Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead

British Museum, London. Until 6 March 2011.

In 1819, the English physician and polymath Thomas Young — known for his discovery of the interference of light — published a pioneering article on ancient Egypt in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It offered a partially correct translation of the Rosetta Stone's hieroglyphic and demotic texts and outlined the new science of Egyptology. Young persevered in trying to understand the scripts, expressing impatience with the “monstrously complicated Egyptian superstitions”. But he was overtaken. His reluctance to engage with the bewildering pantheon of animal-headed Egyptian gods and priestly mumbo-jumbo was a key factor in the ascendance of his French rival, the philologist Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphic script fully in 1822–23.

Visitors to Journey Through the Afterlife, the British Museum's elegant exhibition on the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, may initially sympathize with Young. The displayed texts — not a single book but various compilations of instructions for the afterlife, in hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts — describe a bizarre universe of belief. They were first interpreted as a funerary ritual by Champollion working from papyrus scrolls in the 1820s.

Ancient Egyptians believed that their lives would be judged by the gods when they died — as shown in the papyrus of Ani, part of a Book of the Dead from 1275 BC. Credit: TRUSTEES OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM

Yet the intricately painted vignettes — featuring the deities, animals, chimeras, kings and scribes of Egypt more than 3,000 years ago — have a disconcerting power. However fantastical the ideas depicted, the Book's pages document the shift in human thought towards judgements based on moral behaviour. Ethical precepts were written down in Egypt as early as 3000 BC. They were followed more than a thousand years later by the Babylonian King Hammurabi's famous law code.

The Book of the Dead, which appeared before the beginning of the New Kingdom around 1550 BC and was commonly used until the Graeco-Roman era in Egypt in the first century BC, shows for the first time the idea that the benefits of eternal life depend on an individual's adherence to correct behaviour on Earth. The law of ancient Israel, and the Ten Commandments in the Bible, were influenced by ancient Egyptian ethics.

Inscribed on stone sarcophagi, wooden coffins and stone amulets, but mainly painted and drawn on long papyrus scrolls placed close to a mummified corpse, Books of the Dead collected up to 200 spells. They were intended to reanimate and protect the corpse of an Egyptian in the afterlife, in a civilization where the average lifespan was 35 years. Neither the number of spells nor their order and content were fixed, so there is no definitive version of the Book; nor does it have a simple narrative, although the exhibition does its best to provide one.

The dominant idea is that the ba (soul) of the deceased should fly during the daylight hours from the grave of its mummified corpse and continue to enjoy earthly pleasures beside the fertile Nile, returning at nightfall — much as the Sun god Ra endlessly cycles through the sky. Indeed, the ancient Egyptians called these compilations the 'book of coming forth by day'; the modern name 'book of the dead' was coined by the German Egyptologist Richard Lepsius in the 1840s, probably from the term used by Egyptian workers on excavations when they discovered such manuscripts.

There are major collections of Books of the Dead in museums in Egypt, Europe and the United States. The British Museum's holding is among the finest, and this exhibition is drawn almost exclusively from it. Many of the papyri have not been exhibited before, mainly because of the extreme sensitivity to daylight of the paints used in illustrating them. Tests by British Museum conservationists on the pigments, such as realgar (red arsenic) and orpiment (yellow arsenic), show that fading begins within days of exposure to natural light. “Choosing items which could be exhibited safely has been a lengthy process”, writes the exhibition's curator John H. Taylor in the magnificent catalogue. Moreover, sensitivity of the paints to vibration means that the museum will have to modify its original plan of taking the exhibition on tour.

The best-known vignette in the Book of the Dead, rightly given pride of place near the end of the exhibition, is the judgement of the deceased before he or she is permitted to enter the afterlife. In the papyrus of Ani (pictured), a scribe who probably died around 1275 BC during the reign of Ramesses II, Ani and his wife bow respectfully towards the gods, as Ani's heart (regarded as the seat of intelligence) is weighed in the balance scales by the jackal-headed Anubis against the feather of Maat (truth). The procedure is watched greedily by Ammit the Devourer, a monstrous combination of crocodile, lion and hippopotamus.

Ani speaks to his heart, telling it not to testify against him like a bad conscience. “The Egyptians devised ways to escape punishment by the gods, but the fact that they felt a need to do so is revealing of a new stage in human psychology, a new notion of just behaviour,” notes Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum. On studying this compelling vignette, even visitors as dismissive of Egyptian mysticism as Young would have to agree.