Inventory number

General description

This hieratic papyrus, dating to the Ramesside Period, contains the closing speech of Chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead. The text is written in vertical columns framed by ruling lines and executed in retrograde hieroglyphs with great precision. It was prepared for Khonsumes, a wab-priest and chief of weighers in the temple of Amun, whose name and titles appear at the end of the manuscript. The writing is elegant and consistent, with black ink used throughout except for a short rubric introducing the text.

At a later stage, a small strip of papyrus bearing a hieratic title in Late Egyptian -“The Book of Going Forth by Day” - was attached to the beginning of the roll. The strip was probably cut from one of the protective sheets and used as a label or binding band identifying the content of the roll when stored or deposited in a funerary context. The addition of this title suggests that the manuscript was reused and reinterpreted during the Third Intermediate Period, when older funerary papyri were frequently adapted for renewed ritual purposes.