To accomplish all the necessities the Egyptians believed in, they relied on spells and invocations, which were collected in a series of funerary texts such as the Pyramid Texts. By the era of the New Kingdom, the most popular funerary text was The Book of the Dead, one of the most evocative titles of literature in the history of humankind. Its mystical writings offer a glimpse into a realm of magical thinking beyond the skills of most writers of fiction.
Resplendent with highly accomplished artwork, The Book of the Dead has enraptured scholars and laymen for centuries. For that reason, it may surprise many that The Book of the Dead does not actually exist as a book. In fact, what is referred to as The Book of the Dead today is actually the accumulation of around 400 spells that exist in transliteration and translation from the whole gamut of Egyptian history. The name was given to this collection of texts by modern Egyptologists, but the fact remains that no one text contains all of the spells associated with this body of work. To the ancient Egyptians, these spells would have loosely contributed to a collection known as The Book of Coming Forth by Day. This moniker is extremely important to the understanding of its primary purpose: returning from the depths of "night."
