The Egyptian Book of the dead by P. Le Page Renouf and Edouard Naville

funeral chamber. The four walls, which should be vertical, are drawn lying flat on the ground. In the middle of the chamber, under a canopy, is the mummy, on which Anubis lays his hands; under the bed is a bird with a human head, the symbol of the soul of the deceased. We must suppose that the god Anubis is a priest, or a member of the family, who has put on a jackal’s head, and who pronounces the words said to be those of the god. At the foot of the bed are the two goddesses Isis and Nephthys. Each of the four walls had a small niche of the exact size of an amulet, which was lodged in it. We know it from the four oriented steles of Marseilles (Naville, _Les quatre stèles orientées du Musée de Marseille_), where we find the text belonging to each wall, and also the niche cut in the stone for each amulet. On the North was a human figure, on the South a flame, on the East a jackal, on the West a Tat. In the chamber were four so-called canopic vases, with the gods of the four cardinal points, each of whom has his words to say. Besides these were statuettes called _shabti_ or _ushabti_, the helpers of the deceased in his work in the Elysian fields. In the papyrus London, 10010 (_Af._), from which this chapter is translated, one of them has the usual appearance, the other the head of Anubis. The soul of the deceased is supposed to be in the chamber, and to worship the rising and the setting sun. Very few papyri have this chapter as complete as _Af._, which is taken here as standard for text and vignettes, but there are fragments of it here and there. The Turin version is much shorter than the old one. The papyrus of _Nu_ (ed. Budge) contains the texts of the four walls with rubrics very similar to those of the steles in Marseilles. They form a special chapter joined to 137A, with the title: _What is done secretly in the Tuat, the mysteries of the Tuat, the introduction into the mysteries of the Netherworld._ In order to facilitate the understanding of the chapter, I have lettered the words spoken by the various figures.