The Vignettes in the Book of the Dead of Neferrenpet

The present volume is an inquiry into the illustrations found with practically every spell in the Book of the Dead of Neferrenpet, a sculptor from Deir el-Medîna who lived in the early nineteenth dynasty. After an attempt to recover the correct relation to the accompanying text, each vignette of the papyrus Neferrenpet is compared with parallels in older, contemporaneous and younger documents in order to establish the specific position of this Book of the Dead in the iconographical development as it becomes manifest in this type of funerary literature.

The Brussels part of the papyrus, published by Louis Speleers in 1917, could be complemented with a hitherto unpublished Book of the Dead from the University Museum in Philadelphia. Neferrenpet’s Book of the Dead (as far as preserved now) is photographically reconstituted on 42 plates. The extant sheets of a duplicate papyrus in the British Museum follow on six additional plates.