Anthropoid Coffin of Madja

On 12 March 1933 the French archaeologist Bernard Bruyère found this coffin in tomb 1370, in the eastern cemetery at Deir el-Medina, the village of the royal tomb builders on the west bank at Thebes. The burial context places it in the reigns of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, in the 18th Dynasty. It belonged to a woman named Madja, and the lid shows her as a mummy in her shroud, hands hidden, with a three-part wig and a broad collar.

The painting runs all the way round. On the lid lie four jackals of Anubis, guardian of the dead, each resting on a shrine. Isis stands at the head and Nephthys beneath the feet. Along one side the coffin itself is drawn to the tomb while four women mourn. Along the other Osiris stands holding two crook sceptres, as men bring a leg of beef, jars and a duck to a seated couple. The coffin came to the Louvre in 1935, in the division of the excavation's finds.