Books of Breathing

The Books of Breathing is an important Ancient Egyptian funerary text of the Late Period and the Roman Period.

Scholar Hugh Nibley gives a short description of the Book of Breathings; "For the Book of Breathings is before all else, as Bonnet observes, a composite, made up of "compilations and excerpts from older funerary sources and mortuary formulas." [H. Bonnet, Reallexikon der �gyptischen Religionsgeschichte (Berlin, 1952), p. 59.] From the Second Book of Breathings, hardly distinguishable from it, it blends off into such earlier writings as "The Book of Passing through the Eternities," the "Amduat," and the "Book of Gates," in which we recognize most of the ideas and even phrases of the "Sensen" Papyrus. [W. Wreszinski, "Das Buch von Durchwandern der Ewigkeit," Aegyptische Zeitschrift (AZ) 45 (1908), pp. 111ff; Chassinat, "Le Livre second des Respirations," p. 315.]"

See also

• Book of the Dead
• Book of Abraham

References

• Hornung, Erik (1999). The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (in German). David Lorton (translator). Cornell University Press. 
• Nibley, Hugh (2005). The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: an Egyptian Endowment. Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book Company. 
• Nibley, Hugh. "What is 'The Book of Breathings'?". BYU Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, (Winter, 1971). BYU. Retrieved 2/10/2013.