The British Museum's collection of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead is the focus of its current winter show, writes David Tresilian As anyone who has visited its ancient Egyptian galleries will know, London's British Museum has one of the world's most important collections of ancient Egyptian artifacts, including the famous Rosetta Stone, discovered by Napoleon Bonaparte's invading forces in Egypt in 1799 and subsequently used to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. However, not all the museum's ancient Egyptian collection is equally robust, and much of it, especially pieces made of wood, textile, or papyrus, is usually kept under wraps. Visitors to the museum this winter therefore have the otherwise rare opportunity to see some of this fragile material taken out of storage and put on show in the museum's current major exhibition, Journey through the Afterlife, the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, which explores ancient Egyptian attitudes to death and the afterlife. The exhibition includes hundreds of fragments of papyrus, grave goods, sarcophagi and other items, most of them drawn from the British Museum's collections, and focuses on the instructions left in ancient Egyptian tombs to help the dead navigate through the afterlife, the so-called Book of the Dead. These instructions, mostly in the form of spells that would help the dead to meet the formidable challenges they could encounter in the world beyond, have been found in tombs dating from the Old Kingdom, when they were mostly painted on tomb walls, to the Ptolemaic period, when the spells were written on papyrus rolls or textile sheets and left within easy reach of the mummified bodies of the dead. The ancient Egyptians seem to have thought of the afterlife as a succession of trials, a period of challenge at the end of which lay the promise of eternal existence in the benevolent company of the gods. In order to meet these trials and navigate their way through the challenges of the afterlife, the dead needed all the help they could get, and this seems to have been the essential function of the instructions contained in the Book of the Dead. Including spells to ward off vicious animals such as beetles, snakes and crocodiles, to change shape at will, and to move through the guarded enclosures that made up ancient Egyptian topographies of the afterlife, the text of the Book of the Dead went through multiple revisions over a period of several thousand years, its contents being put in standard form sometime in the second millennium BCE during the New Kingdom, or around 1550-1069 BCE. In addition to explaining the meaning of the spells in the Book of the Dead and the circumstances under which they might have been thought to be performed, the exhibition examines the ways in which copies of the text were made, their function in the context of other grave items, such as charms, amulets and guardian statues of the gods, and the social hierarchies that determined an individual's options in the afterlife as much as they did in this one. Some copies of the Book of the Dead, like some tombs, are exquisitely made, with well-written hieroglyphic script and carefully executed illustrations. Other copies are more slapdash, showing evidence of recycling and hastily executed or incomplete spell collections. Something was clearly better than nothing where the afterlife was concerned. But in the same way that the ancient Egyptian pharoahs were given solid gold face masks to indicate their appearance in the afterlife, with lesser individuals having to make do with wood and gold paint, those in the upper reaches of the social hierarchy seem to have commissioned full and elaborate versions of the Book of the Dead, while those lower down had to make do with fragments painted onto to linen bands or even recycled cast-offs from grander tombs. Yet, as the exhibition reveals, there was a common structure of belief underpinning the Book of the Dead and affecting the afterlives of rich and poor alike. The ancient Egyptians devoted formidable resources to preparing for the afterlife, as the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Thebes or the Old Kingdom pyramids at Giza clearly show, and it is just as clear that these resources were not equitably distributed, with the rich enjoying elaborate tombs and the poor wrapped in linen shrouds and buried in the desert. However, despite such inequalities the ancient Egyptians did seem to have had a conception of death as the great leveler, and part of this involved the idea of judgement. While it is not entirely clear on what basis the dead were thought to be judged, judgement scenes plainly figure in surviving copies of the Book of the Dead, with paintings of the dead person's heart being weighed in a balance by the jackal-headed god Anubis and spells having to do with ways of passing this crucial test figuring in them. Those who passed went on to enjoy an afterlife conceived as an idealised version of the lives the ancient Egyptians would themselves have lived, with scenes of fertile fields and the green valley of the Nile, the so-called "field of reeds," predominating. Those who did not pass would have been devoured by a monstrous beast, part crocodile, part lion and part hippopotamus, shown squatting threateningly beside the scenes of judgement. As curator John Taylor writes in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, this conception of posthumous judgement, an individual apparently being judged in the afterlife for his conduct in this one, is close to conceptions later developed in other world religions. It seems to bring the ancient Egyptians closer to us, given the fears of failing on judgement day that they entertained, and it links ancient Egyptian ideas on the foundations of morality and individual moral conscience to religious ideas and the role in judgement apparently played by the gods. * * * The exhibition is housed in the British Library's former round reading room, adapted for museum purposes since the Library's relocation some years ago, and an elaborate series of interlocking rooms has been constructed within the space. Visitors are first introduced to the crossing of boundaries that the journey to the afterlife entailed, an individual's passage from life to death being accompanied by elaborate religious rituals, including mummification of the body if the individual could afford it, the "opening of the mouth," part of a ritual designed to allow free passage to the soul, or ba, and the placing of the body in a carefully prepared tomb. The preservation of the body was important since in the ancient Egyptian view of things the soul, depicted in paintings in the Book of the Dead as a human- headed bird, apparently returned to the body at intervals during its journey through the afterlife, sometimes for sustenance or instruction from the materials placed in the tomb, sometimes to receive offerings made by the living at the tomb's mortuary temple. The exhibition's central sections deal with the challenges that the dead might encounter in the afterlife, and it is here that it makes fullest reference to the spells in the Book of the Dead. Of the various recensions of the text on display, those found in the tombs of Ani and Hunefer, both scribes during the New Kingdom around 1280 BCE, are among the fullest and most elaborate. The version of Ani, acquired by the British Museum at the end of the 19th century, is one of the most richly illustrated of all known copies of the Book of the Dead, while the version of Hunefer, also complete and acquired by the museum at the same time, is remarkable for the extraordinary clarity of the images and the writing, both of which look as if they might have been done yesterday. There are also fragments from other versions on display, including spells to protect the heart from the version of Tentameniy done in the Ptolemaic period -- the heart being weighed by the gods on judgement day -- and transformation and animal-repulsion spells from various other versions produced between the New Kingdom and the Ptolemaic period. This variety allows continuities and differences in versions of the Book of the Dead to be perceived, with key spells and episodes remaining constant over a thousand-year period, but there being clear variations in painting styles and the arrangement of materials. Ptolemaic versions seem to have been more likely to arrange text and images vertically in columns, as if reproducing a text that had been frozen into formulae that the Ptolemaic scribes, copying spells written perhaps a thousand years before, may not have fully understood. Images, called vignettes, are smaller, and hieratic script, a cursive version of ancient Egyptian writing, is more often used in place of the more elaborate hieroglyphs. One exceptionally late fragment in the exhibition from the version of Kerasher done in the Roman period during the reign of Augustus Caesar employs colours and a painting style unknown in previous recensions. According to the catalogue, the ancient Egyptians' conception of the afterlife, at least at the time the Book of the Dead was produced, was of a kind of eternal paradise, similar in conception to the classical idea of the Elysian Fields. They hoped "to reach a land that was like the Egypt they knew and loved, with waterways, islands and fields of waving corn." This eternal Egypt would be better than the actual one, since, like Adam in paradise, those there would be freed from the need to work. Images of this hoped-for, paradise-like Egypt, in which the ancient Egyptians would live in the presence of the gods, are included in the final rooms of the exhibition, which also include a concluding section on what is known about the production of the Book of the Dead. Ancient Egyptian scribes formed a professional caste, in which there were many opportunities for specialisation. Scribes responsible for copying the spells, presumably from a standard master version, would leave gaps for painters to include the images and illustrations. Copies of the Book of the Dead would be prepared in advance, the dead person's name being inserted later using coloured inks in spaces left blank for it. The exhibition includes fragments that reveal how the process might have been done, including the version of Nespasefy, dating from 650-625 BCE and now in Marseilles, in which, for unknown reasons, the painter has not supplied the images, despite notes on the papyrus instructing him to do so. Another version, that of Hor, dating from the late first century BCE, is full of mistakes, apparently due to the late Ptolemaic scribe's inability to understand the meaning of the texts or to make the transcription from hieratic to hieroglyphic script. The exhibition's final room contains a star exhibit in the shape of what seems to be the whole 37 metres of the version of Nesitanebicheru, dating from 950-930 BCE and presented to the museum in 1910. The British Museum is to be congratulated on this major show and on the accompanying catalogue that brings readers up to date with research on the Book of the Dead. A final catalogue essay gives details of the development of modern scholarship, from the time of German Egyptologist Richard Lepsius, who produced a first modern edition in 1842, and the publication of the first critical edition, produced with the support of the British Museum in 1886. As well as being interesting in itself, this history is part of the modern reception of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, and it might have been equally interesting for the British Museum to have included a final section in the present exhibition on its discovery and modern study. Many versions are described as having been acquired in Egypt in the late 19th century, among them those of Ani, Hunefer and Nesitanebicheru, and one wonders how such "acquisitions" in fact took place. Other acquisitions were going on in other British-controlled territories at the same time, and some of these have since become the subject of controversy. Many of the papyrus fragments in the exhibition are listed as being of "unknown provenance." Does this mean they were looted from tombs and sold on to European collectors, eventually ending up in the British Museum? It might have been interesting for the museum to have included a section in the exhibition on the history of its own collecting and collections. Journey through the Afterlife, the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, British Museum, London, until 6 March
