The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Translated by P. Le Page Renouf, with commentary by Édouard Naville
The Egyptian funerary corpus properly titled "The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day": spells, hymns, and the weighing-of-the-heart judgment scene that guided the dead through the underworld.
- Composed
- New Kingdom, circa 1550 BCE, with older roots
- Original language
- Egyptian (hieroglyphic)
What this text is
What Europeans named the Book of the Dead, the Egyptians called the Chapters of Coming Forth by Day. It is not a single book but a corpus of around two hundred spells, hymns, and instructions, copied onto papyri and tomb walls for over a millennium, meant to equip the dead for the journey through the Duat, the Egyptian underworld.
Its most famous scene, the weighing of the heart against the feather of Maat, truth, is one of the oldest detailed pictures of moral judgment after death in any literature. This edition pairs Renouf’s translation with Naville’s commentary, both foundational works of nineteenth-century Egyptology.
Why researchers read it
The Egyptian material preserves a fully developed map of post-mortem experience that predates the Greek, Jewish, and Christian versions that later absorbed pieces of it. For SOL’s investigations into how traditions describe consciousness beyond the body, this corpus is the deepest ancient stratum available.
Research that draws on this text
Inside SOL
From public source to working investigation
The public page gives you a question and a source trail. Membership turns that starting point into work you can examine, challenge, and continue.
Read the complete source
Open The Egyptian Book of the Dead in the member Library, inspect the passage in context, and keep the named translation or edition visible while you compare interpretations.
Test it with Prism
Bring the passage or Research record into a source-grounded conversation. Ask for competing translations, supporting evidence, objections, and what remains uncertain. Prism can still make mistakes; the visible source trail is how you check it.
Follow the connections
Use Connections to examine how the source and Research record relate to other claims, evidence, objections, and open questions.
Read and search the complete text inside SOL
Members read The Egyptian Book of the Dead in full, search it alongside more than a thousand other works, and follow its ideas across traditions with SOL's research tools. SOL is invite-only right now; join the waitlist to be notified when access opens.