Author Description

Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge made numerous trips to Egypt on behalf of the British Museum to buy antiquities. When he retired, the collection contained about 57,000 objects. The publications of this famous egyptologist and orientalist helped to bring the Egyptian findings to larger audiences. In this fully illustrated book, he describes The Book of the Dead, a series of religious texts that was placed in the tomb to protect the soul of the deceased.Excerpt: 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.