Its most famous scene is the weighing of the heart: in the hall of judgement the heart of the deceased is set on a balance against the feather of Maat, truth and cosmic order, while Anubis adjusts the scales, Thoth records the verdict, and the monster Ammit waits to devour the heart of anyone who fails, the deceased meanwhile reciting the "negative confession," a declaration of sins not committed. Spell 125, this judgement scene, is the moral heart of the collection. A word on transmission: the English name and the most widely circulated old translation both come from E. A. Wallis Budge, whose Papyrus of Ani (1895) made the text famous but whose renderings and interpretations are now regarded by Egyptologists as outdated and often unreliable; the standard modern English translations, such as Raymond Faulkner's, should be preferred for accuracy.
Karl Richard Lepsius, the German Egyptologist who published the first systematic edition of the corpus in 1842, coined the now-standard title "Book of the Dead," translating an Arabic phrase used by nineteenth-century antiquities dealers for papyri found with mummies rather than the ancient Egyptian title itself, properly the Book of Coming Forth by Day; the corpus is not a single fixed book but a repertoire of several hundred spells from which each owner, or the workshop preparing a papyrus, selected a customised subset. The text's development stretches back through the Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts to the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts inscribed in royal tombs, a genre history in which funerary literature reserved for kings became available, over more than a thousand years, to officials and eventually to anyone who could afford a scribe.