![]() To progress through the complex challenges in these stages, the dead must speak the right names and spells at the right time and respond with the right answers to the gods’ questions. Although the text itself varies in content and order, the narrative is generally divided into four main sections: the deceased enters the underworld and regains the physical abilities of the living, the deceased is resurrected and joins Re to rise as the sun each day, the deceased travels across the sky before judgement in the underworld by a panel of gods and, finally – assuming the soul hasn’t been destroyed – the deceased joins the gods. Forty-two additional gods appear to judge and test the newly departed. The gods Osiris, associated with resurrection, and Re, associated with the sun, star in the Book of the Dead. By the New Kingdom, the afterlife was understood as accessible to all who could afford their own Book of the Dead, a handy guidebook providing the spells necessary for the perilous, confusing and elaborate trials faced to earn eternal life among the gods. ![]() As religious beliefs on the afterlife changed, copies of the Coffin Texts – an adapted version of the Pyramid Texts – were written on coffins and included in the tombs of non-royals, such as wealthy Egyptians and elites. The oldest of these writings, the Pyramid Texts, were available exclusively to Egyptian royalty. The Book of the Dead first appeared in the New Kingdom, but the text evolved from a long tradition of magical funerary writing. Photo: Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund
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