Taminiu

A detail from the funerary papyrus of Taminiu, around 950 B.C. This section shows a series of mummified demons that the deceased must pass on the way to the afterlife.

The oldest surviving example of scrolls from the Book of the Dead date at around 1900 BC, almost four thousand years old. But writing stretches back to the thirtieth century B.C. which suggests that the funerary scrolls from that period have now passed through to their own afterlife. Irony, an indispensable weapon in the Illustrators arsenal.

The examples that I have shown so far are purely pictoral but this is a distorted picture. The majority of the scrolls were image combined with text. Illustration.