These words of Renouf have still a very great force, although in the last twenty years some progress has been made towards a better understanding of the text. When Renouf gave the above description of the difficulties of the translation, the main source from which he could derive his information was what he called “the corrupt Turin text.” Since then a critical edition has been made.[4] It is based on texts of the XVIIIth and XIXth dynasties, written at a time when the intelligence of the book was not lost to the same extent as under the Saïtes or the Ptolemies, as may be ascertained from the considerable number of glosses introduced into the Turin text which are absent from the older versions. This edition has been compiled from various papyri, as the older ones are much shorter than the later ones; it is not a single document like Lepsius’s _Todtenbuch_; most of the chapters have been found in their old form; a few are missing, but a good number have been added to the list which have fallen out of the late versions. Generally it is from this critical text that Renouf made his translation. Occasionally he may choose an older version from a tomb, or perhaps a papyrus of the British Museum, but he hardly ever reverts to the Turin _Todtenbuch_ unless he has no other resource at his disposal. Nevertheless the difficulties which Renouf enumerates are only partly removed. We are still very far from being able to give a final translation of the Book of the Dead, and I have no doubt that Renouf would repeat about his own work what he says of Dr. Birch’s translation, “Many parts of it, where most faithful to the original, must in consequence of that very fidelity be utterly unintelligible to an English reader.” No doubt Renouf’s translation is a great step towards making the book more intelligible; still the reader may often stumble over sentences out of which it is hardly possible to make a reasonable sense, in spite of their grammatical correctness, and which at first sight will seem childish, not to say, with Renouf, “outrageous nonsense.” But we may say with certainty that they were not so to the old Egyptians. Under this extraordinary or even ridiculous garment may be hidden some very simple, or even elementary truths. Let us remember that we have not yet unravelled all the intricacies of the Egyptian mythology, which plays such an important part in the book. Moreover, we only begin now to understand how the Egyptians expressed abstract ideas. When we speak of passion, shame, remorse, hope, we have so thoroughly lost sight of the concrete element in these words, that we are apt to forget that originally they must have been metaphors, and that they must have expressed something striking the senses, and connected with the material world. An instance will illustrate the difficulty in this translation.