The Book of the Dead is an ancient Egyptian text with customized spells to aid the deceased in the afterlife. It provides insight into Egyptian religious beliefs and has different versions for specific funerals. The earliest versions date back to the 16th century BC and incorporate earlier funerary texts.
The Book of the Dead is an ancient Egyptian text that provides instructions on the afterlife. There is no single definitive version, but rather a set of texts that may be referred to by this name, often customized for a particular deceased. “The Book of the Dead” is not a translation of the Egyptian title of the text, but an invention of the German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius, who published translated parts of the book in 1842. The Egyptian name of the texts is The Book of Coming Forth By Day .
The texts contained spells intended to help the deceased in the afterlife. Some were meant to please the gods, while others were meant to prevent certain misfortunes befalling the dead person as he entered the afterlife. The Book of the Dead also provided an insight into what would happen after death according to Egyptian religious belief. One of the best-known images associated with the book is one in which the god of the dead, Anubis, places the heart of the deceased on scales to be weighed against a feather of truth.
Many parts of the Book of the Dead are common to almost all versions, but most texts in this genre are customized for a specific funeral. The appropriate spells to include differed depending on the wealth and social status of the deceased, for example. There are four main categories used to classify texts, although each existing version is unique. These categories are the Heliopolitan version, the Theban version, a third version without a fixed chapter order that is closely related to the Theban texts, and the Saite version.
The earliest known versions of the Book of the Dead date from the beginning of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt, in the 16th century BC Portions of earlier funerary texts, the Coffin Texts and the Pyramid Texts, were incorporated into these early versions. The book has become more standardized over the centuries, and the latest versions, dating from after the 26th Dynasty of the 7th and 6th centuries BC, show a stricter and more consistent order.
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