Now on display: an ancient spell book for the dead

In the mid-19th century, a British antiquarian named Sir Thomas Phillipps announced his intention to own one copy of every book in the world. A so-called “vello-maniac,” Mr. Phillipps, a quarrelsome baronet, bought indiscriminately manuscripts from booksellers with whom he was incessantly at odds. Soon there was barely room in his decaying Cotswolds country house for his second wife, Elizabeth, who eventually moved to a boarding house in Torquay, an English working-class seaside resort. By the time Mr. Phillipps died in 1872, he had amassed an unparalleled collection of 60,000 documents and 50,000 printed books.

His descendants auctioned off his private library bit by bit, and by the late 1970s his collection of 19 ancient fragments of funerary scrolls – each part of what is today collectively known as the Egyptian Book of the Dead – was acquired by the New York bookseller. Hans P. Kraus. Together with his wife Hanni, Mr. Kraus donated the lot to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1983. For the past four decades, the writings, which span a period from about 1450 BC to 100 BC, have been locked away in a vault, fragile and easily damaged by light. On November 1, an exhibition at the Getty will present seven of the most representative pieces to the public for the first time. The show runs until January 29.

Rita Lucarelli, an Egyptologist at the University of California, Berkeley, said: ‘I am pleased that the Getty has finally decided to make public and exhibit what has until now been an almost forgotten part of its glorious collection of antiquities, but which in fact contains important objects. specimens of one of the most famous ancient Egyptian corpus in the world.”

The Book of the Dead, a standard item at funerals of the Egyptian elite, was not a book in the modern sense of the word, but a compendium of some 200 ritual spells and prayers, with instructions on how the spirit of the deceased would use them in the afterlife. have to recite. Sara Cole, the curator of the Getty exhibition, called the incantations a kind of supernatural “travel insurance,” designed to empower and protect the deceased on the long, winding journey through the afterlife. Unlike current insurance policies, no two copies were the same.

Despite the book’s title, it was life and not the afterlife that concerned the ancient Egyptians, who lived an average of 35 years. “Your happiness outweighs the future life,” reads an inscription from the New Kingdom period, which lasted from 1550 BC. to 1069 BC.

“The texts are a means to allay your mortal fear and control your destiny,” says Foy Scalf, an Egyptologist at the University of Chicago and editor of the exhibition catalogue.

Indeed, the original name of the text translates to the “Book of the Day It Comes forth.” In 1842, the German scholar Karl Richard Lepsius published a translation of a manuscript and coined the name Book of the Dead (das Todtenbuch), which reflected long-standing fantasies about the nature and character of Egyptian civilization. The numbering system he used to identify the different spells is still used today and features prominently on the Getty’s exhibition panels.

Compiled and refined over millennia since about 1550 BC, the Book of the Dead provided a kind of visual map with which the newly disembodied soul could navigate the duat, a maze-like underworld of caves, hills, and burning lakes. Each spell was intended for a specific situation that the dead might encounter along the way. For example, Spell 33 was used to ward off snakes, which had a disturbing taste for chewing on “the bones of a putrid cat.”

Without the right spells, you could be beheaded (spell 43), placed on a slaughter block (spell 50) or, perhaps most humiliating of all, turned upside down (spell 51), which would reverse your digestive functions and cause you would consume your own waste (spells 52 and 53).

In a hellscape riddled with booby traps and populated by some of the most terrifying fantasies of antiquity, magic mattered. Among the creepier illustrations on display at the Getty are images of gods (the jackal-headed Anubis; the falcon-headed Horus) and monsters (Ammit the Devourer, a crocodile-headed hybrid of a lion and a hippopotamus).

“The reason the creatures are terrifying is not to frighten souls who try to gain access to these places, but to keep out those who don’t belong there,” said Dr. Scalf. “Entering among the gods is a very limited matter.”

The intended destination was the realm of the gods and the safe haven of eternal paradise, a field of gently swaying reeds that resembled an idealized version of the Egypt the deceased had left behind. The lush landscape had field hands who helped each arrival sow, plow and harvest the grain that provided sustenance for the gods.

“Not only do the dead worship and feed the gods, but they also worship and feed their dead ancestors and even themselves,” said Dr. Scalf. “This is not servitude, this is pious work that shows your piety towards the gods.”

After attaining divinity, the deceased joined the sun god Re as he traveled through the sky in a solar boat. At sunset they crossed the West and merged with Osiris, the god of the underworld, and took on regenerative powers. At dawn, Re would battle the giant serpent Apep, lord of chaos, and emerge victorious from the East to complete an endless cycle of renewal and rebirth.

Scrolling at the Getty

Ownership of the Book of the Dead was largely limited to the nobility, priests, courtiers, and other patrons who could afford this extravagance. High-status individuals commissioned a writing workshop to produce a customized selection of sayings that mentioned them by name.

Two of the four papyrus scrolls in the Getty show were by women named Aset and Ankhesenaset, both of whom were priestesses and ritual “singers of Amun” at the god’s temple in Thebes’ Karnak complex. The scrolls are torn scraps, removed from graves and adapted for the art market during an unregulated era of European colonialism.

The oldest papyrus scroll in the Getty collection belonged to a woman named Webennesre and contains Spell 149, in which the deceased encounters 14 mounds in the underworld, each with its own inhabitants. “Spells were engraved in almost every available place at funerals,” said Dr. Scalf. Some were painted on the inside and outside of sarcophagi, others were printed on shrouds, statuettes, amulets and ‘magic stones’ embedded in the walls of tombs.

Another highlight of the exhibition are three thin linen strips inked with spells and then wrapped around mummified bodies as part of the ritual embalming process. “The bandage brought the sacred texts into direct physical contact with the deceased, enveloping and protecting them,” said Dr. Cole, the show’s curator. “That made people’s relationship with the Book of the Dead even more personal.”

After a section of longer textile was applied to the carcasses of two men named Petosiris, the wrappings were torn off and sold in pieces in the 19th century. The bodies themselves may have been pulverized and sold as paint pigment (mummy brown) or medicine (mummia, a powder found on pharmacy shelves throughout Europe).

Grateful death

The show’s coup de théâtre is a papyrus rendering of the Hall of Judgment, created for Pasherashakhet, a ‘doorkeeper’ who served the moon god Khonsu at Karnak. The vignette detail depicts an episode from Spell 125, in which the deceased appears before Osiris and a tribunal of gods, while his heart – presumably the locus of the intellect – is weighed by Anubis, keeper of the kingdom of the dead.

At one end of the scale is the heart; on the other, the feather of the goddess Maat, the embodiment of truth and justice. If Pasherashakhet’s heart is equal to the weight of the feather, he is admitted to the next world. If the heart is too heavy, meaning that its sins outweigh its good deeds, the crouching Ammit the Devourer with its mouth open will consume it and consign it to a second and lasting death.

In the accompanying hieroglyphs, Thoth, the ibis-headed god of writing, announces the result: “His heart is safe on the scale without fault.”

Pasherashakhet passed the test. It’s time to join Re and climb aboard the solar boat.

There is also a saying for that.