The Oxford Handbook of the Egyptian Book of the Dead

Among the broad spectrum of ancient Egyptian religious literature, the Book of the Dead is the most representative of ancient Egyptian mortuary religion and of the magical and ritual practices belonging to it. Moreover, its rich corpus of texts and images provides unique information on the scribal practices, mortuary traditions, myths, and priestly rituals in ancient Egypt from the 2nd Millennium BCE to the Roman Period. The Oxford Handbook of the Egyptian Book of the Dead is the first major guide to collect and synthesize the wide-ranging body of scholarship on the Book of the Dead as well as the broader literature on ancient Egyptian religion and magic. Useful for both curious undergraduates and advanced scholars, this collection of contributions from specialists in the field will become a go-to resource for years to come on everything from the textual history of the Book of the Dead to its material origins and historical reception. Editors Rita Lucarelli and Martin Andreas Stadler have curated a singular volume that is both state of the art and comprehensive.

Rita Lucarelli is Associate Professor of Egyptology at UC Berkeley and Faculty Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology of the University of California, Berkeley and Fellow of the Digital Humanities in Berkeley. She worked as a Research Scholar and a Lecturer at the Department of Egyptology of Bonn University, where she was part of the team of the "Book of the Dead Project". She is presently working at a project aiming at realizing 3D models of ancient Egyptian coffins, the "Book of the Dead in 3D". She is also completing a new monograph on demonology in ancient Egypt entitled Agents of Punishment and Protection: Ancient Egyptian Demonology in the First Millenium BCE, and she is one of the coordinators of the international project "Ancient Egyptian Demonology Project", or "Demon Things." Martin Andreas Stadler is Professor of Egyptology at the University of Würzburg. He taught as acting professor at the University of Tübingen in 2009/10, and was visiting professor in Paris 2015. His principal research interests are Egyptian funerary art, demotic literature and Egyptian Religion, including the Ptolemaic-Roman era studying whether and how the Egyptians maintained their cultural identity during the periods of Greek and Roman governance.