The Book of the Dead was never a book, and ancient Egyptians never called it that. The name was coined in 1842 by German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius; the Egyptians knew these texts as spells of coming forth by day. This deep dive traces the evolution from Pyramid Texts carved for pharaohs around 2400 BC, through Coffin Texts painted for wealthy elites, to New Kingdom papyrus scrolls that a scribe, official, or priest could buy for a deben of silver, roughly half a year's wages. Workshops prefabricated scrolls with blank spaces for the buyer's name, and red ochre ink marked titles, ritual instructions, and the names of dangerous demons.

The episode explains why the stakes felt so high by walking through the Egyptian anatomy of the self: the body, the heart, the ka, the ba, the shadow, and the name, all of which threatened to fly apart  ...