While the film The Mummy has led us all to believe that the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead looks like something you might find in your local esoteric or New Age store, it actually wasn’t a book at all. We know, we know, why would Rachel Weiss and Brendan Fraser lie to us? It’s all very sad.

Seeing as it wasn’t a book as we might understand it, the Book of the Dead is actually a collection of papyrus and mummy wrappings with funerary spells on them. The spells would be spoken aloud and then placed in the tomb with the mummy (or straight onto the wrappings) so that they could then read them in the afterlife.

There are thought to be 200 chapters to the collection of spells and rites but they haven’t all been found yet. So who knows, maybe somewhere out there is the bit Rachel Weiss reads aloud in The Mummy, thus awakening a terrible creature and bringing a plague upon humanity? Probably not. After all, “no harm ever came from reading a book!”