I’ve read a lot about this but nobody ever gives a clear picture. You go through the departments of the afterlife which some say are in the sky and others under ground. Which is it? Does anybody know for sure? Do the deceased travel with the king, who is in the form of a mummified ram-headed deity in some of the lands of the dead, and later on as a scarab-headed man, I think. I read in one account that at dawn the pharaoh goes back to his tomb when the sun rises. But it says the sun IS the pharaoh. And in any case why wouldn’t he get to travel with the sun during the day? Doesn’t the sun god and the pharaoh get tired of the same thing every day, the same monsters to battle every night? It also says somewhere else that the deceased go to the Field of Reeds after they are in the Duat, in one of the chambers of which they are judged whether they committed about 32 or 58 sins, most of which overlap and repeat untidily. Is the pharaoh there too?
Why did they bother with the mummies and statues (except for the same reason we bother to our extent with these things, which is to make money), when they thought this soul was going through these chambers of the dead and then going to the Field of Reeds for happy hunting in the marshes? IF your mummy was destroyed, then your ba would be in your statue peering out through a chink in the tomb. In the first place why would anybody want to do this and in the second place, why do all the mummy thing when you could just inhabit your statue?
One thing you have to keep in mind is that when you say “Ancient Egyptian” you’re actually glossing over about 4 or 5 thousand years worth of history and hundreds of different cultures. Oversimplification = bad.
Here’s a link to the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead (translated).
It’s a bit difficult to read and I don’t know if that helps but there it is anyway.