New Scientist
Image: Fæ
The Book of Two Ways, a guide to the Ancient Egyptian underworld, is perhaps the first illustrated book in history – and now archaeologists have found remains of the oldest known copy. The discovery comes at a time when researchers are rethinking the meaning of the archaic text and its enigmatic images.
About a century ago, Egyptologists began finding strange annotated drawings inside 4000-year-old wooden coffins buried in a necropolis called Dayr al-Barsh?. Among the drawings was a panel on which there were two long, meandering lines (pictured above) that seemed to be described as roads in the surrounding hieroglyphic text. Elsewhere, the text appeared to offer instructions for travelling through the underworld towards the resting place of the god Osiris – a journey that, if successful, would secure a happy afterlife.
This suggested to researchers that the illustrations were a map of the underworld, with the meandering lines representing two paths the dead could take on their travels. For this reason, they dubbed the document the Book of Two Ways. Read more on newscientist.com…
