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Anubis kneels at the foot of the scales and reads the beam, with one hand up to the weight on its cord. Ammit crouches beside him, a creature with crocodile jaws over a lion’s mane. She ate the hearts that came down heavy, and the dead person simply ended.

A scribe named Hunefer is dead, and the worst part of the afterlife is a courtroom. On the papyrus buried with him, around 1275 BC, the whole ordeal plays out left to right like a strip of film. Anubis, the jackal-headed god of embalming, leads Hunefer in by the hand. Then Anubis kneels at a great balance and does the only test that matters. One pan holds Hunefer’s heart. The other holds a single ostrich feather, the feather of Maat, who is truth and right order. The heart has to weigh no more than the feather. An Egyptian believed the heart, not the brain, held the record of everything a person had done, and here it is put on the scale to be read. Crouched under the balance waits the thing everyone dreaded. She is called Ammit, the Devourer, drawn as a hybrid of the three animals Egyptians feared most: the head of a crocodile, the front of a lion, the hindquarters of a hippopotamus. If the heart came down heavy with wrongdoing, she ate it, and the dead person simply ended, no second death and no underworld, just gone. Standing by with a scribe’s palette is Thoth, the ibis-headed god of writing, there to record the verdict in his own hand, because in Egypt nothing was real until it was written down. The Book of the Dead even supplied Hunefer with the words to say to his own heart: do not stand as a witness against me. Hunefer passed. Beyond the scales the falcon-headed Horus takes him by the hand and presents him to Osiris, green-skinned king of the dead. Osiris sits enthroned in a shrine at the end of the line, with Isis and Nephthys behind him and the four sons of Horus standing on an open lotus before the throne. The papyrus is not a scene the artist imagined. It is a legal document Hunefer ordered for himself, a not-guilty verdict painted in advance and rolled into his coffin so the trial could only go one way. Hunefer was a royal scribe and overseer of cattle under Seti I. His Book of the Dead, now sheet by sheet in the British Museum, is one of the finest that survives, the drawing crisp and the color still bright. In the top register a jury of gods sits in a row, watching. The balance holds level. The feather has not moved.