toucana Posted January 22, 2023 Posted January 22, 2023 Archaeologists have confirmed that a papyrus scroll discovered at the Saqquara necropolis site near Cairo last year does indeed contain texts from the Egyptian Book of the Dead— the first time a complete papyrus has been found in a century, according to Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt. The scroll has been dubbed the "Waziri papyrus." It is currently being translated into Arabic. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/01/archaeologists-discovered-a-new-papyrus-of-egyptian-book-of-the-dead/ These "books" were actually collections of funerary texts and spells to help the deceased on their journey through the underworld (Duat)—not to bring people back from the dead—and they are not holy texts like the Bible or Qur-an. They were originally painted onto objects or written on the walls of burial chambers. Over time, illustrations were added and spells were also inscribed on the interior of coffins or the linen shrouds used to wrap the deceased. Copies of the Book of the Dead were made to order by scribes, and the scrolls could be as short as 1 meter (3.2 feet) and as long as 40 meters (about 131 feet). People knew of the existence of such scrolls in the Middle Ages, and assumed that they were religious in nature because they were found in tombs. Prussian Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius coined the name Book of the Dead in 1842 after translating one such text. The best known example to date is the Papyrus of Ani, discovered in luxor in 1888 and now housed in the British Museum. But such finds are increasingly rare. The Saqqara necropolis served the ancient Egyptian capital of Memphis, and boasts numerous pyramids, including the Step pyramid of Djoser, whose design and construction is usually attributed to Imhotep, chancellor to the Pharoah Djoser Sample illustration - ‘The Weighing of the Heart’
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