The Book of the Dead: Ancient Egypt's Guide to the Afterlife

The ancient Egyptians called it "the document of going forth by day"—a reference to the solar cycle in which the sun dies each evening, travels through the underworld, and is reborn every morning. That same journey was what every elite Egyptian hoped to make after death, and the Book of the Dead was their guide. But as Dr. Yekaterina Barbash, curator of Egyptian art at the Brooklyn Museum, explains, it was never a single fixed text. Over roughly 1,500 years—from about 1500 BC down to the first century BC—the Book of the Dead evolved continuously, shaped by fashion, workshop preferences, and the choices of the person ordering it.

What the Book of the Dead Actually Was

The title "Book of the Dead" was coined in the 19th century by the German Egyptologist Richard Lepsius, who published one of the longest known copies. The Egyptians themselves sometimes referred to it as "the document of going forth by day," a phrase that appears on the outside of some scrolls. But the collection was not a book in the modern sense. It was a corpus of roughly 200 distinct texts or "spells" intended to help a person's spirit transition into the afterlife and continue existing there successfully.