clear up some of the confusion associated with Budge speak and to redeem, even with its shortcomings, Budge’s translation as part of the two-century continuum of Egyptology. For even though Budge wasn’t an innovative scholar in his day, and his personality and scruples disturbed many, his English translation of the Book of the Dead is within the norms of his contemporaries. In fact, as Birch was his early mentor, it is likely that he relied heavily on Birch’s pioneering efforts to translate the Book of the Dead into English. Birch may have been the first, but it was the enduring popularity of Budge’s translation, backed by the British Museum and embellished with the remarkable exquisiteness of Ani’s papyrus, that largely helped establish the prevailing legacy of the Book of the Dead.

FOR FURTHER READING

As the previous introduction has suggested, understanding the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead often includes grappling with a complicated scholarly apparatus. Throw in the century that has passed since Budge’s translation, compounded by any associated controversies, and you are left with many troublesome obstacles. In addition to Budge, I would recommend the English translations of T. George Allen,xxiii Raymond Faulkner,xxiv Stephen Quirke,xxv and Paul F. O’Rourke.xxvi Two excellent English language catalogs have been recently published to accompany major museum exhibitions: Book of the Dead: Becoming God in Ancient Egypt and Journey through the Afterlife: Book of the Dead.xxvii Each catalog includes interpretive articles written by well-established scholars in addition to individual entries for objects in the exhibition. In conjunction with their exhibit, the British Museum published a set of articles in a special issue of the online journal British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan (Issue 15: The Book of the Dead—Recent Research and New Perspectives). As a general introduction, the chapter on the Book of the Dead in Erik Hornung’s The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), along with its exceptional annotated bibliography, remains fundamental. For those who wish to delve even deeper, publications on the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead have multiplied over the last twenty years, partially inspired by the results of the Book of the Dead project out of Bonn and their incredibly helpful database of manuscripts (http://totenbuch.awk.nrw.de/). Several academic series resulted from this project, including Handschriften des Altägyptischen Totenbuches, Studien zu Altägyptischen Totentexten, Totenbuchtexte, and Totenbuchtexte Supplementa, the many volumes of which will keep anyone busy for an entire career. These can be supplemented with the Catalogue of the Books of the Dead in the British Museum, which at the time of this writing includes four volumes, and the monumental study of Malcolm Mosher Jr., The Book of the Dead, Saite through Ptolemaic Periods: A Study of Traditions Evident in Versions of Texts and Vignettes (Prescott: SPBDStudies, 2017–2018), of which six volumes have already appeared.

i The translation of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead by Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge has appeared in a bewildering array of editions and printings, the unravelling of which requires dedicated scholarship in its own right. Budge’s edition of the papyrus was first published in two volumes in 1895. New versions and reprints appeared in 1901, 1909, 1910, 1913, 1920, 1922, 1929, 1960, 1967, 1989, and 1994, as well as numerous other years. The translation was also borrowed and adapted for other work. For example, in 1901, Budge’s English translation appeared in Epiphanius Wilson, Egyptian Literature: Comprising Egyptian Tales, Hymns, Litanies, Invocations, the Book of the Dead, and Cuneiform Writings, Revised Edition (London: The Colonial Press, 1901), pp. 1–131. The editions were often reformatted so that in one edition the reader finds a hieroglyphic transcription separate from, but on the same page as, the English translation, such as the 1913 edition by G. P. Putnam’s Sons published in three volumes consisting of an introduction and commentary in volume one, a hieroglyphic transcription and English translation (not interlinear) with index in volume two, and a facsimile of the papyrus of Ani in volume three. In another edition, that of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. in 1898, the introduction and English translation appeared together in volume one, which included interleaved foldout facsimile plates of the papyrus, the hieroglyphic transcription was contained in volume two, and volume three consisted of a glossary of the Egyptian words. Such editions, therefore, differ from the 1895 printing of the British Museum, reproduced frequently in Dover editions and now here by Skyhorse Publishing, where a hieroglyphic transcription is accompanied by an interlinear English gloss.

ii Published after his death: Jean-François Champollion, Graimmaire égyptienne, ou Principes généraux de l’écriture sacrée égyptienne appliquée à la representation de la langue parlée (Paris: Typ. de Firmin Dido frères, 1836).

iii Karl Richard Lepsius, Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter nach dem hieroglyphischen Papyrus in Turin (Leipzig: G. Wigand, 1842). Budge had already discussed this history of translation in his volume The Mummy: Chapters on Egyptian Funerary Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893), p. 202, updated and revised in 1925: The Mummy: A Handbook of Egyptian Funerary Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), pp. 236–237.

iv Noted already by Budge in the 1925 edition of The Mummy, p. 236, where he notes the Arabic phrase as kitâb al-mayyitûn book of the dead (plural), as compared to the kutub al-umwāt books of the dead by Stephen Quirke, Going Out in Daylight — prt m hrw: The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Translation, Sources, Meaning (GHP Egyptology 20; London: Golden House Publications, 2013), p. 1. The differences in the Arabic derive from the morphology of Arabic plurals (kitâb is singular book and kutub is plural books) and regional dialects (al-mayyitûn and al-amwāt being synonyms for the dead (plural) vs. al-mayyit the dead (singular) while Quirke’s al-umwāt may represent an Egyptian dialectical variant). For discussion of the Arabic roots, see Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, Part 7: (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1968), p. 2742; and Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (Arabic-English), edited by J. Milton Cowan, Fourth Edition (Ithaca: Spoken Language Services, Inc., 1994), p. 1091.

v Christian Karl Josias Bunsen, Egypt’s Place in Universal History, Volume V (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1867), pp. 123–333.

vi For example, the rubric for spell 125 in one manuscript calls it the book of going out in the day, while the phrase spell of going out in the day was applied to diverse texts, including Book of the Dead spells 15, 64, 66, 68, 71, 72, among others, and had already appeared with the corpus of so-called Coffin Texts in spells 105, 152, 153, 335, 404, 783, 784, etc. The titles have been compiled in Siegfried Schott, Bücher und Bibliotheken im alten Ägypten (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990), pp. 101 and 167–170.

vii For example, the Greenfield Papyrus is over thirty-seven meters in length. It was published by Budge in The Greenfield Papyrus in the British Museum: The Funerary Papyrus of Princess Nesitanebtashru, Daughter of Painetchem II and Nesi-Khensu, and Preistess of Amen-Ra at Thebes, about B.C. 970 (London: British Museum, 1912).

viii Supplement to the London Gazette 1 January 1920, p. 2.

ix Morris L. Bierbrier, Who Was Who in Egyptology (London: Egypt Exploration Society, 2012), pp. 90–91.

x The story is retold by Budge with pride and without regret in his memoir By Nile and Tigris: A Narrative of Journeys in Egypt and Mesopotamia on Behalf of the British Museum between the Years 1886 and 1913 (London: John Murray, 1920). Numerous critical accounts have been published: Jason Thompson, Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology. 2: The Golden Age: 1881–1914 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2015), pp. 167–169; Donald Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 181–182; Brian Fagan, The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt (Boulder: Westview Press, 2004), pp. 199–203.

xi Donald Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums, and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 182.

xii In the last ten to twenty years, many studies have appeared that provide rich detail and illuminating critique of this history. See Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley: University of California Pres, 2002); Donald Malcolm Reid, Contesting Antiquity in Egypt: Archaeologies, Museums and the Struggle for Identities from World War I to Nasser (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2015); Elliott Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); William Carruthers (ed.), Histories of Egyptology: Interdisciplinary Measures (Routledge Studies in Egyptology 2; New York: Routledge, 2015); Christina Riggs, Unwrapping Ancient Egypt (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).

xiii The 1890 edition by the British Museum contained only a facsimile of the papyrus of Ani (inventory number BM EA 10470). At the time, P. le Page Renouf was Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities prior to Budge taking over in 1894. The facsimile publication itself appeared in a second edition in 1894.

xiv The quotes derive from the private letters of Renouf as quoted in a review by Patricia Usick in British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan 5 (2006), pp. 13–16, of the edition of the letters by Kevin J. Cathcart (ed.), The Letters of Peter le Page Renouf (1822–1897) (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2002–2004).

xv Jason Thompson, Wonderful Things: A History of Egyptology. 2: The Golden Age: 1881–1914 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2015), p. 167, who quoted James Wasserman’s virtually unreadable comment in the preface to The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1998), p. 9.

xvi The quote about Budge’s ignorance is reported in Archaeological Notes, Biblia 8 (1895–1896), p. 176, n. †, and the quote about his incompetence comes from a letter of Breasted quoted in Thompson, Wonderful Things, p. 168. Breasted’s review appeared in The Biblical World 19:3 (1902), pp. 228–229.

xvii Compare the translations by Ramond O. Faulkner in The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day (San Fancisco: Chronicle Books, 1998): My hand shall not be thrust aside in the tribunal of all gods, (pl. 6) and As for yesterday, that is Osiris. As for tomorrow, that is Re on that day in which the foes of the Lord of All were destroyed (pl. 7).

xviii The Leipzig Glossing Rules consist of recommendations for how to label linguistic elements in a way that is mutually understood by language scholars. For the rules, see https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php. For how these rules have been applied to ancient Egyptian, see Camilla Di Biase-Dyson, Frank Kammerzell, and Daniel A. Werning, Glossing Ancient Egyptian: Suggestions for Adapting the Leipzig Glossing Rules, Lingua Aegyptia: Journal of Egyptian Language Studies 17 (2009), 343–366.

xix The methodology of transliterating ancient Egyptian has gone through several phases over two hundred years of Egyptology. An overview of the early period from Champollion up to the time of Erman can be found in James Teackle Dennis, The Transliteration of Egyptian, Journal of the American Oriental Society 24 (1903), 275–281. Two articles from the time were heavily influential: Zur Umschriebung der Hieroglyphen, Zeitschrift für ägyptischen Sprache 27 (1889), 1–14; Adolf Erman, Die Umschreibung des Ägyptischen, Zeitschrift für ägyptischen Sprache 34 (1896), 61–62. A helpful comparative chart showing how different scholars have transliterated the so-called alphabet of Egyptian hieroglyphs can be found in Carsten Puest, Egyptian Phonology: An Introduction to the Phonology of a Dead Language (Monographien zur Ägyptischen Sprache 2; Göttingen: Peust & Gutschmidt Verlag, 1999), 48; and James P Allen, Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs (Third Edition; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 17.

xx Erman and the Berlin school had adopted a set of transliteration characters without vowels (since the hieroglyphic script did not indicate vowels) already incorporated by 1889 into the primary Egyptology journal Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache.

xxi There is even confusion in the title of Budge’s book itself across its many editions, since The Book of the Dead is listed at the top of the title page in italic print, while The Papyrus of Ani in the British Museum: The Egyptian Text with Interlinear Transliteration and Translation, a Running Translation, Introduction, Etc. is given below in non-italic print. Library and books catalogs often list these volumes under different titles or subtitles. Several updates and revisions to this work followed under yet other titles, including the three volume 1898 edition by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. with The Book of the Dead at the top of the title page followed by The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day: The Egyptian Text according to the Theban Recension in Hieroglyphic Edited from Numerous Papyri, with a Translation, Vocabulary, Etc. below.

xxii It became a classic in the literal sense when it appeared as part of the Penguin Classics imprint: The Egyptian Book of the Dead , translated by E. A. Wallis Budge, with an introduction by John Romer (Penguin Classics; London: Penguin, 2008).

xxiii T. George Allen, The Book of the Dead or Going Forth by Day: Ideas of the Ancient Egyptians Concerning the Hereafter as Expressed in Their Own Term (Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 37; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

xxiv Raymond O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (New York: The Limited Editions Club, 1972). Faulkner’s translation has, like Budge’s, been reprinted often, including in a revised reprint from the British Museum in 1985, a Chronicle Books edition in 1998 that included the full facsimile of the papyrus of Ani, and a Barnes & Noble edition in 2005.

xxv Stephen Quirke, Going Out in Daylight – prt m hrw. The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: Translation, Sources, Meanings (GHP Egyptology 20; London: Golden House Publications, 2013).

xxvi Paul F. O’Rourke, An Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Sobekmose (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2016).

xxvii Foy Scalf (ed.). Book of the Dead: Becoming God in Ancient Egypt (Oriental Institute Museum Publications 39; Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2017); John H. Taylor (ed.), Journey through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

PREFACE.

The Papyrus of Ani, which was acquired by the Trustees of the British Museum in the year 1888, is the largest, the most perfect, the best preserved, and the best illuminated of all the papyri which date from the second half of the XVIIIth dynasty (about B.C. 1500 to 1400). Its rare vignettes, and hymns, and chapters, and its descriptive and introductory rubrics render it of unique importance for the study of the Book of the Dead, and it takes a high place among the authoritative texts of the Theban version of that remarkable work. Although it contains less than one-half of the chapters which are commonly assigned to that version, we may conclude that Ani’s exalted official position as Chancellor of the ecclesiastical revenues and endowments of Abydos and Thebes would have ensured a selection of such chapters as would suffice for his spiritual welfare in the future life. We may therefore regard the Papyrus of Ani as typical of the funeral book in vogue among the Theban nobles of his time.

The first edition of the Facsimile of the Papyrus was issued in 1890, and was accompanied by a valuable Introduction by Mr. Le Page Renouf, then Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities. But, in order to satisfy a widely expressed demand for a translation of the text, the present volume has been prepared to be issued with the second edition of the Facsimile. It contains the hieroglyphic text of the Papyrus with interlinear transliteration and word for word translation, a full description of the vignettes, and a running translation; and in the Introduction an attempt has been made to illustrate from native Egyptian sources the religious views of the wonderful people who more than five thousand years ago proclaimed the resurrection of a spiritual body and the immortality of the soul.

The passages which supply omissions, and vignettes which contain important variations either in subject matter or arrangement, as well as supplementary texts which appear in the appendixes, have been, as far as possible, drawn from other contemporary papyri in the British Museum.

The second edition of the Facsimile has been executed by Mr. F. C. Price.

E. A. WALLIS BUDGE.

BRITISH MUSEUM.

January 25, 1895.

INTRODUCTION.

THE VERSIONS OF THE BOOK OF THE DEAD.

THE history of the great body of religious compositions which form the Book of the Dead of the ancient Egyptians may conveniently be divided into four¹ periods, which are represented by four versions:—

  I. The version which was edited by the priests of the college of Annu (the On of the Bible, and the Heliopolis of the Greeks), and which was based upon a series of texts now lost, but which there is evidence to prove had passed through a series of revisions or editions as early as the period of the Vth dynasty. This version was, so far as we know, always written in hieroglyphics, and may be called the Heliopolitan version. It is known from five