What is the Egyptian Book of the Dead?

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is a collection of spells, written on papyrus and placed in burials, to guide the dead through the world below and through the judgment. Its Egyptian title, Pert em Hru, means “Coming Forth by Day”, and it is often called the Book of Coming Forth by Day. It was used from about 1550 BCE for more than a thousand years. Each copy holds a selection from about two hundred known spells, often with painted scenes.

What the spells were for: Egyptians hoped to live on after death, but the way was full of danger. The spells gave the dead what they needed: words to open gates, the names of guardians, protection from snakes and crocodiles, and the power to take other forms, such as a falcon or a lotus. Many grew out of the older Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts.
The weighing of the heart: In the best-known scene, Anubis weighs the dead person’s heart against a feather, the sign of Ma’at, truth and right order, while Thoth writes down the result. Ammit, part crocodile, part lion and part hippopotamus, waits to swallow a heart that fails. In spell 125, in the Hall of the Two Truths, the dead person tells forty-two judges of wrongs never done, such as stealing, killing and lying: Egyptologists call it the negative confession. Those who pass are led to Osiris, king of the dead.
How Gerald Massey read it in 1907: Massey calls the book “the Ritual” and gives it the whole of Book IV. He argues that its picture of the afterlife was cast in the mould of older myths of sun, moon and stars: as the sun sinks each night and rises again, so the soul dies and rises. He proposes a fuller title, “The Ritual of the Resurrection”, and stresses that the dead were judged by their deeds. He also argues that the Ritual lives on, in disguise, in the gospels.
What scholars say now: Egyptologists agree that conduct mattered at the judgment, as Massey says, though the spells were also meant to help: spell 30B, often carved on heart scarabs, asks the heart not to speak against its owner. They read the book as a varied set of spells chosen for each burial, not one fixed scripture. His claim that the gospels grew out of it is not accepted by Egyptologists or biblical scholars, though the two share themes of judgment and of new life after death.
Where you can see it today: The Papyrus of Ani, made for a scribe named Ani, and the Papyrus of Hunefer, with a famous picture of the weighing of the heart, are in the British Museum in London. The modern name comes from the German scholar Karl Richard Lepsius, who in 1842 published a long copy kept in Turin.
In Massey’s words: “The so-called Book of the Dead, then, here quoted as the Ritual for the sake of brevity, is the Egyptian book of life: life now, life hereafter, everlasting life.” (Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907), Book IV, p. 194)
In the app: Library › Book IV. In the app, Book IV gives Massey’s whole account of the Ritual, with a plain-words note under every part, and the Trainer’s lessons include The heart in the scales.

Last updated October 25, 2026.

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