This text was found in the tomb of someone named Hunefer, a scribe. So these were really important texts that were originally just for kings in the Old Kingdom, but came to be used by people who were not just part of the royal family, but still people of high rank, and that's what we're looking at here. Sometimes the texts were written on papyrus, like the one we are looking at, sometimes they were written on shrouds that the dead were burried in. These were sense of instructions for the afterlife, and than later we have coffin text, writing on coffins and then even later in the New Kingdom, we have scrolls like this that we call the books of the dead. This is a tradition that goes all the way back to the Old Kingdom, writing that we call pyramid text.
![kingdom of the dead book kingdom of the dead book](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/c2/6a/67c26a3894d93b3b244cb64343037625.jpg)
We're looking at a written text of something that we call the Book of the Dead which the ancient Egyptians had other names for, but which was a ancient text that had spell and prayers and incantations, things that the dead needed in the afterlife. A papyrus is a reed that grows in the Nile Delta that was made into a kind of paper-like substance and actually was probably the sigle most important surface for writing right up into the Medieval. We're looking at a fragment of a scroll which is largely ignored.
![kingdom of the dead book kingdom of the dead book](http://p9.storage.canalblog.com/98/96/577050/54384077.jpg)
It's a great room, there's great stuff here.
![kingdom of the dead book kingdom of the dead book](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a7/fc/5f/a7fc5fd953221602e0c31c3f1d7e85f8.jpg)
We're in the Brithish Museum in London, in a room that is filled with ancient Egiptian mummies, and as a result it's also filled with modern children.