What is the approximate length of the Papyrus of Ani?

The Papyrus of Ani is approximately 78 feet long.

That extraordinary length reflects the manuscript’s format: it is a scroll made from joined sheets of papyrus rather than a bound book. The surviving document contains cursive hieroglyphic writing and colored vignettes illustrating Ani’s journey through the afterlife, including the weighing of his heart.

The papyrus was prepared for Ani, a Theban scribe, around 1250 BCE during the Nineteenth Dynasty. Its text belongs to the Egyptian funerary tradition commonly called the Book of the Dead, a collection of spells intended to help the deceased pass safely through the Duat and reach the afterlife.

The figure is an approximate overall length, not the measurement of one display frame. The British Museum catalogs the manuscript in numerous sections, whose individual frames are measured in centimeters. This can make museum records appear to show much shorter lengths, but those are measurements of separate mounted sections rather than the complete scroll.