The Egyptian Book of the Dead

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 April 2017

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the text and context of The Book of the Dead, also known as the Book of Coming Forth by Day, the ancient Egyptian collections of spells which were intended to help the recently deceased navigate the underworld. They flourished under the New Kingdom from C16th BC until the end of the Ptolemaic era in C1st BC, and drew on much earlier traditions from the walls of pyramids and on coffin cases. Almost 200 spells survive, though no one collection contains all of them, and one of the best known surrounds the weighing of the heart, the gods' final judgement of the deceased's life.

With

John Taylor Curator at the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum

Kate Spence Senior Lecturer in Egyptian Archaeology at Cambridge University and Fellow of Emmanuel College

and

Richard Parkinson Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford and Fellow of the Queen's College

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:02.0	Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:05.0	There's a reading list to go with it on our website.
0:07.0	And you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time.
0:12.0	I hope you enjoyed the programs.
0:14.0	Hello, the book of the dead helped ancient Egyptians through their afterlife for over a thousand years
0:19.0	after the building of the Great Pyramids and before Cleopatra.
0:22.0	The Egyptians expected the gods to judge them when their hearts would be weighed against an ostrich colour.
0:27.0	If the hearts were too heavy and impure, they would be devoured by a demon that was part lion, part crocodile and part hippopotamus.
0:34.0	Those who had understood the book of the dead knew how to make their hearts light and how to answer the gods questions
0:40.0	and which passwords to give to open the doors to the afterlife.
0:44.0	With me to discuss the Egyptian book of the dead are John Taylor, curator at the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum.
0:51.0	Kate Spence, senior lecturer in Egyptian archaeology, came with University and fell out of Immanuel College
0:58.0	and Richard Parkinson, professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford and fell out of the Queen's College.
1:04.0	Kate Spence, I said between the Great Pyramids and Cleopatra, it's quite a stretch.
1:08.0	Have you any closer definition of when these books are the dead?
1:14.0	Well, they appear shortly before the New Kingdom. They initially appear around 1700 BC and by about 1430 BC they're appearing on rolls of papyrus.
1:28.0	So Egyptian cultures are already old by this period. They're drawing on a lot of tradition but because they appear at a period where there isn't strong centralised control,
1:38.0	shortly before the New Kingdom started, there was a lot of scope for innovation.
1:42.0	So, and these spells appear with some new texts but they're also drawing on older traditions of mortuary literature such as the Pyramid texts and the Confents.
1:53.0	Yes, literature is associated with it.
1:57.0	Well, the Egyptians had a lot of it and a large part of our preserved corpus does relate to spells or literature associated with the afterlife in some way.
	...

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