What is the Book of the Dead?

Many people don’t ever know the history behind the Book of the Dead. Yet, you may want to know what is the book of the dead in real. It is an ancient Egyptian text that includes instructions about the afterlife. It is not really a kind of version, but includes a number of texts that could be referred to by this name. The texts are often customized for specific decedent. This book does not translate the text’s Egyptian title, but is the invention of Karl Richard Lepsius, a German Egyptologist who published its translated portions of the book in 1842.

The Egyptian name for the texts given is “The Book of Coming Forth By Day”. The texts are actually the spells that help the decedent in afterlife which somewhere means that the texts please the gods and other others mean to prevent the dead person from facing certain misfortunes. This book also provides an overview of what would happen in real after death. The book represents the Egyptian religious belief. The book also reveals a picture that shows the god of the dead, Anubis places the heart of the dead in a scale to weigh it against a feather of truth.

There are many portions of the Book of the Dead that are common to almost every version, but most of the texts from this genre are tailor-made for specific funeral. The book enfolds four major categories that are used to segregate the texts, making every existing version unique. They are the Heliopolitan version, the Theban, the third version which contains unfixed order of chapters, but closely associated to the Theban texts, and the fourth version that is Saite.

The earliest known version of this book dates at the beginning of the 18th Egyptian Dynasty, in the 16th century BCE. The early versions include the Coffin Texts and the Pyramid Texts. Over the centuries, the book was turned in more standard manner and the latest versions were created after the 26th Dynasty of the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. They are found stricter than the earlier versions.