From Heritage Daily:
The Book of the Dead is the name given to a corpus of ancient Egyptian magical, ritual and funerary texts, aiming at protecting the body of the deceased and to accompany him or her during the journey in the regions of the Duat, the ancient Egyptian netherworld. The Egyptians called this collection “peret em heru”, “going out by day or in the sunlight”, which was a metaphor for rebirth and eternal life after the liminal stage of death. The corpus is attested for a very long span of time, from the beginning of the New Kingdom (1500 BC) to the Greco-Roman period (332 BC – AD 380). The objects where Book of the Dead spells and vignettes (illustrations) occur are part of the funerary equipment used for the burial rituals: papyri first of all, mummy bandages, linen, coffins, stelas, amulets, canopic boxes (used to keep the soft interiors of the body before mummification) and statuettes; selections of Book of the Dead spells occur also on tomb and temple walls. (Read more.)
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