The Book of the Dead. By Sir E. A. Wallis
Budge. (British Museum. Is.)—The learned Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities has written an admirable account, for general reading, of "the great collection of funerary texts which the ancient Egyptian scribes composed for the benefit of the dead." There was no standard recension of these spells, hymns, prayers and magic formulae which the Egyptians inscribed on tombs or coffins or wrote upon long papyrus rolls which were buried with the dead. But the chief collection, entitled "The Coming Forth into the Day," was in existence about 3700 B.C., and was gradually enlarged as the centuries passed. One famous copy of it in the British Museum is the Papyrus of Ani, seventy- eight feet long, with many coloured vignettes, which the author bought near Luxor in 1887. The author sketches the main doctrines of the Egyptian religion, with its careful preparation for the Day of Judgment at which the individual soul, after evading the terrors of the under-world, had to answer for his deeds before Osiris. He then indicates the contents of a typical Theban edition of the funerary texts, quoting at length the famous introductory Hymn to Ra, and the Hymn to Osiris. The pamphlet is excellently illustrated and is sold at a very low price.
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