The first thing was to head, or rather move body and soul, to the necropolis. To be welcomed into the tomb, to neutralize the threat of Apophis and to become solarized in the Osirian world. From there, the regeneration, with the ritual of opening the … mouth; the transfiguration and the Divine Judgment; the boat trip through the underground world; and in the end, if everything goes as Osiris commands, Eden, the exit to the day. Because, even though over the centuries Egyptologists have ended up baptizing it as the Book of the Dead, the Egyptian papyri that included the transition from the world of the living to the world of the deceased, that instruction manual for reaching the afterlife and taking pleasure in the eternal life among mighty rivers and mountains of wheat, were actually something else. “The Egyptians called it ‘The Day Out Book’, which explains very well what its function was,” says the director of the Egyptian Museum, Maixaixa Taulé.
Around it, divided into three walls, a life-size reproduction of the 23.6 meters of hieroglyphic writing of the papyrus of Ani, one of the most spectacular and outstanding examples of the Book of the Dead (yes, as a trademark the ‘Book of the Exit to the Day’ is a bit weak) and a jewel of the British Museum since Ernest Wallis Budge took it from Egypt as if by trickery and birlibirloque. “It is a manual to overcome adversity and be reborn in the Field of Happiness,” emphasizes the curator and curator of the museum, Luis Manuel Gonzálvez, in charge of annotating the Ani papyrus and incorporating descriptions and explanations of key scenes such as the funeral procession. ; the room of the Double Truth, with the weighing of the heart and the pen; the negative confession and the 42 commands; the trip aboard the solar boat with the god Thoth as helmsman; and the identification of the soul of the deceased with the Sun god, definitive proof of life after death, since if something dies and is born every day it is precisely the king star.
A mess, yes, although that is precisely why the Barcelona museum has decided to bring the Book of the Dead back to life. “It is something that is not studied in depth unless you are an Egyptologist, so we wanted to explain the most famous texts in a simple and understandable way,” says Taulé. And to achieve this, in addition to reproducing Ani’s papyrus in an educational and entertaining way, the exhibition ‘Going out for the day’, on display until February 2025, it also brings together more than seventy pieces from the Clos collection related to the theme.
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Two visitors observe the Ani papyrus at the Egyptian Museum in Barcelona
EFE
For example, a fragment of the Book of the Dead of the Lady Bary with one of the least frequent chapters, that of offerings; and another fragment of another book also dated between 1307 and 1196 BC. C. that reproduces one of the crucial moments: the negative confession. In the piece you can sense hieroglyphs with declarations of innocence such as “I have not stolen, “I was not a talker” and “My only wealth was my possessions”, “I have not been bad, I have not done evil”… And so on until almost fifty different ways of saying that one is fit for eternal life.
In the display cases, various specimens of ‘ushebtis’, eyes of Horus with protective properties, lapis lazuli amulets with the Knot of Isis, alabaster headrests, the mask of a crocodile mummy, the coffin of a shrew. a box to store the viscera and a set of tools to carry out the ritual of opening the mouth. And in the center, the lid of a tomb from the years 525-332 BC. C. that preserves fragments of a Book of the Dead engraved in stone; an exquisite gold Osiris head; and a mummy overture treated with gold leaf.
Pieces all of them related to one of the 194 chapters that the Egyptians had to choose from when making their Day out book. «Not everyone could have a book of the dead. It depended on their economic and cultural capacity,” Gonzálvez clarifies. So the ‘all inclusive’, burial and mummification aside, was reserved for a very small part of the population. To people like Ani, a scribe who commissioned his in great detail in 1250 BC. c.
The most normal thing was for ordinary Egyptians to be buried with a single undecorated chapter, but that of Ani has 67 and is richly illustrated with hieroglyphic texts. “Everything appears except the final verdict of Osiris,” the commissioner slips.
