Book of The Dead - Discovery, Translation, Interpretation and Preservation

Discovery, Translation, Interpretation and Preservation

The existence of the Book of the Dead was known as early as the Middle Ages, well before its contents could be understood. Since it was found in tombs, it was evidently a document of a religious nature, and this led to the widespread misapprehension that the Book of the Dead was the equivalent of a Bible or Qu'ran.

The first modern facsimile of a Book of the Dead was produced in 1805 and included in the Description de l'Égypte produced by the staff of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt. In 1822, Jean Francois Champollion began to translate hieroglyphic text; he examined some of the Book of the Dead papyri and identified them as a funerary ritual.

In 1842 Karl Richard Lepsius published a translation of a manuscript dated to the Ptolemaic era and coined the name "Book of The Dead". He also introduced the spell numbering system which is still in use, identifying 165 different spells. Lepsius promoted the idea of a comparative edition of the Book of the Dead, drawing on all relevant manuscripts. This project was undertaken by Edouard Naville, starting in 1875 and completed in 1886, producing a three-volume work including a selection of vignettes for every one of the 186 spells he worked with, the variations of the text for every spell, and commentary. In 1876, Samuel Birch of the British Museum published a photographic copy of the papyrus of Nebseny.

The work of E. A. Wallis Budge, Birch's successor at the British Museum, is still in wide circulation - including both his hieroglyphic editions and his English translations, though the latter are now considered inaccurate and out-of-date. More recent translations in English have been published by T. G. Allen (1974) and Raymond O. Faulkner (1972). As more work has been done on the Book of the Dead, more spells have been identified, and the total now stands at 192.

Research work on the Book of the Dead has always posed technical difficulties thanks to the need to copy very long hieroglyphic texts. Initially, these were copied out by hand, with the assistance either of tracing paper or a camera lucida. In the mid-19th century, hieroglyphic fonts became available and made lithographic reproduction of manuscripts more feasible. In the present day, hieroglyphics can be rendered in desktop publishing software and this, combined with digital print technology, means that the costs of publishing a Book of the Dead may be considerably reduced. However, a very large amount of the source material in museums around the world remains unpublished.