Khonsumes done went and died

What, your phones broken? You couldn't call?

Clicken sie fer der größer.

This is actually a very good example of a portion of a scroll that Khonsumes commissioned for his own tomb. 

The book, Going Forth by Day is not an actual book. There is no such thing as Book of the Dead. Instead, the scrolls were vignettes that people of means commissioned from scribes for their individual scrolls, usually the most significant bits. It would be like picking and choosing your favorite parts of the bible. That is why no two examples are exactly the same. Most often the scrolls were pre-written and pre-painted with spaces left for names to be inserted. Chincy, isn't it? And isn't it ever so? The most heartfelt religious beliefs reduced to prosaic pedestrian commerce. Khonsumes (I associate the name with "consumes") was a priest himself, meaning a scribe himself, but he certainly did not write his own scrolls. 

You can actually see the handwriting change as scrolls progress with these things. You can see the virtuosity of the art change as well. You can see the difference in handwriting between text here and there, and between text and name of deceased, you can see where too much space or too little space is allowed for the name. I do not know of a single example where this is not so.

My own copy is among the best. The scroll of Ani now owned by the British Museum. Hard as h-e-double scroll sticks to follow. It does not read as the scroll reads. The actual scroll itself is cut into pieces. Budge (the often wrong British archaeologist) had to decide where to make the cuts and the British museum is stuck with those segments for display. The text in the book representing the museum's holding is cut further into pieces for reproduction based on importance and length for formatting. Translation is in pieces too and hardly matches at all. The text in English does not match the photograph on the pages. The complimentary literature explaining things helps but it is exhausting to keep checking back and forth, back and forth, struggling to match interpretation with text, additional explanatory literature, try as you might to follow, the thing is in chunks all over the place and wears you right out trying to make sense of it. Further, it is written in demotic, a shorthand sort of cursive of hieroglyphics that is somewhat idiosyncratic as handwriting is. The whole point was to help study hieroglyphics. I cannot make sense of it all and I have a terrible time using it as learning tool. But it is beautiful, very large format, and technically excellent. Even more so if you are already a pro.

Louvre visitor steps #15 here.