Wallace Budge - The Egyptian Book of the Dead

With a new Introduction by JOHN ROMER

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL , England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL , England

www.penguin.com

First published in Great Britain as The Bank of Dead by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner 1899
One-volume revised edition published 1923
This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2008
1

New Introduction, Historical Outline and Further Reading copyright John Romer. 2008
All rights reserved

The moral right of the translator and editor has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

978-0-14-191815-0

2. O SIRIS, THE GOD OF J UDGMENT, THE
R ESURRECTION , I MMORTALITY, THE E LYSIAN
FIELDS, ETC

CHAP .

CXLI.
CXLII. T HE B OOK WHICH A MAN SHALL RECITE FOR HIS FATHER OR FOR HIS SON DURING THE FESTIVALS OF MENTET

________________________________

This book is part of our intellectual history. Just as John Bull is British, the Eiffel Tower is French, and God often speaks in King James English, so this particular Book of the Dead is an integral part of what we now call ancient Egypt. Apart from the sacred texts of the great religions, it is also the bestselling edition of any ancient text. And its influence extends beyond the realms of ancient history.

The remarkable celebrity of these ancient funerary texts is due to their translator, Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge. His was the first edition of the Book of the Dead to have been produced in English in a convenient and inexpensive format. Published in 1899 and reissued in 1909 in an enlarged and revised three-volume edition the version given here it has remained continuously in print. From T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and William Faulkner to J. R. R. Tolkien and Norman Mailer, everyone read and absorbed the contents of Budges compact book with its yellow dustjacket, its light brown buckram binding and its inky illustrations.

The books greatest influence flowed through the meticulous pen of Sir James Frazer, Budges near-contemporary at Cambridge and, arguably, the worlds most influential anthropologist. Frazers famed Osiris, one of the dying and resurrecting gods on whom he lavished several bestselling volumes, is largely drawn from Budges Book of the Dead a borrowing that Budge reciprocated in his last work, which was, in turn, partly based on Frazers Golden Bough . It is unlikely, though, that either Budge or Frazer were happy with the uses to which Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung put their joint researches, and to such vast effect.

Curiously enough, when Jean-Franois Champollion, the decipherer of hieroglyphs, first read some of ancient Egypts funerary scrolls in the 1820s, the West was disappointed. Though studious antiquaries had long maintained that they held forgotten wisdoms, Champollion declared that their diffuse and difficult calligraphy appeared to record nothing but the rites of ancient funerals. A few years later, a closer study by Dr Richard Lepsius, a Berlin professor and Champollions successor, established that some of these scrolls also appeared to contain words spoken by the dead themselves. Yet later, Lepsius came to understand that they also held an even wider diversity of themes within them prayers, incantations, hymns, dialogues, confessionals, lamentations and rituals each one divided from its neighbour by pretty illustrations.

In 1842 Lepsius published the first modern edition of one of these funerary scrolls, setting its ancient text into 165 separate chapters, and rendering the abbreviate forms of its cursive script into long lines of formal hieroglyphics that could easily be read by egyptologists. Entitling his work Das Todtenbuch der Aegypter , derived from the Arabic phrase Kitab al Mayyitun dead peoples books that had long been used by Egyptian villagers to describe the scrolls they occasionally found beside the mummies of the ancient dead, Lepsius perpetuated the generic name that Champollion had first given the scrolls. And, when in 1867 Dr Samuel Birch of the British Museum published an English translation of Lepsius hieroglyphics, he reconfirmed this designation in his direct translation into English as The Book of the Dead.