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The Book of the Dead: Facsimiles of the Papyri of Hunefer, Anhai, Kerasher and Netchemet (1899)

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Plates of four painted funeral papyri, the scribe Hunefer's among them, with Budge's transcripts and translations. It includes the opening of the mouth chapter and hymns to Ra and Osiris.

Public domain copy

Made byAnonymous (Egyptian); edited by E. A. Wallis Budge
TranslatorE. A. Wallis Budge
LanguageEnglish
FilePDF 17.0 MB
DownloadOriginal source

Where this comes from

This is a public-domain copy. The line below says where the file comes from and why we may host it.

Why we can share it: Published 1899, before 1931, so public domain in the US (reasoning; the archive record for this scan, a Digital Library of India upload, states no copyright status). Budge died 1934.

This is a scan of a facsimile volume, so the pictures matter more than the text layer. The PDF has no reliable searchable text.

Read the story behind it

TextPyramid TextsThe great pyramids at Giza are silent inside, with no inscriptions at all; the oldest religious writing in Egypt appears only later, carved on the walls of burial chambers to send a dead king up to the stars. One spell, the Cannibal Hymn, has him hunt the gods, cook them and eat their magic. What did these spells promise him?GodThothMillions of mummified ibis birds were buried in catacombs as offerings to Thoth, the ibis-headed Egyptian god of writing and the moon. Stories give him hidden writings too, including a Book of Thoth locked in nested boxes at the bottom of the Nile; reading it brought disaster on the man who took it. What did it say?GodAtumIn the Book of the Dead, Egypt's creator god calmly tells Osiris that he will one day destroy everything he made and survive it as a serpent, while the earth returns to the waters. He had risen self-made from those waters; some texts say he sneezed out the first gods. What does he mean by an ending?

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