The Oxford Handbook of the Egyptian Book of the Dead

Among the broad spectrum of ancient Egyptian religious literature, the Book of the Dead is the most representative of ancient Egyptian mortuary religion and of the magical and ritual practices belonging to it. Moreover, its rich corpus of texts and images provides unique information on the scribal practices, mortuary traditions, myths, and priestly rituals in ancient Egypt from the 2nd Millennium BCE to the Roman Period. The Oxford Handbook of the Egyptian Book of the Dead is the first major guide to collect and synthesize the wide-ranging body of scholarship on the Book of the Dead as well as the broader literature on ancient Egyptian religion and magic.

Useful for both curious undergraduates and advanced scholars, this collection of contributions from specialists in the field will become a go-to resource for years to come on everything from the textual history of the Book of the Dead to its material origins and historical reception. Editors Rita Lucarelli and Martin Andreas Stadler have curated a singular volume that is both state of the art and comprehensive.

Rita Lucarelli is Associate Professor of Egyptology at UC Berkeley and Faculty Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley and Fellow of the Digital Humanities in Berkeley. She worked as a Research Scholar and a Lecturer at the
Department of Egyptology of Bonn University, where she was part of the team of the "Book of the Dead Project". She is presently working at a project aiming at realizing 3D models of ancient Egyptian coffins, the "Book of the Dead in 3D". She is also completing a new monograph on demonology in
ancient Egypt entitled Agents of Punishment and Protection: Ancient Egyptian Demonology in the First Millenium BCE, and she is one of the coordinators of the international project "Ancient Egyptian Demonology Project", or "Demon Things."

Martin Andreas Stadler is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Würzburg. He taught as acting professor at the University of Tübingen in 2009/10, and was visiting professor in Paris 2015. His principal research interests are Egyptian funerary art, demotic literature and Egyptian Religion,
including the Ptolemaic-Roman era studying whether and how the Egyptians maintained their cultural identity during the periods of Greek and Roman governance.

Introduction

I The Textual History of the Book of the Dead
1. From the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts to the Book of the Dead
Louise Gestermann

2. The Book of the Dead in the 18th Dynasty
Irmtraut Munro

3. The Ramesside Book of the Dead and the Deir el-Medina tradition
Barbara Lüscher

4. The Book of the Dead in the Third Intermediate Period
Giuseppina Lenzo

5. The Book of the Dead in the 25th/26th Dynasty
Svenja Gülden

6. The Last Books of the Dead
Florence Albert

II Types of Sources: the Material Aspect of the Book of the Dead
7. Scribes and writing traditions
Ursula Verhoeven-van Elsbergen

8. Production and layout of the Book of the Dead papyri
Ogend Goelet

9. The Female owners of the Book of the Dead
Susanne Töpfer

10. The Book of the Dead on tissue and mummy bandages
Annie Gasse

11. The Book of the Dead in tombs
Silvia Einaudi

12. The Book of the Dead in temples
Holger Kockelmann

III The Book of the Dead's Position in Ancient Egyptian Religion
13. The Book of the Dead as a source for the study of ancient Egyptian religion: methodology, problems, prospects
Martin Andreas Stadler

14. The Funerary Literature Related to the Book of the Dead
Foy Scalf

15. The Book of the Dead in the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods and the contemporary funerary texts
Andreas Kucharek

16. The Book of the Ba
Andreas Kucharek

IV Particular Aspects of the Book of the Dead's Contents
17. Thematic groups and sequences of spells
Felicitas Weber

18. Spell 1 of the Book of the Dead and its Vignette
Tarek Tawfik

19. The Field of Offering/Field of Reeds
Alvarez Sosa

20. The Judgement over The Final Judgement
Jirí Janák

21. The so-called "Chapitres supplémentaires"
Annik Wüthrich

22. Vignettes
Malcolm Mosher

V The Book of the Dead in Modern Times
23. The time of the pioneers
Barbara Lüscher

24. Modern Reception
Aris Legowski

25. Translating the Book of the Dead
Burkhard Backes

26. Conservation and Restoration of a Book of the Dead Roll
Myriam Krutzsch

27. Choat, Forgeries of the Book of the Dead
Rita Lucarelli