Coffin of Tamutmutef

Most Egyptian coffins show the dead wrapped like a mummy. This one shows a woman in her clothes. Tamutmutef was a chantress of Amun, one of the women who sang in the service of the god at Thebes, and on the lid of her coffin the pleats of a fine linen dress are carved in relief, with her arms and her feet showing from the folds of the cloth. The museum traces this type back to the end of the 18th Dynasty, in the New Kingdom, and says it was meant to give the dead a fresh, living look.

Centuries later, in the Third Intermediate Period, the model came back. Sometimes coffins of this kind from the New Kingdom were simply reused, and the museum says this is possibly one of them. Whoever prepared it for Tamutmutef brought it up to date with the rich, dense decoration of the so-called yellow coffins, figures and texts crowded over a yellow ground. The museum can date it only broadly, to the 21st or 22nd Dynasty, between 1076 and 791 BC, and shows it in its gallery devoted to materials.