The *Book of the Dead* and Egyptian afterlife traditions in modern translation

Record summary

Late twentieth-century translations and studies of the Egyptian *Book of the Dead*, including editions associated with Raymond O. Faulkner, helped renew comparative attention to the deceased’s journey through gates, guardians, judgment, spells, and transformations. The work is a corpus of funerary compositions copied on papyri and coffins, not a single canonical book or eyewitness account of an underworld. It matters for comparing boundary maps and protective speech with Greek, Mesopotamian, and later popular underworld narratives. Versions differ substantially by period, manuscript, and tomb context.