Green god ... Anhai's statuette of Osiris at the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead exhibition. Photograph: Trustees Of The British Museum  Statues are speaking at the British Museum. The dead are coming to life. The statue in front of me is a small painted wooden figure of the god Osiris, just over half a metre high, in a glass case in one of the first rooms of this engrossing exhibition. It is instantly striking, because of the bright green of its face and hands, but its verbal eloquence lies hidden inside.  It was made as a container for a rolled-up papyrus that "speaks" for its owner to the gods: a Book of the Dead, a collection of magic spells to help a departed person on their journey through the Western Lands, where gods and monsters live and the dead walk. The Book of the Dead was an illustrated guide to this landscape, as well as a survival kit of spells to repel dangers and get the gods on your side.  This particular statue, and the papyrus it held, belonged to Anhai, a woman of high rank from a powerful priestly family in the Egyptian New Kingdom, who died in about 1100 BC. Her book, like others, was not only meticulously filled with spells written by scribes but illuminated with bright, crisp paintings that show crucial scenes and deities. The figures in these pictures stand or walk in profile – the Egyptians never did learn to portray people in the round, as the Greeks would – and have a crystal-clear beauty. Anhai's paintings portray her as tall and slender, with long, braided black hair, being led by the falcon-headed god Horus, who tightly grasps her wrist, towards the gates of the dead.  When this collection of often-enigmatic pronouncements was first collated and translated by 19th-century scholars, it was seen as a kind of Egyptian Bible. An 1898 translation by the British Museum's expert EA Wallis Budge gave it the sonorities of the King James translation to make the point, inspiring many a mummy-related horror film and fuelling a remote image of ancient Egypt.  But this show vividly demonstrates that this image is false: what we actually see here are individualised books of the dead, each one making a different choice from the corpus of spells, movingly personalised with portraits of the dead person. In a book belonging to Ani, a royal scribe who died in about 1275 BC, we even see him and his wife Tutu playing a board game called senet – a game seen as symbolic of the journey through the afterlife, but also here inspiring a lovely domestic scene.  Real-life details fill these books of the dead. Gardens, houses, feasts, clothes, animals and boats are lovingly portrayed. The texts themselves are also very beautiful: it is amazing to look at precisely inked writing that is more than 3,000 years old, a thousand years before Julius Caesar. So why are there comparatively few quotes in this exhibition? Although Budge's translation is now considered dated, there are clear, modern English translations of many of these spells, and surely there should be more of them on the walls.  The show does not stint on deathly drama, however. The setting, under the dome of the old British Museum reading room, is strikingly exploited with ghostly lighting and deep shadows; a mummy's burial chamber is even recreated inside. As you proceed from this tomb into the realms of the dead, in this case represented by an array of coffins, sculpted stones, masks, bandages and papyri, you enter – as the Ba, the bird-like detachable spirit of the deceased, would – a strange limbo-like land of gates and passages and journeys. At last you come to the Hall of Judgment. Each Egyptian had to stand before Osiris while her or his heart was weighed by Anubis. In the other scale was the feather of Maat, goddess of balance and rightness; the terrifying Devourer crouched nearby, waiting to eat the hearts of sinners. In these papyri, artists have great fun imagining the Devourer – part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus.  If your heart was free from sin, you proceeded on towards the Field of Reeds, a paradise that looked exactly like the real Egypt and where the dead could do what they did in life, but without illness or pain. They are portrayed working in the fields, although, if you were asked to do anything too onerous in the afterlife (and were rich enough), you could get shabti figures – servile statuettes – that were buried to take on the task.  As this exhibition reveals, no civilisation ever had a stronger belief in the afterlife than Egypt. Greeks and Roman myths focus overwhelmingly on this life; Egypt, with one foot in prehistory, looked over the horizon to the place where the setting sun vanished. Yet ancient Egyptians lived 35 years on average. Their obsession with the afterlife was a response to that reality. And in their desire to perpetuate existence, they demonstrated their passion for the world. They loved life and wanted it to go on forever. In the end, perhaps there is nothing spooky in this exhibition at all. It is a hymn to the sun.
Jonathan Jones: The Egyptian guides to the afterlife tell us much about their creators' love for this life