Inner Coffin of Mentuirdis

Half of this face is burnt black. The other half still keeps its paint, the reddish skin, the eye outlined in black, the striped wig around it. The museum's description does not say how the fire happened.

The coffin was found in the Valley of the Queens, in the tomb of Prince Khaemwaset, whose own sarcophagus lid is also in Turin. Long after the prince's burial, Theban families of the 25th and 26th Dynasties used his tomb for their own dead, and Schiaparelli's mission found it crowded with their coffins. Mentuirdis held the title Cultivator of Lotus Flowers in the Temple of Amun, like men of another family buried there, and his is the most complete set of the whole group. It keeps the box of his outer coffin and both halves of the middle and inner ones, so it shows the main decorative schemes of the time side by side.

The outside of this inner coffin is laid out in small framed scenes. Inside, the lid carries the goddess of the West, who received the dead, and the box the djed pillar, the sign of Osiris that stood for lasting rebirth. The museum dates it to the 25th or 26th Dynasty, between 722 and 525 BC.