"Make a way for me, my soul, my spirit and my shadow, for I am equipped, I am a transfigured spirit."
Spell 91, Book of the Dead

A rich ancient Egyptian drawing his last mortal breath didn’t just lie down and accept eternal rest; he packed his tomb and got ready for his biggest ever adventure. His goal was the Field of Reeds – basically the Nile valley, but with better weather – and to get there he’d need to journey through Osiris’s netherworld, fighting demons and chatting with gods, but also breathing, eating and doing everything else involved in staying... if not alive exactly, them something strangely close to it, before he could get his heart weighed and emerge blinking into the sunshine. It was complicated and perilous, so to keep himself safe he’d buy a set of spells before he died, chosen from the vast body of magic words and pictures that we now know of as the Book of the Dead.



The British Museum's new exhibition guides you right through this exhausting process – from mummification and burial through the netherworld, or Duat, and out into the blissful fields beyond – in what is one of its best blockbusters of recent years. Here, the museum’s customary emphasis on detail rather than overview works, thanks to the narrative power of the objects on display: the papyri, mummies, coffins, masks, jewellery, amulets and tomb figurines, accompanied by brief notes and translations of bits of the spells, allow you to piece together an understanding of ancient Egypt’s vision of the afterlife.



Every ancient Egyptian navigated this realm in his or her own way, and so every Book of the Dead was unique. With off-the-peg versions, the scribe would leave a space to add the buyer’s name; the very rich would commission their own specially-made Books, meaning they could make their own choice of spells and add family members to the cast of characters. The Books also reflected the occupation and status of the deceased: that of a temple baker is short and written in hieratic script; Queen Nodjmet's (1050BC) is dominated by the figure of her husband. The British Museum has one of the world’s best collections of Books of the Dead (rarely displayed because of the fragility of the papyri), and for this exhibition it has borrowed a few more: seeing so many different manuscripts collected together brings home the individuality and reality of their previous owners.

Just as the Books are animated by the character of their owners, so too do they breathe with the spirit of the scribes. Funerary texts were originally carved on the walls of royal pyramids, then written on the surfaces of coffins; by 1600BC these texts had evolved into the Book of the Dead, which could be inscribed on coffins, shrouds, bandages or mummy lids (an advanced civilisation’s way of scrawling “Get Well Soon” over a plaster cast?) and papyri. It's these papyri, with their fresh energetic strokes and action-packed images that most vividly retain the impression of their creators. Mostly (there are a few papyri at the end of the exhibition that are more authentically crumbled and Indiana Jones-looking), the manuscripts seem caught just as they were made: the papyrus crisp, the blacks black, the turquoise luminous, the yellow still glittering. And they’re highly personalised. Over time, the layout became formalised and a tight, precise boxed-in design evolved (for example, the papyrus of Ankhwahibra, 550-525BC). But style also varied according to personal taste: Ani's Book (1275BC) is boisterous as a kids’ cartoon; Anhai's (1100BC), one of the first made for a woman, is more elegant. In some instances you can even see where different scribes have worked on the same Book and the quality of the line changes or borders don’t quite join up. The best example of this is in the awe-inspiring Greenfield Papyrus, made for a priestess called Nestanebtasheru in 930BC, and at 37m the longest Book of the Dead in the world (displayed here in its entirety for the first time ever); it was illustrated by two different draughtsmen, one of whom drew in a noticeably more graceful and well-proportioned style.



These papyri were crafted and owned by individuals, and so are shaped by a very human self-interest. The ancient Egyptians imagined the Duat as a complex, material world much like that of the living; and so, ever-practical, they prepared for it as they would for any journey, compiling spells as we’d pack a rucksack. And chief among their concerns, in death as in life, was self-preservation. 



Dying did bring some changes, mostly of a mechanical variety, and so the first stages of the papyri show how to overcome them: mummification to preserve the body, and an ‘opening of the mouth’ ritual so the deceased could breathe again. Once the funerary rites were complete, the soul, or ba, often represented as a human-headed bird, was free to leave the body and roam the human world, sail the skies in Ra’s boat, or seek out Osiris, so long as when night fell it returned to its bandages. This vision of the afterlife was reflected in the ancient Egyptians’ name for the Book of the Dead: the 'Coming Forth by Day'.



Dying was not, then, a termination but rather a different state of being, like sleeping or sickness, in which the self remained essentially intact. Talismans and spells that protected the living would also protect the dead: a headrest used for sleeping could be used again in the tomb; spell 163, against injury and death, could be used to keep the dead body safe and gain admittance to the afterlife. And it was because the dead were separated from the living by only the thinnest of veils that, in return for leaving food and drink in their tomb, relatives could get the dead to intercede for them with the gods.

The underworld was as real, richly-detailed and dangerous as the world above ground, and every one of its potential perils had to be foreseen and protected against; spells 153A and B, for example, guard against the possibility of becoming entangled in the gods’ nets. By the same reasoning, much of the afterlife was quite as mundane as earthly existence, and so the living had to prepare some very practical spells for breathing air, eating food or drinking water after death.

Just as death mimicked life, so semi-divinity was but a splash of gold and a few well-chosen words away. Right from the start, mummification and a symbolic gold and lapus luzuli (real or fake) mask imbued the dead with godlike qualities; then, when they weren't transforming themselves into falcons, snakes or lotus flowers, they wandered the netherworld, proclaiming themselves gods and telling other supernatural beings what to do. Such self-assurance is perhaps unsurprising given the high positions Book of the Dead owners would have occupied in life, and Osiris’s green skin – representing rebirth – was a constant reminder that even the god himself was once human. Nevertheless, the deceased come across here as startlingly presumptuous in their dealings with other immortals, and they took whole fistfuls of spells into the tomb with them for the subduing and bossing about of hostile entities: “O you door-keepers who guard your portals, who swallow gods and who gulp down the corpses of the dead... May you guide the deceased, may you open the portals for him.”

This mix of the practical and fantastical, the prosaic and divine, looks strikingly like a giant fantasy-based computer game. The deceased moves through an intricate environment battling a series of snake- and knife-wielding gods before defeating the crocodile-headed, lion-chested, hippo-rumped Devourer (or big boss), and so completing his mission. Along the way, he must fight a whole series of deadly animals and insects, collect magical talismans (amulets to keep evil beings out of the burial chamber, a magic brick with a reed stuck in to breathe through should the tomb fill up with sand) and complete various side-missions, while all the time remembering to eat, drink and monitor life force levels. Two very different cultures’ very similar answers to the question “Is this all there is?”



If the netherworld is a computer game, the Book of the Dead is a set of cheats. In fact, the objects gathered here suggest the ancient Egyptian upper classes were idle, selfish fibbers of the highest order. It wasn’t piety or good works that got you waved you through the netherworld, it was heka, the magical use of a word or image: just reading out an entity’s name from your Book was normally enough to overpower it, suggesting the immortal legions didn’t really have a fighting chance. You did need to get your heart weighed before you could pass through to the Field of Reeds, but Osiris wasn’t as all-seeing as St Peter at the Pearly Gates; even Santa Claus is probably a better judge of character. All you needed to guarantee a favourable judgement was a heart-scarab amulet and spell 30B instructing your heart not to tell on you. It was thanks to this underhand ruse that Nodjmet's Book could show her being judged good, even though she was involved in the political murder of two policemen and so by rights should have been snapped up in the jaws of the Devourer without a second thought. The power of words over truth is demonstrated by another of the tasks of the netherworld: the deceased had to deny 42 faults to 42 deities, apparently regardless of whether or not they were actually guilty. Revealingly, perhaps, it's thought that this task was derived from a series of declarations priests had to make before entering and working in the temples.



Not only did the dead cheat to win safe passage, but they cheated to get out of doing any work. The papyri show them playing interminable games of senet, and they even packed the boards with them in their tombs; admittedly, this was partly because senet was a symbol of the journey of death; but it seems likely they were also hoping to get a good amount of gaming in on the other side. They carried with them, too, a set of shabti figures, so that if once they had tricked their way into paradise they were asked to do any manual labour, they could magically activate the little statues and set them to work in their stead.

Still, despite the way they bent the afterlife to their own self-interest, no one could accuse the ancient Egyptians of lacking imagination. The very process of mummification – the removal of bodily organs into jars, the embalming, the bandaging – demonstrates a flair for the macabre, and they were equally talented at conjuring up darkly comic chimeras, such as a man with a turtle for a head. The papyri depict many acts of strange violence, as when a sun god cat chops the head off a chaos god snake, and many lurid perils of the hereafter. Spell 33 wards off serpents: “O Rerek, snake, take yourself off, Geb and Shu have arisen against you, for you have eaten a mouse, which Ra detests, and you have chewed the bones of a putrid cat.” The importance of imagining every one of these possible dangers also leads to some rather gruesome specifics; for instance, not only do you need spells for protection against decapitation and slaughter, but to keep you from a diet of excrement and urine. Such graphic images testify to the horrors of death, which was ever-present for a people destined to die young – on average, at around 35 – and which essentially had to be navigated alone and without priests to intercede. Still, the whole nightmarish effect is rather undermined by just how cute and cartoonish these animal-headed gods and demons look, as well as their evident uselessness: not once is there any suggestion that they might manage to stop the dead getting through the netherworld, and given the gods’ failure to wise up to the old heart-scarab amulet trick, it’s a wonder the Devourer had quite so much flesh on her mismatched bones.



Ultimately, it's the details in this exhibition that are so fantastic – the grisly spells and terrible monster fights – and the way these details open onto a vast underworld and the civilisation that created it. But this very density of detail means it’s tricky to see all the exhibits during busy periods, and the lack of background information can be frustrating; the Duat is never put into the context of a greater supernatural universe, and we never find out what people who couldn't afford a Book of the Dead thought about the afterlife or how they got through it without any spells. But, cavils aside, this is an enthralling exhibition, and the ancient Egyptians emerge as individuals with very human concerns, lively art, a rich belief system, and a rather appealing vision of death as a more exciting state of being alive.




Journey through the afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, runs until 6 March 2011 at the British Museum, London WC1B 3DG. Tickets cost £12 and can be booked from 020 7323 8181 or online at www.britishmuseum.org.