ABSTRACT
EGYPTIAN MUMMIES to the elaboration of the tomb itself. The coffin, in fact, became a small tomb within a tomb, and was decorated with architectural details reproducing those of the tomb. The inscriptions on the tomb wall were often duplicated on the inner walls of the coffin, and finally transferred entirely to the coffin.1 The earliest wooden coffins are rare, and when discovered they are almost always in a fragile or decayed condition, and unfit for removal. Wooden coffins as old as the lInd Dynasty were found by Quibell at Saqqara (see Fig. 1). The Cairo Museum has specimens of the Vth and VIth Dynasties.1 The decoration of these early coffins is a study by itself, and has been dealt with in many publications. The inscriptions comprise a long series of funerary spells now commonly called the Coffin Texts to distinguish them from the later texts which make up the Book of the Dead of the New Empire, and have been specially studied by Lacau, who has published a large series of them from coffins in the Cairo Museum to supplement those already published from other sources.3 In addition to these texts, the coffins are adorned with a kind of frieze on which are depicted offerings to the dead and objects for his use in the next world. 4. The body was laid usually on its left side
in the coffin, and opposite to its face, two mystic eyes, symbolising the sun and moon, were painted on the outside of the coffin, to protect the dead man's head, just as they were traced upon many other objects for the same purpose (Fig. 44). These eyes, so placed on the coffin in the Middle Kingdom, went out of fashion in coffin decoration in later times, but occasionally reappeared, as for instance on the stone sarcophagus in which the mummy of Amenophis II to-day reposes in his tomb in the Valley of the Kings. The body was sometimes simply wrapped in bandages, but at least as early as the Xlth Dynasty a cartonnage headpiece was put over the wrappings, so as to preserve the facial likeness of the dead man and perpetuate his identity (see below, p. 148). Sometimes more than one coffin was used, the inner coffin fitting closely within the outer. The inner coffin by the time of the early Middle Empire was often anthropoid in form, and represented the bandaged mummy in its cartonnage head-piece and linen shroud. usually with an elaborate pectoral ornament, and was a reduplication in wood of the actual mummy within, repeated in more durable materials. A good example of this arrangement can be seen in the mummy of Senebtisi, discovered at Lisht by the American Excavators.1 The rectangular coffin, sometimes of wood and sometimes of stone, continued in use throughout the Middle Kingdom, with or without the anthropoid coffin within it.2
