Before the heart is weighed, the deceased in chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead recites a list of wrongs they claim not to have committed, addressed in turn to forty two assessor gods, one for each of Egypt's nomes or provinces. Each declaration takes the same form: I have not done this, spoken to a named god who personifies the offense being denied. The list ranges from grave wrongs, I have not killed, I have not stolen, to matters that read as ritual or administrative, I have not caused the Nile to overflow its banks at the wrong time, I have not blasphemed a god.
Because the declarations are addressed one by one to named deities rather than delivered as a single oath, the text is sometimes described as forty two separate denials rather than one statement. Surviving copies differ in the exact wording and order of the declarations, and Egyptologists do not treat any single papyrus, including the well preserved Papyrus of Ani, as a fixed canonical text; the form was flexible within a shared template across the centuries it was copied. Scholars group the declarations loosely into moral offenses against other people, ritual offenses against temple purity, and offenses against the state of the Nile and the land itself, though the papyri themselves impose no such formal grouping and the order varies from copy to copy.