Catalogue of the Books of the Dead in the British Museum III

The Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan in the British Museum preserves one of the most extensive collections outside Egypt of funerary papyri, among which the greatest number bear texts from the repertory known to the ancient Egyptians as the Formulae for Going Forth by Day, and to modern scholarship as the Book of the Dead. These texts to secure eternal life for individual persons are first found written on papyri of the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty, c.1450 BC, and the tradition survived until the first century BC, the beginning of the Roman period in Egypt. Several of the finest manuscripts were published in facsimile in the last century, but these editions are rarely available; with the present volume the Museum is continuing the publication of this important category of manuscript, rich in information on religious texts and iconography as well as in the history of manuscript production. The third volume in the series publishes the papyrus of Nebseni, an Eighteenth Dynasty copyist from the Temple of Ptah at Memphis. The manuscript is presented here in its original form with full photographic reproductions. These are accompanied by an introduction by Guenther Lapp on the identity of the owner and the reasons for the selection and order of the particular texts included.