Ancient Egyptian ritual practice treated correct speech as inseparable from ritual power: a spell, an offering formula or a funerary text was understood to work only when spoken precisely, in the right order, by someone qualified to say it, and the lector priest, kher-heb in Egyptian, was the office built specifically around that requirement. Egyptian tomb and temple art depicts him in a recognizable, distinct costume, a sash worn diagonally across the chest, generally shown holding an unrolled papyrus scroll from which he reads, marking him visually apart from other temple staff even where his precise rank within a temple's wider priestly hierarchy might vary from site to site and period to period.
His duties spanned both the great state temples, where he recited during formal cult ritual and major festivals, and private funerary practice, where a lector priest recited spells from the corpus that became known as the Book of the Dead during burial rites, guiding the deceased through the recitations Egyptian belief held necessary for a successful passage into the afterlife. The office required real literacy and command of a large body of ritual text, a genuinely scarce and valuable skill in ancient Egyptian society, and lector priests are accordingly recorded serving prominent roles across a wide span of Egyptian history, from the Old Kingdom through the Ptolemaic period, one of the longer continuously attested priestly offices in the whole tradition.