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I responded to the cleanup tags on this article by effectively replacing the text. The replacement article is very short, as my sole source on the subject is cursory and I'm short on energy this evening. Unfortunate, but leaving out information is better than misrepresenting it. The old version of the article was written by the incoherent User:Drift chambers, based mainly on works by the outdated E. A. Wallis Budge. It seemed to conflate the Book of Traversing Eternity with the Book of the Dead in some way, so I don't trust much of what it said. (Budge applied the name "Book of the Dead" to the whole sequence of funerary texts from the Pyramid Texts to the Coffin Texts to the Saite Recension of what we think of as the Book of the Dead. I don't know whether he applied it to the Book of Traversing Eternity as well, or whether that was confusion introduced by Drift chambers.)
The old version of the article had one very solid source that I left out: a review by Terry Wilfong of Traversing Eternity by Mark Smith. Unfortunately, I couldn't tell from the review which of the funerary-text elements it describes were from the Book of Traversing Eternity itself and which were from other funerary texts from the same time period. Smith's book, though, will probably be indispensable for anyone who rewrites this article properly, so I'm copying the essential information about it and the link to the review below.
Bryn Mawr College Classical Review [Retrieved 2012-01-04] Mark Smith, Traversing Eternity: Texts for the Afterlife from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xviii, 725. ISBN 978-0-19-815464-8. Reviewed by T. G. Wilfong, The University of Michigan (twilfong@umich.edu)
A. Parrot (talk) 04:23, 17 May 2013 (UTC)[reply]
