"Book of the Dead" is the title now commonly given to the great
collection of funerary texts which the ancient Egyptian scribes
composed for the benefit of the dead. These consist of spells and
incantations, hymns and litanies, magical formulae and names, words
of power and prayers, and they are found cut or painted on walls of
pyramids and tombs, and painted on coffins and sarcophagi and rolls
of papyri. The title "Book of the Dead" is somewhat unsatisfactory
and misleading, for the texts neither form a connected work nor
belong to one period; they are miscellaneous in character, and tell
us nothing about the lives and works of the dead with whom they were
buried. Moreover, the Egyptians possessed many funerary works that
might rightly be called "Books of the Dead," but none of them bore a
name that could be translated by the title "Book of the Dead." This
title was given to the great collection of funerary texts in the first
quarter of the nineteenth century by the pioneer Egyptologists, who
possessed no exact knowledge of their contents. They were familiar
with the rolls of papyrus inscribed in the hieroglyphic and the
hieratic character, for copies of several had been published, [1]
but the texts in them were short and fragmentary. The publication of
the Facsimile [2] of the Papyrus of Peta-Amen-neb-nest-taui [3] by
M. Cadet in 1805 made a long hieroglyphic text and numerous coloured
vignettes available for study, and the French Egyptologists described
it as a copy of the "Rituel Funéraire" of the ancient Egyptians. Among
these was Champollion le Jeune, but later, on his return from Egypt,
he and others called it "Le Livre des Morts," "The Book of the Dead,"
"Das Todtenbuch," etc. These titles are merely translations of the
name given by the Egyptian tomb-robbers to every roll of inscribed
papyrus which they found with mummies, namely, "Kitâb-al-Mayyit,"
"Book of the dead man," or "Kitâb al-Mayyitun," "Book of the dead"
(plur.). These men knew nothing of the contents of such a roll, and
all they meant to say was that it was "a dead man's book," and that
it was found in his coffin with him.