How to Merge with the Gods

When Foy Scalf was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, he learned about a group of first-to second-century papyrus manuscripts scattered in museum collections in Europe and Egypt that had never been fully studied or translated.

They were religious texts written in Demotic, a late script of ancient Egyptian notoriously difficult to learn due to its scrawling cursive and similar-looking signs. Scalf was already drawn to challenging questions about civilizations’ origins and the intertwined realms of ancient religion and magic, so the warning of “notoriously difficult” appealed to him.

“I’m fascinated by how our relationship to the world around us has developed,” he says. “Reading the texts from ancient cultures shows me that they struggled with many of the same things we do: a meaningful life in a complicated environment. Finding such similarities between people many continents and millennia apart helps to build a shared empathy and understanding between all of us.”

After gaining proficiency in Demotic, Scalf traveled to the British Museum, Louvre, and other museums to analyze the unstudied religious manuscripts, work that became his dissertation. He also worked as an epigrapher at archaeological digs in Egypt, examining and translating administrative inscriptions written on clay pottery fragments (known as ostraca) or cylinder seal impressions. “Every day when we commuted to work, we got in a little truck and drove up to the Great Pyramid and then walked around the fields of tombs around the pyramids at Giza,” he recalls. “It was mind-blowing. I miss it, but a lot of the work I’m still doing is very similar. I’m still reading from original, unpublished texts—many of which nobody’s read in two or three thousand years.”

Today Scalf heads the research archives at the University of Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures and oversees databases of ancient inscriptions. He may not be reading from objects days after their excavation, but categorizing and analyzing digital images of text from collections around the world yields its own wealth of discovery. As a scholar, he’s spent the last several years focused on the origins and evolution of the Book of the Dead, a huge body of religious writings that preceded the unexplored Demotic papyri he examined for his dissertation.

Book of the Spells

Neither a book, nor primarily about death, the name “Book of the Dead” is misleading. It is a collection of nearly 200 spells, or ritual incantations and instructions, that played an essential role in the religious life and burial practices of Egyptians for nearly 1,500 years, from about 1550 to 50 BCE.

The spells were written in hieroglyphs and hieratic, a cursive form of hieroglyphs (both predecessors to Demotic), often with illustrated vignettes. Priest-scribes were responsible for copying, and reinterpreting, the texts, resulting in a wide range of spell selections, orders, and wording. Like stating positive affirmations aloud, some spells declare the deceased’s new identity as divine with first-person language, associating them with gods: “I am Osiris, I am Hapy,” etc. Scalf notes a spell in which the deceased claims each of their body parts as different gods. “Their eyes are one goddess. Their ears are another god, their tongue, their lips, their teeth, their hands, their legs—all are gods.”

There is great variety too—some spells offer poetic visions of “joining with the stars,” while others are more pragmatic, intent on warding off bugs. The spells were likely familiar to all Egyptians through shared oral traditions, no matter their status, and were an integral part of everyday life, in which the realms of magic, medicine, and religion were undivided.

The spells appeared on an abundant range of objects (for those who could afford them): carved into figurines, amulets, and stone sarcophagi; painted onto coffins, tomb walls, and wooden tablets; inked onto thousands of papyrus scrolls; written on the rough linen cloth of mummy shrouds and wrap-pings. Even King Tutankhamen’s famous golden mummy mask bears a protective spell. Often, many of these methods would be used simultaneously for one person’s burial. “You can imagine if you’re an ancient Egyptian with money and you’re worried about your afterlife, this is one way to do something about it,” Scalf explains. “You make this layered approach where you’re literally wrapping yourself in a magical cocoon of text.”

The name “Book of the Dead” was bestowed upon the texts by a German scholar in 1842 (Das Todtenbuch), but an actual translation is closer to “Spells for Going Forth by Day.” In death, ancient Egyptians believed the spirit separated from the body and emerged from the tomb to join with the sun god Re. Upon setting in the west, the spirit was transformed, merging with the gods—particularly Re and Osiris, god of the dead—and accompanying them in their daily solar cycle of eternal rebirth. By reciting or reading the spells during one’s life and afterlife, one could manifest this process of transfiguration and safely complete the journey.

The process of understanding this profound body of writing continues as additional fragments, with new versions of the spells, are discovered.

Sealed Away for 40 Years

In 2017 staff at the Getty Villa Museum carefully unpacked storage boxes holding Egyptian Book of the Dead manuscripts that had not been seen by anyone in years. The unrolled papyrus scrolls and strips of linen mummy wrappings had remained in storage since arriving at the museum as a donation in 1983. Before that, the group had been in private collections for over a century, after coming to England sometime before the 1870s. While small, this group of 19 objects has a remarkable span of 1,400 years, representing both the early and late phases of Book of the Dead production.

“We realized we had this significant body of material that had never been displayed, let alone fully translated and analyzed,” explains Getty curator Sara E. Cole, who organized Getty’s exhibition The Egyptian Book of the Dead (November 1, 2023–January 29, 2024). “We developed a plan to publish the manuscripts, and that’s when I reached out to Foy Scalf.”