This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Papyrus of Hunefer was made to answer one question in advance: would its owner survive judgment. Hunefer was a royal scribe, holding the titles Scribe of Divine Offerings and Overseer of Royal Cattle, and steward to Pharaoh Seti I, a comfortable and respected position within the New Kingdom court. Around 1290 to 1280 BCE, he commissioned an illustrated Book of the Dead scroll for his own funerary use, and its best known chapter stages the trial he expected to face after death.
The scene is the weighing of the heart. Anubis, the jackal headed god associated with embalming, conducts the weighing itself, placing Hunefer's heart on one pan of a scale and the feather of Maat, the goddess who personifies truth and cosmic order, on the other. A heart heavier than the feather meant a life out of balance, judged unworthy of continued existence, and Ammit, a composite creature combining crocodile, lion and hippopotamus, stood ready beside the scale to devour any heart that failed. Thoth, the ibis headed god of writing, records the result as it happens, and Osiris himself presides over the whole hall from his throne, flanked by his sisters Isis and Nephthys.
Hunefer's papyrus shows him passing. Horus leads him forward into Osiris's presence, the reward for a heart that weighed no heavier than truth itself. The scroll survives today at the British Museum, object EA9901, acquired in 1852, its most reproduced page measuring 45 by 90.5 centimeters across two densely painted registers, a private commission that still lets a modern reader see exactly what one Egyptian official believed was waiting for him.