Paintings on the floor of a coffin from around 1800 BC resemble the paintings found in the Book of Two Ways Werner Forman Archive/Shutterstock

The Book of Two Ways, a guide to the Ancient Egyptian underworld, is perhaps the first illustrated book in history – and now archaeologists have found remains of the oldest known copy. The discovery comes at a time when researchers are rethinking the meaning of the archaic text and its enigmatic images.

About a century ago, Egyptologists began finding strange annotated drawings inside 4000-year-old wooden coffins buried in a necropolis called Dayr al-Barshā. Among the drawings was …