The Papyrus of Ani is a papyrus manuscript with cursive hieroglyphs and color illustrations created c. 1250 BCE, in the 19th dynasty of the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt. Egyptians compiled an individualized book for certain people upon their death, called the Book of Going Forth by Day, more commonly known as the Book of the Dead, typically containing declarations and spells to help the deceased in their afterlife. The Papyrus of Ani is the manuscript compiled for the Thebanscribe Ani.
It was stolen from an Egyptian government storeroom in 1888 by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, as described in his two-volume By Nile and Tigris,[1][2] for the collection of the British Museum where it remains today. Before shipping the manuscript to England, Budge cut the seventy-eight foot scroll into thirty-seven sheets of nearly equal size, damaging the scroll's integrity at a time when technology had not yet allowed the pieces to be put back together.
^Budge, E.A. Wallis; Romer, John (2008). The Egyptian Book of the Dead. United States: Penguin Classics. p. xxxiii. ISBN9780140455502.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day, The First Authentic Presentation of the Complete "Papyrus of Ani", Introduction and commentary by Dr. Ogden Goelet, Translation by Dr. Raymond O. Faulkner, Preface by Carol Andrews, Featuring Integrated Text and Full Color Images, (Chronicle Books, San Francisco) c1994, Rev. ed. c1998. Contains: Map Key to the Papyrus, Commentary by Dr. Ogden Goelet, Selected Bibliography, and "Glossary of Terms and Concepts".
Eternal Egypt: Masterworks of Ancient Art from the British Museum, Edna Russmann.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead: (The Papyrus of Ani), (Dover Ed., New York), c1895, Dover ed., 1967. Egyptian Text Transliteration and Translation, Introduction, etc. by Sir E.A.Wallis Budge.