The Book of the Dead

O título · original

The Title.

"Book of the Dead" is the title now commonly given to the great

collection of funerary texts which the ancient Egyptian scribes

composed for the benefit of the dead. These consist of spells and

incantations, hymns and litanies, magical formulae and names, words

of power and prayers, and they are found cut or painted on walls of

pyramids and tombs, and painted on coffins and sarcophagi and rolls

of papyri. The title "Book of the Dead" is somewhat unsatisfactory

and misleading, for the texts neither form a connected work nor

belong to one period; they are miscellaneous in character, and tell

us nothing about the lives and works of the dead with whom they were

buried. Moreover, the Egyptians possessed many funerary works that

might rightly be called "Books of the Dead," but none of them bore a

name that could be translated by the title "Book of the Dead." This

title was given to the great collection of funerary texts in the first

quarter of the nineteenth century by the pioneer Egyptologists, who

possessed no exact knowledge of their contents. They were familiar

with the rolls of papyrus inscribed in the hieroglyphic and the

hieratic character, for copies of several had been published,

but the texts in them were short and fragmentary. The publication of

the Facsimile of the Papyrus of Peta-Amen-neb-nest-taui by

M. Cadet in 1805 made a long hieroglyphic text and numerous coloured

vignettes available for study, and the French Egyptologists described

it as a copy of the "Rituel Funéraire" of the ancient Egyptians. Among

these was Champollion le Jeune, but later, on his return from Egypt,

he and others called it "Le Livre des Morts," "The Book of the Dead,"

"Das Todtenbuch," etc. These titles are merely translations of the

name given by the Egyptian tomb-robbers to every roll of inscribed

papyrus which they found with mummies, namely, "Kitâb-al-Mayyit,"

"Book of the dead man," or "Kitâb al-Mayyitun," "Book of the dead"

(plur.). These men knew nothing of the contents of such a roll, and

all they meant to say was that it was "a dead man's book," and that

it was found in his coffin with him.