The Mysterious Fayum Portraits

The Book of the Dead of Sobekmose, in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, New York, is one of the most important surviving examples of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead genre. Such ‘books’ – papyrus scrolls – were composed of traditional funerary texts, including magic spells, that were thought to assist a dead person on their journey into the afterlife.

The ancient Egyptians believed in an underworld fraught with dangers that needed to be carefully navigated, from the familiar, such as snakes and scorpions, to the extraordinary: lakes of fire to cross, animal-headed demons to pass and, of course, the ritual Weighing of the Heart, whose outcome determined whether or not the deceased would be ‘born again’ into the afterlife for eternity.

216 pages.