Coffins

The mummy after it has been preserved was placed in a brightly painted wooden coffin. The decorations on the coffin usually fit the decease’s status. A central band contains symbols of rebirth bordered by panels with images of god and goddesses. The large djed pillar painted on the back of the coffin represents a backbone. This provides symbolic support for the mummy and shows a writing of the decease’s ancestry. Next the first coffin part is placed in another wooden coffin. Like the first coffin, it is in the shape of the mummy but more simply ornamented.


                                        Coffin and Mummy Board of Pasebakhaemipet
 The inside of the bottom is painted with a figure of a goddess. The lid again shows the decease’s face, wig and sophisticated collar. There is an image of the scarab beetle with outstretched wings hovers over the mummy. The final part, the mummy and coffins were placed in a rectangular outermost coffin mostly made of wood, sometimes the wealthy had ones of stones, and are inscribed with religious texts. On the top of the coffin sits a jackal, probably Anubis. There is usually a box of shabtis nearby.

Funerary texts:

Many mummies were provided with some form of funerary literature to take with them to the afterlife. Most funerary literature consists of lists of spells and instructions for navigating the afterlife. During the Old Kingdom, only the pharaoh had access to this material, which scholars refer to as the Pyramid Texts. The Pyramid Texts are a collection of spells to assure the royal resurrection and protect the pharaoh from various malignant influences. The Pharaoh Unas was the first to use this collection of spells, as he and a few subsequent pharaohs had them carved on the walls of their pyramids. These texts were individually chosen from a larger bank of spells.

In the First Intermediate Period and in the Middle Kingdom, some of the Pyramid Text spells also are found in burial chambers of high officials and on many coffins, where they begin to evolve into what scholars call the Coffin Texts. In this period, the nobles and many non-royal Egyptians began to have access to funerary literature. Though many spells from the earlier texts were carried over, the new coffin texts also had additional spells, along with slight changes made to make this new funerary text more relatable to the nobility.

In The New Kingdom, the Coffin texts became the Book of the Dead, or the Funeral Papyri, and would last through the Late Kingdom. The text in these books was divided according to chapters/ spells, which were almost two-hundred in number. Each one of these texts was individualized for the deceased, though to varying degrees. If the person was rich enough, then they could commission their own personal version of the text that would include only the spells that they wanted. However, if one was not so wealthy, then one had to make do with the pre-made versions that had spaces left for the name of the deceased.

If the scribe ran out of room while doing the transcription, he would just stop the spell wherever he was and would not continue. It is not until the twenty-sixth dynasty that there began to be any regulation of the order or even the number of spells that were to be included in the Book of the Dead. At this time, the regulation is set at 192 spells to be placed in the book, with certain ones holding the same place at all times. This makes it seem as if the order of the texts was not what was important, so the person could place them in an order that he was comfortable with, but rather that it was what was written that mattered.