Lhe Book of the Dead of the Ancient Egyptians has as its true title, at the time of ancient Egypt, Book to Come Out to Light. The "day" in question is that of the living, but also of any luminous principle opposing darkness, oblivion, annihilation and death. From this perspective, the deceased Egyptian seeks to travel in the boat of the sun god Re and cross the kingdom of Osiris (nocturnal version of the diurnal Sun in the process of regeneration). These are papyrus rolls, covered with funeral formulas, placed near or against the mummy, in the strips.
These different copies of the Book of the Dead are not all identical, because the beneficiary chooses the formulas that suit him, probably according to what he can afford because these manuscripts represent a significant investment. Some can therefore be short, while others reproduce the whole, or almost, of the corpus. In 1842, the German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius called Todtenbuch (Book of the Dead) a papyrus kept in the Egyptian Museum in Turin and of which he made a first translation. This name then stuck, although in modern Egyptian literature we often find the juxtaposition of the two titles, namely "Book of the Dead - Going out into the light".