Egyptian Book of the Dead

How this book fits

Traditions: Egyptian religion and magic
Role in the tradition: Primary source Written from inside the tradition: scripture, revelation, a grimoire, a manifesto or a practical treatise.
Public attention: Landmark Wikipedia has an article about it in 58 languages.

Read it

Budge's translation ↗ sacred-texts.com checked against the Internet Archive's copy of July 12, 2025, because the site refuses scripts · archived copy

From Wikipedia

The Book of the Dead is the name given to an ancient Egyptian funerary text generally written on papyrus and used from the beginning of the New Kingdom to around 50 BC. "Book" is the closest term to describe the loose collection of texts consisting of a number of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through the Duat, or underworld, and into the afterlife and written by many priests over a period of about 1,000 years. In 1842, the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius introduced for these texts the German name Todtenbuch, translated to English as 'Book of the Dead'. The original Egyptian name for the text, transliterated rw nw prt m hrw, is translated as Spells of Coming Forth by Day.

From the Wikipedia article Book of the Dead, revision 1371410433, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikidata Q174361: “ancient Egyptian funerary text”.

In this study

In the chronology, among the works with no securely known author.

A changing collection of funerary spells rather than one fixed book. Individual papyri were assembled for the deceased and supplied the knowledge, incantations and instructions needed to pass through the afterlife.