The Book of Coming Forth by Day

The so-called Egyptian Book of the Dead is not a book in any ordinary sense and was not called that by the Egyptians, who knew its spells as the "Book of Coming Forth by Day." It is a loose, variable collection of funerary spells, hymns and vignettes written on papyrus (and earlier on coffins and tomb walls) and placed with the dead to protect and equip them for the perilous journey through the underworld (Duat) to the judgement before Osiris and to eternal life.

No two copies are identical: a scribe or a purchaser selected from a large repertoire of numbered "chapters" (about 190 in the modern numbering), so that each papyrus is a bespoke compilation rather than a fixed canon. The corpus took shape in the New Kingdom (from about 1550 BCE) and remained in use, with changes, for well over a thousand years, developing out of the earlier Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts.