A New York Times obit writer scribed a fun piece contemplating the Egyptian Book of Going Forth By Day, in honor of a spectular example of this work that’s currently on exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. The article starts:
“What’s next?” As a New York Times obituary writer, it’s a question I’ve never dared ask.
While interviewing prominent people as I craft in-depth profiles in advance of their deaths, I don’t want to miss the story. But the answer is, nobody knows for sure.
A news obituary is a biography about a life that begins at the end. It mentions death only once; it never suggests what, if anything, follows — a prospect so many people have contemplated for thousands of years, whether what they hope or think comes next is heaven or reincarnation or an oblivion equivalent to the one we were in before we were born.
I was reminded of this gap in my reporting by the death in ancient Egypt of a man named Ankhmerwer more than two millenniums ago.
There were no newspapers or obituary pages back then. But Ankhmerwer’s death did not go unrecorded. It was memorialized on a rare, intact, gold-accented funerary scroll 21 feet long, known as a Book of the Dead. Those types of books predate The Times’s obit pages by about 3,000 years. Ankhmerwer’s scroll, gold amulets, reed pens and other ancient artifacts went on public display last month, perhaps for the first time ever, curators say, in the Brooklyn Museum’s Egyptian galleries, for an exhibition titled “Unrolling Eternity: The Brooklyn Books of the Dead.”
Read the entire article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/19/arts/design/book-of-the-dead-brooklyn-museum-obituary.html
