Inventory number

General description

Papyrus with two chapters from the Book of the Dead

Cat. 1827/5 consists of a series of fragments belonging to a single papyrus dating to the New Kingdom.

The recto shows a polychrome vignette depicting a bird with human head and feet; this is the representation of one of the parts of the spirit of the deceased, the one called ba, a word often translated as "soul". The text written in cursive hieroglyphs contains two incomplete chapters of the Book of the Dead. Specifically, the fragments contain the spells 84 and 85, belonging to the group of transformation spells. Those spells would allow the deceased to take different formes, in this chapters the shape of a heron and the one of a living Ba, allowing the deceased to acquire their behaviors and symbolic characteristics to face the journey through the afterlife.

Unusual, given the content of the recto, is the presence on the back of a single line of hieroglyphs, also incomplete and of dubious interpretation, probably being part of an offering formula.