THERE IS A water main break at the Minya antiquities magazine, which means that the coffins cannot be moved there as planned. Fortunately, no artifacts already inside were harmed, but the building itself is hard to get in and out of, so the decision is made to transport everything to the Dig House magazine for more detailed study, and to station extra police guards there for protection.

It also means that Wyatt and I will have round-the-clock access to the coffin. I could literally roll out of bed, and study the Book of Two Ways. But if I had any dream of my head bent beside Wyatt’s as we pored over the image on the coffin floor together, it vanishes as I realize that this discovery only means there is even more work to be done, and I am not the one who decides what we get to analyze first.

Fifteen years ago, I’d been writing my thesis on how the coffin was a microcosm of both the tomb and the universe itself. At a basic level, each funerary text contained information the deceased would need in the afterlife. But zoom out a bit, and the coffin itself became a miniature of the cosmos, from the sky painted on the lid to the map of the Book of Two Ways on the floor, to the mummy that filled the space in between. Zoom out again, and the tomb itself—with its superstructure of a public chapel space and underground burial chamber and the coffin contained within—was another symbolic representation of the layers of the universe.

But here, in the Dig House magazine, we are deconstructing even further. Set on separate sawhorses, the inner coffin and the exterior coffin are both intact and quite large, with walls over a meter high. We’ve set up scaffolding so that we can climb up and look inside, but even so, the text is small and distant enough for it to be a struggle to see. Instead, we rely on Alberto to photograph, his camera affixed to a long pole.

I have already started copying the art in the coffins, tracing it on my iPad so that Alberto will be able to input the images into a three-dimensional digital representation. Wyatt has directed me to start with the paintings on the inside of the exterior coffin, which are so breathtaking that I cannot do them justice. On my screen I can see the brushstrokes of the artist, the shading and detail that leap off the cedar in white and sienna and blue directly across from where Djehutynakht’s head would have faced. There is the head of an ibex, its horns grooved and its ear patterned. A huge ceremonial wine jar in terra cotta is given dimension with a white highlight on one side. There are tables groaning with fruits and vegetables and meat and cones of bread, the haunch of a steer with spotted skin, a coiled rope with individually articulated fibers and strands, and one stunning goose whose broad wings are painted with mottled feathers in every shade of gray. The most intricate artwork is the ornately drawn false door through which the ba soul can slip between the Netherworld and the tomb. Above it is a text asking for offerings from the king and Osiris on festival days, with a handy list of suggested items on the far right side of the wall.

My eyes are burning after an hour of painstaking work on the iPad. I rub them, and glance at Wyatt. He is deep into his own iPad images, his mouth silently moving as he murmurs transliterations of texts that Alberto has already photographed on the sides of Djehutynakht’s inner coffin. There are 1185 individual spells within the Coffin Texts; he has to figure out which ones Djehutynakht included.

He isn’t paying attention to what I’m doing, so I glance at the inner coffin. As on the outer coffin, there are udjat eyes on its outside front panel. These line up with a matching pair of udjat eyes on the flip side of the wood, painted above a false door, as if the mummy would have been able to peer through both sets of them to see through the wood and look at all the gorgeous artwork I’ve been copying from the inside of the exterior coffin. On the floor of the coffin is the telltale wavy map of the Book of Two Ways. I flip through the digital files until I find the photographs Alberto has taken of it.

When I first studied the Book of Two Ways, I didn’t start with Egypt. I began with maps—Anaximander’s world map from Greece in the sixth century B.C.E., Fra Mauro’s medieval map, the Atlas Maior, maps of Atlantis and Middle-earth, maps of what the United States would have looked like if the South had seceded and Europe if D-Day had never happened. Maps don’t have to be literal. They don’t have to be to scale, or to be tangible. They might be drawn to depict the real world, to dream a fictional space, or to inspire a symbolic one—like medieval maps of cathedrals that moved from door to nave to altar in a journey toward Christ. In that sense, the map mirrors the belief system of its maker—just like the Book of Two Ways. Middle Kingdom artists sketched a graphic image of how to walk through the afterlife, complete with entry points and impassable gates and lakes of fire. Crossing this landscape successfully was like winning the best ever season of Survivor, with an eternal home in the same neighborhood as the gods. Here in Deir el-Bersha, there have been four published generations of coffins with the Book of Two Ways in them. Wyatt’s will precede them all.

Djehutynakht’s coffin contains the long version of the Book of Two Ways, 101 spells, which cover two long bands on the cedar floor, and which are broken into segments. It begins at sunrise as Djehutynakht sets sail on the sun god’s solar bark. The distinctive geographic map—the upper blue water route and the lower black land route—comes next. The trails are divided by a red band, the “Lake of Fire of the knife-wielders.” Text fills the rest of the space, describing mountains and fields and rivers and shrines and the names of armed monsters trying to knock the deceased off course. In the loops and hills and valleys, there are tiny, faint pictures of these beasts. Finally, the deceased gets special clothing and accessories to show that he’s conquered this part of the journey, and has made it to Rosetau, the place of hauling, where a coffin would have been moved into a tomb.

In the next section, things only get harder. There are three chambers with fiery walls guarded by “watchers.” If the deceased survives this hurdle, he gets tossed into the paths of confusion on the flint walls in Rosetau, where illustrated tracks crisscross. Beyond that are demons with heads made of scarabs, and demons who hold snakes and lizards, who must be defeated before the deceased reaches Osiris and can live forever.

There is a shorter version of the Book of Two Ways that usually ends here, but in Djehutynakht’s coffin, there is more: an appeal to the god Thoth, patron of this geographic region; and then a thick block of text with no stories or descriptions of the afterlife. Instead, it is a justification of the life of the deceased, meant to prove him worthy of sailing with Re. Then seven gates are shown, each with a more terrible guardian. Finally, the deceased channels his immortality, and is compared to both Re at sunrise and Osiris in the underworld.

This map was the way an Ancient Egyptian reached the afterlife. But it also shows us what Ancient Egyptians thought of the afterlife. This wasn’t all pearly gates and cherubs playing harps. The gates were on fire, and the creatures were terrifying—chimeras with human heads and animal torsos and knives, snake bodies and wings and claws. In this Book of Two Ways, I find a baboon-snake chimera wielding a knife in the water route, and a leopard-bodied monster with a cow head and divine horns.

There’s another image, too. I scroll lower on the photograph, zooming in on it. A seated man, a white crown, a crook and flail in his hands. This is no monster, but a classic Middle Kingdom image of Osiris, seated on a stepped platform, with Thoth as a baboon above him—a direct allusion to the Judgment Hall of Osiris in the much later Netherworld Books. Beside him are empty scale pans. It’s drawn in the part of the Book of Two Ways that is usually solely text, no illustrations.

Scrambling up the side of the scaffolding, I check the photograph against the actual art in the coffin. This can’t be right. I’ve never seen a Book of Two Ways with Osiris and scales in it before. In fact, the only place you ever see that is in Spell 125 of the Book of Going Forth by Day, where the heart of the deceased is weighed against the white feather of truth.

Except that text will not exist for another four hundred years.

“Wyatt,” I say, “I think you should come look at this.”

He glances up from his iPad and frowns at me. “You’re supposed to be working on the exterior coffin,” he says, but he climbs up beside me on the scaffolding.

“I may be rusty,” I tell him, “but I think this is the Hall of Two Truths.”

“From the Book of Going Forth by Day?” he says. “It can’t be. That’s New Kingdom.”