Coffin of King Sekhemre-Heruhirmaat Intef

In April 1848 the British collector A. C. Harris wrote from Egypt to Samuel Birch at the British Museum about an antiquities dealer named Triantaphyllos who had two royal coffins from Thebes. This was one of them. Both had probably been dug out of the hillside of Dra Abu el-Naga a few years earlier, and within six years they were in French hands. This one was given around June 1854 to Auguste Mariette, the young Frenchman then excavating in Egypt for the Louvre, by the Austrian consul-general in Cairo. In December the French state repaid Mariette, and the coffin entered the Louvre inventory beside its companion.

It belonged to King Sekhemre-Heruhirmaat Intef, of the 17th Dynasty, whose reign was very short. The wood is coated with stucco and painted, the king's face is black, a feather pattern covers the body, and a column of hieroglyphs gives his names. Egyptologists have noticed that one of those names was added later in ink, and they still debate whether the coffin was made in haste or first prepared for someone else.