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The way they describe the spells makes it sound like the afterlife is a dungeon crawl. Like the book of the dead is the wiki on how to build a Nethack ascension kit.
I suppose that's exactly it.
In the afterlife there are a number of expected hazards that lay between the recently discorporated and the ideal outcome. This manual will help you get past these hazards.
The Tibetan version takes a similar approach. There are probably a dozen more in this vein.
Makes you wonder about our "a couple years of insanity, torture and drugs" approach to dying.
I mean surely a dozen cultures over thousands of years coming to these parallel conclusions can't be all wrong.
>>I mean surely a dozen cultures over thousands of years coming to these parallel conclusions can't be all wrong.
Sure they can.
Great photos. I was struck by the calligraphy in the second image ("A detail from the Papyrus of Ankhesenaset"), which doesn't appear to be the same hieroglyphics shown in the other images.
It wasn't clear what languages these texts corresponded to over a very long period (1450 B.C. to 100 B.C.) and possibly a large geographical area comprising different languages. Excerpts of the translations would have added to this article.
The Book of the Dead is a somewhat standardized corpus of Middle Egyptian texts used over a long period of time, including the time when later phases of the Egyptian language were spoken instead of Middle Egyptian. You're seeing two different scripts, Hieratic (cursive) vs. hieroglyphs rather than two different languages. Both scripts are equally old. (There are other, later funerary texts written in later phases of the Egyptian language that can be said to descend from the Book of the Dead, but the papyri in question are Book of the Dead texts.)
If you're interested in reading these texts in translation, Falkner's translation is available in many different editions and would be a good place to start. Just as a warning, these texts require a lot of context to make much sense. There's also a lot of wild, uninformed interpretations out there.
My favourite interpretation is the Carnahan-O'Connell translation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mummy_(1999_film)
Isn't this just handwriting? I thought the Egyptians had two different writing systems.
[Edit]
The Papyrus of Ankhesenaset is indeed written in hieratic script.
The Egyptians also had demotic script, which was used more for secular writing and, much later, Coptic which is based on the Greek alphabet with some demotic thrown in.
It's not so much that demotic was used more for secular writing, but rather Hieratic (and hieroglyphs!) continued to be used in a religious context out of tradition after the development of Demotic which tended to replace Hieratic for everything else.
"Klaatu, barada, nikto"
Trivia, Evil Dead took that from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_Still
Anyone looking for a fairly complete collection of Ancient Egyptian writing in translation—not every single thing, mind you, but practically everything someone who's not doing a deep-dive on some specific aspect and time of and in Ancient Egyptian history could want, and then some—might be interested in Miriam Lichtheim's work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Lichtheim
I've got, and have read, the three-volume edition of Ancient Egyptian Literature.
Almost everything before the Greeks, as far as Western and near-East literature, reads alien as hell and is pretty hard to get a grasp on, largely (I think) because so much of it exists absent context, with the remarkable and towering exception of Gilgamesh, which is truly amazing. I've tried Sumerian and Akkadian collections in translation, and bounced the fuck off after putting in substantial effort. Got zero out of it. It's all fragments of poems to gods that you have to go read a bunch of modern writing to figure out (where'd they get their info? It's not in the surviving literature, I have no idea). You need several times as much commentary as original text, to make sense of it.
Ancient Egyptian literature is the only of that set (Gilgamesh aside—everyone should read Gilgamesh) that I'd tentatively recommend to a general reader as the easiest to get into, though the entirety of Lichtheim's collection might be a bit much. Of interest are examples of the various genres of Ancient Egyptian literature—"mirrors for princes" instructional texts; scribal copy-practice instructional texts (why not impart some wisdom and/or entertainment with copy practice?); formulaic but evolving funerary inscriptions (they routinely threaten their gods, it's wild); monumental "historical" inscriptions (propaganda, LOL); and the handful of fictional tales, which tend to be entertaining enough but are in multiple cases frustratingly incomplete (talk about cliffhangers! You'll never get the ending, probably). It's a rough read, not exactly relaxing cotton-candy airport-novel reading, but far more tractable than the surviving fragments of the Fertile Crescent ancients (except Gilgamesh! Read that!)
Actually, there's another category of literature from that region, the written form of which isn't so old as those, but that has oral lineage with roots back into that era: the biblical "Old Testament", or Jewish scripture. It comes off rather well by comparison to the rest, though benefits from very-late composition and editing (contemporary with the Greeks, who read just fine to moderns) compared to the others. That's a fun one, too.