Book of the Dead
A corpus of ancient Egyptian funerary texts, known in Egyptian as the Book of Coming Forth by Day, consisting of a collection of roughly two hundred 'spells' or magical and liturgical formulas that formed and expanded over more than a millennium, from the beginning of the New Kingdom (c. 1550 BC) well into the Ptolemaic period, with no single, canonical or complete version ever existing: each copy, generally written on papyrus and placed within the deceased's tomb or wrapped among the mummy's bandages, selected and combined a variable number of spells according to the budget and preferences of whoever commissioned it. The work is a direct heir to two older funerary traditions restricted to the royal elite, the Pyramid Texts (Old Kingdom) and the Coffin Texts (First Intermediate Period), and its progressive spread to broader social strata reflects a 'democratisation' of the hope for an afterlife that had previously been almost exclusive to the pharaoh. Its central purpose was to provide the deceased with the magical knowledge and formulas needed to successfully overcome the many dangers of the journey through the underworld (Duat), to correctly identify with various protective deities, and, above all, to pass the final judgement before Osiris, in which the deceased's heart was weighed on a scale against the feather of the goddess Maat, personification of truth and cosmic order; if the heart proved lighter than the feather, the soul gained an eternal blessed existence, whereas if it was heavier — weighed down by the burden of evil deeds — it was devoured by the monstrous Ammit. Spell 125, which contains the famous 'negative confession' in which the deceased lists before forty-two divine judges all the moral offences he has not committed, is one of the most important ethical documents of the whole of ancient Egypt. First discovered and translated in the West in the nineteenth century, chiefly thanks to the work of the German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius, the Book of the Dead remains the single most important primary source for understanding the cosmology, eschatology and religious morality of ancient Egypt.