This is the hieroglyphic text of Chapter 30 of the Book of the Dead. This text, or portions of it, often appeared on the back side of the heart scarab wrapped into a mummy, above the deceased's heart. It is a plea to the heart of the deceased not to betray its owner and speak badly of him (or her) when they face eternal judgement before Osiris and seek admittance into the afterlife.

The Book of the Dead is not really a book. Rather, it is a collection of texts that appeared in various places within a tomb. It came into being in the Seventeenth Dynasty (around 1600 BCE) as a successor to the Pyramid Texts. No single tomb included every one of the texts or "chapters". Egyptologists, having collected and collated these texts from many different tombs called them a "book" although they were never actually in book form in ancient Egypt.

This version of Chapter 30 is from The Papyrus of Ani as reproduced in Budge's Egyptian Book of the Dead, first published in 1895. (Thanks to John Sarr for corrections to Budge. See his recent scarab project.) The images here were composed in a beta version of Hierowriter, our web-based hieroglyph-writing tool.