Book of the Dead

A corpus of roughly 192 recognized spells, never assembled identically in any two copies, that Egyptians of the New Kingdom and later had inscribed on papyrus scrolls and buried with their dead to help navigate the underworld's dangers and judgment. It descends directly from the royal Pyramid Texts and the broader Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts, but its funerary magic was no longer restricted to kings: any family that could pay a scribe could commission an illustrated scroll for a relative. Its best-known scene, most fully realized in the Papyrus of Ani, shows the deceased's heart weighed on a scale against the feather of the goddess Maat while reciting Spell 125's 'negative confession' of sins not committed, the earliest fully developed depiction of moral judgment after death in world literature.