Egypt's "Book of the Dead" is a name from 1842

A note before going on. This article is about a funerary text on the judgement of the soul after death, not about how to live through grief, and it does not replace anyone who accompanies. If you are going through someone's death, or thoughts of harming yourself, talk to someone you trust or to a professional; findahelpline.com takes you to a helpline in your country.

The previous article read a text read aloud to someone who has just died, in fourteenth-century Tibet. This one goes back more than two thousand years and changes the question: not what is said to the dead person, but what the dead person has to say to be let through. It is the text known in the West as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which already turned up in passing in the previous article: it is the title Evans-Wentz modelled his own on in 1927. I read, in English, E. A. Wallis Budge's 1895 translation of the papyrus that belonged to the scribe Ani, around 1250 BCE. I did not read the hieroglyphs, and what I did not read, I say at the end.

A name from 1842

In his introduction, Budge quotes the name the Egyptians themselves gave it: peret em heru, which he translates several ways — "manifested in the light", "coming forth from the day", "coming forth by day" — and adds that in French it was rendered "la manifestation au jour" and in German "Erscheinen am Tage". He also says that name carried, for the Egyptians, a sense no modern language has fully rendered yet, and that there is another, less used title that calls the whole work "the chapter of making strong (or perfect) the Khu".³ Nowhere in what I read does the word "dead" appear in the Egyptian title.

"Book of the Dead" was given by Karl Richard Lepsius, a German Egyptologist, in 1842, when he published the first printed edition of one of these papyri — the one now in Turin — under the title Das Todtenbuch der Ägypter: "the book of the dead of the Egyptians". It was also Lepsius who first numbered the chapters, and that numbering is still the one everyone uses, Budge included half a century later, and the one I use in this article when I write "chapter 125".¹ It is exactly the pattern of the previous article: the title by which we know a text about death is almost never the one its author gave it. Here the pattern is older — Lepsius named this eighty-five years before Evans-Wentz did the same to the Tibetan text, and, according to Wikipedia, modelled directly on this very name.¹

Entering the Hall of the Two Truths

Before Ani can say a single word about what he did in life, he has to get past a door. And the door asks his name before he can give his: "Dost thou know the name of this door to declare it unto me?" Ani answers: "'Driven away of Shu' is the name of this door." The door then asks about its two leaves, and he names them too. After that speak the threshold, the bolt, the lock, the doorposts, the floor — every part of the building demands its own secret name before letting him continue, and even his own feet must be named before he may tread: "'[Placed] before Amsu' is the name of my right foot, 'Grief of Nephthys' is the name of my left foot." Only then does the warder of the hall speak to him, asking who the god is that lives in his hour, and only when he answers correctly is he let through to Thoth.³

It is not what usually comes to mind when picturing "the Egyptian judgement of the dead". There is not yet a single question about good and evil: there is an enormous password, spread across the bolts of a building, and whoever has not memorised it does not even reach the hall. The condition for being judged on what one did is, first, having memorised, while alive, the entire architecture of the afterlife.

The forty-two I did not do

Once inside, Ani addresses forty-two beings one by one, each with a strange name and a place they "come forth from", and to each he denies a single wrongdoing. It is not a confession: it is exactly the opposite, a list of what he never did. A few, as Budge gives them:

"Hail, thou whose strides are long, who comest forth from Annu, I have not done iniquity." "Hail, Devourer of the Shade, who comest forth from Qernet, I have done no murder; I have done no harm." "Hail, Devourer of Blood, who comest forth from the block of slaughter, I have not acted guilefully." "Hail, thou whose eyes are of fire, who comest forth from Saut, I have not plundered the god." "Hail, thou who bringest thy offering, I have not acted with insolence." "Hail, thou bearer of the sistrum, who comest forth from Nu, I have not spoken scornfully." "Hail, thou who makest mankind to flourish, who comest forth from Sais, I have never cursed God."³

Each of the forty-two appears only once, with a name that almost never matches the fault denied to it: the "Devourer of the inward parts" is told "I have not laid waste the ploughed land"; the "Crusher of bones" is told "I have not snatched away food". Budge also includes, as an appendix, this same list from the Nebseni papyrus, in a different order and different words — proof that even within Egypt there was no single fixed way to say it.³ And there is something repeated on every page I found about this text, but that I did not find said by Budge or by the papyrus itself: that the number forty-two matches the nomes, the provinces of Egypt. It may well be true — it is the explanation given almost everywhere — but I did not read it in the source I read, so I leave it written as what it is: something I did not check.

The heart, which can betray me

What actually stopped me was not the list of denials, but what Ani says to his own heart before the scale. He does not speak to a god or a judge: he speaks to an organ, and he speaks to it as to a mother.

"My heart, my mother; my heart, my mother; my heart whereby I came into being! May naught rise up to oppose me at [my] judgment; may there be no opposition to me from the Tchatcha; may there be no parting of thee from me in the presence of him who keepeth the scales! Thou art my ka within my body, which knitteth and strengtheneth my limbs. May no lie be spoken against me in the presence of the god! Good is it for thee to hear."³

For the Egyptians the heart was not a symbol of feeling: it was the record of everything done, and at the judgement it could — it was feared it might — testify against its own owner. So this is not a prayer to some outside god for mercy: it is a private negotiation, spoken before entering the hall, with the only evidence that truly matters and that everyone carries from birth. Afterward it is Thoth who reads the verdict aloud: "Hear ye this judgment. The heart of Osiris hath in very truth been weighed, and his soul hath stood as a witness for him; it hath been found true by trial in the Great Balance. There hath not been found any wickedness in him." And the other gods answer: "That which cometh forth from thy mouth hath been ordained."³

It is the same gesture, in another language two thousand years earlier, that the Bardo Thödol asks of the dead about their own visions: to recognise that what can accuse you, or save you, does not come from outside.

The Devourer, and the failure I did not see

Beside the scale waits Am-mit — "the Devourer", Budge writes, "part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus". A British Museum papyrus he himself quotes describes her: "the fore-part of a crocodile; her hind quarters are those of a hippopotamus; her middle part is that of a lion." Budge writes that "it is clear that such hearts as failed to balance the feather of Maat were devoured by her".³

I say this carefully, because it is what I did not find, not what I found: in the pages of Ani's papyrus that I read, the verdict is always favourable. The heart is weighed, Thoth declares it true, the gods confirm it — and there it ends, every time. I did not see, in what I read, a single scene where Am-mit actually eats a heart. It may be in another papyrus, or it may be — I do not know, and I am not claiming it — that no one ever commissioned a copy of this book to narrate their own failure, since the whole book was paid for, and carried to the tomb, by the very person it was about.

How this papyrus reached London

According to Wikipedia, Ani was a real scribe of Thebes, of the Nineteenth Dynasty, around 1250 BCE, and his papyrus was found in his tomb in 1888, in the hands of unlicensed Egyptian antiquities dealers. When Egyptian police sealed those dealers' houses, Budge — who worked for the British Museum — distracted the guards with a meal while locals tunnelled under the house's walls to retrieve the objects, including this papyrus, which was then smuggled to the museum's principal librarian. Afterward, the British Treasury paid Budge a "gratuity" of £150 on the museum's behalf.² I tell it because the very book I am translating is also, by Wikipedia's own account, a smuggling story: the same museum that today holds the most complete surviving copy of this text holds it there by a method nobody would defend in public today, and it is part of a debate — over what should be returned, and to where — that is still open, and that this article does not settle.

What we do with this

Ani had to memorise the names of an entire door, deny forty-two faults before forty-two strangers, and beg his own heart not to betray him — all of it alone, so that a verdict would be written down and travel with him. Anima Mundis judges nothing anyone writes, and it does not keep a copy afterward either: there is no heart to weigh, no scale, no forty-two named judges. Just 3, 5 or 7 strangers who coincide for ten minutes, and no one — not even this site — remembers afterward what was said. All the Observatory counts is how many voices arrived, and at what UTC hour.

What I could not read

I read, in English, Budge's 1895 translation: his introduction on the Egyptian title, the whole of chapter 125 (the negative confession and its Nebseni-papyrus appendix), the chapters on the heart (XXVII, XXIX, XXX and XXXb) and his notes on Am-mit. I did not read the hieroglyphs or the original papyrus, so I cannot know how far Budge's translation — more than a century old — departs from the Egyptian. I did not read later translations (Faulkner, 1972; Allen, 1974), nor compare versions of other papyri beyond the Nebseni fragment Budge himself quotes. I did not verify the link between the forty-two judges and Egypt's nomes: I leave it stated as something that circulates, not something I checked. And I did not search other papyri, beyond Ani's, for a scene where the heart is actually devoured; I can only say that in what I read, there was none. That the 1895 book is in the public domain is due to its US publication date.