Inner Coffin of Tapeni

The burials of three sisters are shown side by side in this room, Tapeni, Tamit and Renpetneferet. The coffin of Renpetneferet names their parents, Ankh-khonsu and Nesikhonsu, and traces the family back a generation further, to a grandfather, Padiaset, who was head of the workshop of Amun. Tamit and Renpetneferet died young. Tapeni, the museum says, was the only one of the three to reach a mature age, and her burial was prepared with more care than her sisters'.

This is her inner coffin. Texts cover it almost entirely, broken only by small pictures, gods and the dead woman with her ba, the soul imagined as a bird with a human head. On the breast are the sky goddess Nut and the djed pillar, the symbol of Osiris, lord of the afterlife. On the foot the Apis bull, the sacred bull of Memphis, carries her body on its back.

The museum dates the coffin to the 25th Dynasty, between 722 and 664 BC.