The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani, Scribe And Treasurer of the Temple of Egypt, About B.C. 1450. By E. Wallis Budge, M.A., Litt, D., Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum.  G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York..

The anticipation of pleasure and profit with which one takes up these new volumes of Mr. Budge is more than justified on a closer acquaintance with them. We must first content ourselves with a brief outline of the plan of the book. It is the former part of the double title to which the author first devotes his attention. Mention is made of the various Recensions of the Book of the Dead found in the later

dynasties of the Egyptian Empire, but all compiled from the early sources of funerary literature found in the more ancient Pyramid Texts, but doubtless even here repetitions of written and recited texts in use in that still further antiquity which is lost in the obscurity of the receding, unexplored past.

Among the Recensions it is the Theban to which the author gives especial attention, the one in use from the eighteenth to the twenty-first dynasties, and inscribed in various papyri of the period. One of these, the Papyrus of Ani, is the special subject of these volumes.

After this brief history of the Book of the Dead and a description of the entire Theban Recension, Mr. Budge devotes some space to the beliefs as. found in the Book of the Dead, more briefly and with more limited reference to their funerary character than in his “Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection.”1 He begins with the legend of Osiris briefly stated and given from the Greek legends, for as he says there is no connected account of this in Egyptian literature, only constant reference to Osiris showing that all concerning him was “universally admitted fact” needing no explanation. The legend is supplemented with quotations from the Book of the Dead and other texts. The ideas of the Egyptians concerning eternal life, God and the gods, and of the abode of the dead, as found in this funerary book, are given followed by a descriptive list of the gods of the Book of the Dead, of the places mentioned therein, and a ritual of funerary ceremonies performed for the dead, who identified with Osiris were the