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The Egyptian Heaven and Hell
by E. A. Wallis Budge
London; Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.
[1905]
Scanned at Sacred-texts.com, May 2003. J.B. Hare, Redactor. This text is in the public domain. These files may be used for any
non-commercial purpose, provided this notice of attribution is left intact.
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Scene from the Papyrus of Nekht, allowing the deceased and the wife worshipping Osiris in the Other World, and the manner of the house
in which they expect to live, and their vineyard and garden with its lake of water. (British Museum, No. 10,471, sheet 21.)
Next: Preface
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p. vi
PREFACE
THE present work is the outcome of two lectures on the Books of the Tuat, i.e., the Egyptian
Underworld, or "Other World," which I had the honour to deliver at the Royal Institution in the spring of
1904, and it has been prepared at the suggestion of many who wished to continue their inquiries into the
beliefs of the Egyptians concerning the abode of the departed, and the state of the blessed and the
damned.
The object of all the Books of the Other World was to provide the dead with a "Guide" or "Handbook,"
which contained a description of the regions through which their souls would have to pass on their way
to the kingdom of Osiris, or to that portion of the sky where the sun rose, and which would supply them
with the words of power and magical names necessary for making an unimpeded journey from this world
to the abode of the blessed. For a period of two thousand years in the history of Egypt, the Books of the
Other World consisted of texts only, but about B.C. 2500
p. viii
funeral artists began to represent pictorially the chief features of the "Field of Peace," or "Islands of the
Blessed," and before the close of the XIXth Dynasty, about 1300 years later, all the principal books
relating to the Tuat were profusely illustrated. In the copies of them which were painted on the walls of
royal tombs, each division of