The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead: A Guidebook for Surviving the Afterlife

The saying “You can’t take it with you” may be a cliché to all of us here in the twenty-first century, but it would hardly have made sense to an ancient Egyptian. One of the most widely known qualities of that civilization’s upper crust, after all, is that its members spared no expense trying to do just that. The most compelling evidence includes the tombs of the pharaohs, lavishly stocked as they were with everything from daily necessities to religious artifacts to servants (in effigy or otherwise).