New research into a set of 3,000-year-old Egyptian coffins at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has scholars scratching their heads about the booming funerary industry in ancient Egypt. An examination of the sarcophagi of Nespawershefyt (also known as Nes-Amun) has revealed that significant changes were made to the owner’s titles, which suggests that he had his coffins made well in advance of his death and upd ated them as his career flourished.
Helen Strudwick, an Egyptologist and co-curator of the Fitzwilliam’s exhibition Death on the Nile: Uncovering the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt (until 22 May), says this is the first time that such alterations have been reported. “You often see the progression of job titles inscribed on tombs, especially Old Kingdom ones, but no one has reported seeing this on coffins before,” she says. Strudwick suspects that other examples exist but that no one is talking about them.
Did they keep coffins at home?
The discovery opens the door to a host of related questions. “Where were these coffins made? Where were they stored—in one’s house or in a storeroom closer to where the [deceased] would be buried?” Strudwick asks. “These are the fascinating questions we should be asking, and we hope that this research will provoke questions and lead others to look at their collections.”
X-rays and CT scans of one coffin’s lavishly decorated wooden inner lid have revealed that it is made, contrary to its homogenous appearance, from a hodgepodge of pieces recycled from earlier coffins and assembled by a skilled ancient craftsman. “You can see older joints filled with little bits of wood and plasters, and the sheer difficulty of working with these materials, and the compromises that these craftsmen had to make,” says the conservator Julie Dawson, who has co-organised the show with Strudwick.
The patchwork inner coffin is held together by 19th-century screws and metal plates. Dawson says that, although conservators today would never advocate such an intervention, she is “wary of being too critical of earlier restorations because they are often the very reason we still have the object now”.
The coffin se t was donated to the museum in 1822 and is one of its earliest Egyptian acquisitions. Nes-Amun, who lived some time around 1,000BC, held various supervisory positions at the Temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak—a plum post at the time. “His coffin gives us a sense of a man who was clearly very proud of being a member of that team and one who didn’t skimp on quality,” Strudwick says.