Writing an Ancient Egyptian Afterlife, in 21 Feet of Scroll

As an obituary writer I found myself at the Brooklyn Museum, face to face with the gilded Book of the Dead of Ankhmerwer, a 21-foot funerary scroll now on view in the exhibition “Unrolling Eternity.” The scroll, believed to have been found in a tomb near Memphis early in the 19th century by Henry Abbott, was part of a collection later purchased by the New‑York Historical Society and transferred to the Brooklyn Museum.

After being stashed away for roughly 150 years, it has undergone a three‑year restoration by conservators Ahmed Tarek and Josephine Jenks with support from a Bank of America grant and is displayed unfurled from beginning to end. “Book of the Dead” is a misnomer; a more accurate rendering is “Spells of Coming Forth by Day.” These scrolls are not biographies but compilations of incantations and magic spells assembled by priests for the benefit of the deceased.

United States, Brooklyn, New York

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