Body, Cosmos and

Eternity
New research trends in the
iconography and symbolism of
ancient Egyptian coffins

Edited by

Rogério Sousa

Archaeopress Egyptology 3
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Cover illustration: Coffin A from KV 63 (front view). Courtesy of Susan Osgood.

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 Contents

Foreword������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ iii

Introduction�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� v

Part I : Studies on Coffin Symbolism

From skin wrappings to architecture: The evolution of prehistoric, anthropoid wrappings to historic architectonic
coffins/sarcophagi; separate contrasts optimally fused in single Theban ‘stola’ coffins (±975-920 BC).����������������������� 1
René van Walsem

Permeable containers: Body and cosmos in Middle Kingdom coffins����������������������������������������������������������������������� 29

Rune Nyord

Ancient Egyptian funerary arts as social documents: social place, reuse, and working towards a new typology of 21st
Dynasty coffins�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 45
Kathlyn M. Cooney

Representations of passage in ancient Egyptian iconography����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 67

Éva Liptay

Crossing the landscapes of eternity: parallels between Amduat and funeral procession scenes on the 21st Dynasty
coffins��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 81
Cássio de Araújo Duarte

‘Spread your wings over me’: iconography, symbolism and meaning of the central panel on yellow coffins������������� 91
Rogério Sousa

Resurrection in a box: the 25th Dynasty burial ensemble of Padiamunet��������������������������������������������������������������� 111

Cynthia May Sheikholeslami

Gods at all hours: Saite Period coffins of the ‘eleven-eleven’ type������������������������������������������������������������������������� 125
Jonathan Elias and Carter Lupton

Part II : Studies on Museums’ Collections and Archaeological Finds

Continuity in times of transition: the inner coffin of the mistress of the house Gem-tu-es in Vevey (Switzerland)� 137
Alexandra Küffer

Egyptian coffins in Portugal����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 145

Luís Manuel de Araújo

Cercueils jaunes des XXIe et XXIIe Dynasties dans les collections Françaises������������������������������������������������������������ 149
Alain Dautant

Lot 14 from Bab el-Gasus (Sweden and Norway): the modern history of the collection and a reconstruction of the
ensembles������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 167
Anders Bettum

The coffins of the priests of Amun: a socio-economic investigation on Bab el-Gasus cachette�������������������������������� 187
Elena Paganini

Coffins without mummies: the Tomb KV 63 in the Valley of the Kings�������������������������������������������������������������������� 197
Rogério Sousa

i
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium

Permeable containers: Body and cosmos in Middle Kingdom coffins

Rune Nyord
Christ’s College (Cambridge)

Abstract
Middle Kingdom coffins with their extensive programmes of decoration and inscription constitute a rich source for studying Egyptian
mortuary conceptions. Over the last decades this material has been the subject of a number of detailed studies, including two typological
studies (Willems 1988; Lapp 1993) and a number of monographic case studies of individual coffins (Willems 1996; Meyer-Dietrich
2001, 2006). This surge of interest has gone a long way towards elucidating the religious, and especially ritual, context of the coffins.
Nonetheless, certain significant questions are still left open, so that for instance the exact relationship between coffin and ritual is
understood rather differently by the two authors of the coffin cases studies cited. Similarly an object such as a coffin is open to a number
of different understandings (e.g. as medium for image and writing, as space, as house, as inherently connected to – or even notionally
part of – the dead body), some of which are still deserving of further exploration. This paper takes up some of the open questions and
seeks to address them from a number of different perspectives, complementing traditional philological and iconographical approaches
with ontological and material culture perspectives drawn from archaeology and anthropology.

The theme of the ‘Body, Cosmos and Eternity’ symposium
invites us to think about the ways in which we can approach
the challenge of understanding an object like the Egyptian
coffin. With the often rich and complex programmes of
decoration and inscription found on Egyptian coffins, it
has been tempting in both the past and the present to regard
coffins primarily as surfaces of writing and iconography,
an approach which is perhaps also prompted by the
usual form of publication where the material object is by
necessity fragmented into individual sides suitable to be
reproduced as photo or facsimile plates.
Useful and unavoidable as such considerations are, they
tend to remove attention from the coffin as a material object
with particular spatial and conceptual configurations. This
raises the question whether it is possible to supplement
such traditional approaches with new avenues of approach
taking the coffin as a material thing, rather than its
individual sides as mediums for writing and decoration,
as the point of departure. In exploring this question, the
problem of the ontological role of the coffin will be of
particular interest – in other words, for a coffin to work in
the way that seems to be implied by its decoration and use,
what kind of thing would a coffin have to be?
In order to get to these methodological considerations,
the paper begins by offering an overview of the material,
more specifically the conceptual underpinnings of the
main roles played by the body of the deceased and various
cosmological entities in the decoration and inscriptions
on Middle Kingdom coffins. In this presentation of
the material, examples have been chosen that are both
representative enough to give an introduction for readers
less familiar with the material, telling in the sense that
we can draw inferences from them about the nature of
the Middle Kingdom coffin-concept, and useful for the
attempt at ‘thinking through the coffin’ that I will make in
the second half of this paper.
1. Body and cosmos in the coffin
The typical Middle Kingdom coffin is a rectangular
wooden box in which the deceased lies. The ideal patterns
of orientation of the body in the coffin and the coffin in
the tomb chamber lie at the core of the coffin’s ability to
serve to establish connections between the body and the
cosmos.1 The deceased is generally put on his left side,
so that his face is turned towards one of the long coffin
sides. At the same time, the coffin is usually oriented
according to the cardinal axes, so that the longest side of
the coffin is oriented north-south. This gives us a set of
corresponding bodily coordinates and cardinal directions,
so that the front of the deceased is turned towards the east,
and correspondingly his back towards the west, while the
head is to the north and the feet to the south.
The point about the directionality and placement of the
body in the coffin leads naturally to the first theme to be
discussed here, namely the most important ways in which
the decoration of the coffin is dependent on the body
lying within it. One of the most conspicuous elements of
the internal decoration of Middle Kingdom coffins is the
so-called object friezes.2 Consisting of a series of objects
usually known to be connected to the offering ritual and
often paralleled by actual grave goods or models, the object
friezes can be understood as efficacious presentations of
objects needed in one sense or another by the deceased.
Close parallels can also be found in tomb depictions of
funerary rites where the grave goods are being brought by
a procession of ritualists.3
As the object friezes thus enter into a complex relationship
with grave goods, it is worth noting that Podvin has
demonstrated by gathering evidence from intact Middle
1
For this question in general, see RAVEN, 2005.
2
JÉQUIER, 1921; WILLEMS, 1988: 200-228.
3
NEWBERRY 1894: pl. 7; cf. WILLEMS, 1988: 200-201.

29
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium

Body, Cosmos and Eternity

Kingdom tombs that the general placement of the

grave goods correspond to overall principles of
bodily associations.4 Thus, staves and weapons
are placed beside the body near the arms, while

Fig. 1 - Object frieze on the back side of the inner coffin of Gemniemhat, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, ÆIN 1585. Photo: Ole Haupt, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.
sandals, toiletries and other objects are each
placed near the body part with which they are
most strongly associated.

Harco Willems has been able to show that a similar

main principle is found also in the layout of object
friezes on coffins, the distribution of which thus
corresponds to the placement and orientation of the
body lying inside the coffin. Thus, in the example
shown in Figure 1, the head of the deceased would
be to the right and the feet to the left, and thus
at the right end we find a headrest and a mirror,
followed by a collar and counterpoise. After these,
various objects associated with the hands are
found, including bracelets, vessels for purification
and various weapons. At the very left end closest
to the feet, a pair of sandals is depicted.

The principles underlying the distribution of object

friezes are rather more complex, as a number
of other ‘rules’ enter into play, and a full study
on this topic is still an important desideratum.
However, I have argued elsewhere that at least the
main principles of distribution correspond with a
hypothesis that the layout of the object friezes can
be understood as basically a classificatory task
yielding results with similar principles to what can
be obtained from cognitive studies dealing with
human classification systems.5 One peculiarity
is the tendency for the objects to form clusters,
so that an object may not simply be ascribed to a
group on the basis of its own bodily association
but also or instead because of its association
with other objects already ascribed a place in the
classificatory scheme. The underlying notions of
the connections between objects and body become
particularly interesting in such cases.

One of the most prominent of such ‘sets’ of objects

has been explored by Harco Willems,6 namely the
group of ritual implements surrounding the Xnm.t-
wr sieve often shown on the head end of coffins. As
Willems has shown, the sieve is often associated
with a group of objects on the foot end consisting
of sandals, two anx-signs and two different types of
jars. While the sandals can obviously be explained
on the background of a conceptual connection to
the feet, the other items are less clear. Fortunately,
pictorial presentations of a particular purification
rite allow us to explain the bodily association of
the objects. In a scene first attested in the Middle
Kingdom, but of which the clearest versions date

4
PODVIN, 2000.
5
NYORD, 2007: 7-8.
6
WILLEMS, 1999.

30
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium
Rune Nyord: Permeable containers: Body and cosmos in Middle Kingdom coffins
Fig. 2 - The purification ritual with sieve, jar and two
ankhs as represented in two dimensions in the 18th
Dynasty tomb of User (TT 21). Davies, 1913, pl. 21.
Courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.
to the New Kingdom, the association of the sieve, the anx-
signs and the large snw-jar can be seen (Figure 2).7
The depictions show a person being purified with fluid
poured by two ritualists through a sieve placed above
him. The person being purified is shown sitting on a snw-
jar and two anx-signs lie on the ground below. To point
out just a couple of the several interesting aspects of this
rite, the snw-jar is frequently associated with the efflux of
Osiris.8 In one telling example which closely parallels the
purification ritual albeit on a very different scale and at a
much later date, a snw-jar is placed under a corn mummy
during the Khoiak festival, so that some of the water
sprinkled over the corn mummy is collected in the jar. As
Willems notes, this fertile surplus fluid closely parallels
the role of the rDw-efflux in mythologising texts, so that
the conceptual background of the Khoiak rite is very likely
related to that of the purification ritual depicted on earlier
sources and eternalised in Middle Kingdom coffins.9
7
WILLEMS, 1996: 210.
8
See the material collected in WILLEMS, 1996: 118-119. WILLEMS
may have slightly overstated the role of the rDw as offerings restored to
their origin, which, while the idea can be attested throughout the Egyptian
history, is actually fairly rare in the Coffin Texts and the Middle Kingdom
generally. Apart from the occurrence of the snw-jar in the coffin object
friezes which incorporates many objects playing a role as offerings and/
or grave goods, WILLEMS’s interpretation follows ZANDEE’s (1975-
1976: 40-41) reading of CT 362, where the efflux of Osiris serves as
nourishment, probably as a mythologised libation. Compared with the
rest of the Coffin Texts evidence, it is, however, characteristic that it is
not Osiris himself who is nourished by the god’s efflux in this spell, but
other beings. This seems to be part of a general pattern in the Coffin
Texts according to which re-internalising one’s own efflux is portrayed
as highly problematic. For the complex role of rDw-efflux in the Coffin
Texts, see the discussion of the evidence in NYORD, 2009: 462-467.
Note that while the snw-jar does not occur in the role of receptacle of
rDw in the Coffin Texts, it fits perfectly in the structural role as container
collecting the fluids in the diagram ibid.: 467.
9 12
Note that I assume that the purification was of a deceased person, as
that is clearly the role the objects play in the coffin, and also the use
of the rite paralleled in the later sources collected by WILLEMS. In a
later contribution, WILLEMS, 1997 suggests that the New Kingdom
depictions may in fact show the purification of a living ritualist before
entering the place of embalming. This is certainly not impossible, but
31
The rDw-efflux plays a complex role in the Coffin Texts,
but one of the central elements is the idea that the efflux
need to leave the body of the deceased, but must not be
allowed to simply flow out on the ground, but should be
collected.10 While the snw-jar does not occur in the role of
receptacle of rDw in the Coffin Texts, keeping in mind the
depictions of the purification rite and the use of the jar at
the Khoiak-festival, it would fit perfectly in the structural
role as container collecting the fluids as stressed in the
Coffin Texts.
When we do find mythological explanations of the
equipment under discussion here, they focus on a rather
different aspect, namely the placement of the objects under
the feet of the deceased, either generally during the ritual
or perhaps more specifically on the frieze of the foot end
of coffins. Thus Coffin Texts spell 907 as reconstructed
from new parallels from Lisht makes the following
connections:11
I place for you this robber beneath your feet, so that
you may live (anx). (Two ankhs)
You have made inert (s.nn) my father this Osiris N in
this [your] name [of] snw-jar.
You have set a trap (grg) for my father this Osiris N
[in] this your name of mgrg-jar.
As will be seen, each object is identified through the
medium of ‘semantic etymologies’12 with particular aspects
of the enemy of the deceased, i.e. Seth and his followers in
the Osirian mythology underlying the ritual situation of the
wake on the night before the funeral known traditionally
by its German designation Stundenwachen.13 The reason
seems to be not so much the particular role each item plays
in the purification rite, as even the otherwise unambiguous
ankh-signs receive these negative connotations, but rather
the fact that they are all placed ‘under the feet’ of the
deceased in the way that enemies are very often said to
be, including Seth in the Stundenwachen liturgies from the
Coffin Texts.14 While spell 907 is thus not of much use
in teasing out the details and meaning of the purification
rite, at least the spell clearly affirms its association with the
ritualised defeat of the enemies of the deceased during the
Stundenwachen.15
in light of the clear evidence for an association of the rite with practices
involving dead bodies, it is probably safest to focus on this most clearly
attested use, which is in any case the one most pertinent for the present
purposes.
10
NYORD, 2009: 462-467.
11
ALLEN, 1996: 11, lines 1-3.
Cf. BRONKHORST, 2001.
13
The ritual situation of the Stundenwachen is argued to be the main
inspiration for the decoration programme of Middle Kingdom by
WILLEMS, 1988 and 1996.
14
See esp. ASSMANN and BOMMAS, 2002: 409-411 and 416.
15
Pace WILLEMS, 1997: 349 n. 27.
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium
Body, Cosmos and Eternity
Possible Anthropomorphisms
Perhaps the most stable element of the decoration of Middle
Kingdom coffins, first introduced in the late 5th Dynasty,
is the pair of wDA.t-eyes on the front or east side of the
coffin. The often-repeated traditional interpretation of this
phenomenon is based on the idea that the deceased lying
on his or her left side with the face behind the painted eyes
can look through them, the purposes of which is usually
assumed to be to be able to see the offerings presented
to the deceased in the mortuary cult (an interpretation
supported by the frequent association of the pair of eyes
with the depiction of a false door), and/or the sun rising in
the east. We will return to the consequences of the notional
permeability of the coffin indicated both by the eyes and by
the false door, but in accordance with our stated purpose
here, it will be useful to pause for a moment and see if there
are additional conceptual avenues that should be explored
before we decide on following the traditional one.
The array of meanings inherent in the icon of the wDA.t
eye is notoriously multifarious.16 Without for the moment
elaborating the various versions of the myth of the eye of
Horus or the two eyes of the creator god, we can look to
the other type of object on which the pair of eyes is most
usually found in the Middle Kingdom, namely stelae.17
Because the practical aspects of ritual behaviour in relation
to the tomb stela is rather more well-defined than is the case
with the coffin, we can plausibly suggest that in the case
of stelae, the pair of eyes signify the simple presence of
the deceased as object for the mortuary rituals by positing
a gaze which can be met by the ‘audience’ of the stela.
I have argued elsewhere that the reciprocal act of seeing
and being seen plays a fundamental role in Egyptian ideas
about the manifestation of the dead.18 A good example is
found in the Naga ed-Deir letter to the dead now in the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The writer complains
about a haunting which is described as the ghost ‘causing
me to see him in a dream’.19 The nature of these visits as
an imposition is clear from the wording of ‘causing to see’,
but at the same time the gaze of the ghost is also important,
as the end of the letter refers to the nightly encounters as
the ghost ‘seeing me’.20
In this way, the reciprocal gaze becomes a creative
enactment of the relation between the living and the dead,
rather than a unidirectional case of the deceased observing
the outside world from an isolated vantage point. This
interactional manifestation of the deceased through fixing
a point of view, as it were, may remind us of Merleau-
Ponty’s notion that
16
See e.g. ROEDER, 1996:244-264.
17
Cf. HÖLZL, 1990: 13-47.
18
NYORD, 2009: 454-457, see now also NYORD, 2013 for this
phenomenon in the experience of the presence of the deceased in the Old
Kingdom tomb complex.
19
SIMPSON, 1966: pl. IX, l. 2-3.
20
SIMPSON, 1966: pl. IX, l. 6. Cf. NYORD, 2009: 456 with further
references.
32
he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is
possessed by it, unless he is of it, unless, by principle,
according to what is required by the articulation of the
look with the things, he is one of the visibles, capable,
by a singular reversal, of seeing them – he who is one
of them.21
From this way of thinking, it follows that the participants
in an act of seeing cannot be isolated definitively into a
subject and an object of the act, but rather visibility is
always a chiastic interplay between seeing and being seen.
Both stela and coffin are characterised by the particular
use of writing and decoration where they do not describe a
pre-existing state of affairs, but rather serve to bring about
the state of affairs described – a reversal of the ordinary
modern notion of representation, most closely paralleled
in modern usage of so-called ‘performative’ speech acts.22
Assuming that this goes for the eyes as well, and drawing
on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological notion of the
chiastic vision, we can thus say that the eyes and the gaze
they enact are not meant merely to communicate the ritual
presence of the deceased, but rather to effect it, not unlike
the role of a statue of a god or deceased.
The parallel with the statue is instructive here, insofar
as the means to ‘presentify’23 the deceased is precisely
representations which, in one sense or another, provide
him with body parts requisite for his or her manifestation.
If the eyes thus effect the ability of the deceased to see (in
addition to allowing him to be seen in an interactive sense),
perhaps the idea of the eyes as simple windows through the
coffin is too limited. The question then becomes whether
there is an additional sense in which the coffin itself can
be understood as an actual body despite displaying only a
very limited degree of anthropomorphism. The answer may
well be positive as shown by an interesting palaeographical
phenomenon in the ornamental hieroglyphs of certain
coffins from Akhmim.24
The best example of this phenomenon comes from a
small group of 11th Dynasty coffins,25 now in the Cairo
Museum (CGC 28010-28012) on which all hieroglyphs
are monochrome, except on the front side where the eye
hieroglyph ( , D4) forming part of the name ‘Osiris,
Lord of Djedu’ is polychrome in black, white and red,26
and on the back side where the (D1) hieroglyph in the
name ‘Anubis who is on his mountain’ is painted in black
21
MERLEAU-PONTY, 1968: 134f. This idea has played in important
role in recent anthropological work on ‘perspectivism’, see especially
HOLBRAAD and WILLERSLEV, 2007, WILLERSLEV, 2009, and
PEDERSEN, 2011: 65-68.
22
The classical treatments of this phenomenon are AUSTIN, 1962,
and SEARLE, 1969. Notable examples of the use of this conceptual
framework on Egyptian religious texts are SERVAJEAN, 2003 and
MEYER-DIETRICH, 2010.
23
In the sense of VERNANT, 1991: 151-163, cf. the remarks on this
notion in an Egyptological context by ESCHWEILER, 1994: 293ff.
24
BORCHARDT, 1897: 116; LAPP, 1993: 152 (§341).
25
For the dating, see LAPP, 1993: 272-275 (Ach2, Ach5, Ach15) and
BROVARSKI, 1985: 128-129.
26
28010 and 28012 only (LACAU, 1903: I, 27 and 30).
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium
Rune Nyord: Permeable containers: Body and cosmos in Middle Kingdom coffins
Fig. 3 - Diagram showing the distribution of D1 hieroglyphs with and without
colour emphasis on the coffin of Bekheni, Cairo Museum, CG 28012.
Drawing: Henrijette Vex Nyord.
and red.27 That the principle here is based on the location of
the body parts in question is confirmed by the interesting
third coffin in the group, that of the seal-bearer and general
Bekheni.
As his name is derived from the root bxn with a probable
basic meaning like ‘be watchful’,28 it is determined with
the sign (D1). The name of the deceased occurs at the
end of each of the imAx-phrases on the short ends of the
coffin, as well as in the Htp-dj-nsw-formula on the lid,
yielding the locations of the D1-hieroglyph shown in
Figure 3. Corresponding exactly with our hypothesis that
emphasis occurs whenever an eye-hieroglyph or a head-
hieroglyph was located on the part of the coffin closest to
the body part in question, we find emphasised hieroglyphs
on the front, back and head boards, but not on the foot end
or lid, where the sign occurs only at some distance from
the head of the deceased.
These particularly informative examples also help us
put into perspective the much more subtle palaeographic
convention also found at Akhmim where the hieroglyphs
in question are executed in a particularly large format,
even when grouped with other signs.29
What can we make of this phenomenon? The first
scholar to notice it and as far as I know the only one to
have offered an independent interpretation is Ludwig
Borchardt (1897) who associated it with the pair of eyes
invariably occurring on the east side of coffins of this
27
LACAU, 1903: I, 27, 28 and 30.
28
OSING, 1976: 833, n. 1116.
29
See e.g. the late Old Kingdom coffins published by EL-MASRY, 2007:
183-215, notably the head signs on pl. 6-8a and the eye signs on pl. 7b.
33
type. On the basis of this association, Borchardt suggested
that the emphasised hieroglyphs are simply a ‘repetition’
of what is already communicated by the pair eyes, ‘daβ
nämlich hier der Todte gewissermaβen aus dem Sarge
herausschaue’.30 As we have already indicated, it may be
slightly more accurate to say that the pair of eyes effects
the presence and interactional potential of the deceased
by providing him with the requisite body parts, and the
phenomenon just described seems to be born from a
similar aim of making sure that whatever heads and eyes,
even hieroglyphic ones, are located near the place on the
mummy where this potential is likely to become manifest,
need to be functional for this particular purpose. Thus,
the emphasis by colouring and enlargement which clearly
serves no communicative purpose and hardly an aesthetic
one either, can be seen as providing the deceased with an
interactive body.
Inscriptions with bodily associations
The spells inscribed on Middle Kingdom coffins also
occasionally show particular bodily and thematic
connections. Shortly after the publication in 1979 Lesko’s
Index of the Spells on Egyptian Middle Kingdom Coffins
which made this kind of research possible, Barta published
a study31 in which he examined the statistical tendency to
place particular spells on a particular side of the coffin.
His material ranges from relatively unimpressive cases
with just over a 50-50 distribution, to examples where
numerous attestations of a single spell are consistently
placed on the same side of the coffin. Moving on from this
30
BORCHARDT ,1897: 116.
31
BARTA, 1982.
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium

Body, Cosmos and Eternity

purely statistical fact to the major themes dealt with in each the mortuary liturgies identified by Assmann.34 While the
of the spells in question, Barta arrives at the following list tendency of such liturgies to be placed on particular coffin
of key words associated with spells characteristic of each sides more often than others remains of interest, it is clear
coffin side:32 that in such cases seeking the explanation in the thematic
contents of the individual spells is not likely to provide an
Key word Head Foot Front Back Lid Bottom explanation for a lengthy sequence of spells distributed as
Enemies   X X X X X a whole, yet covering several different themes in Barta’s
Offering ritual X   X X X   list.
Solar cycle     X X X X
Resurrection       X X X Nonetheless, there are numerous examples among those
Magic power         X X collected by Barta where there is indubitably a connection
Negative     X X     between the contents of a spell or sequence and its
wishes association with a particular coffin side. As one might
Head rites X           expect, by and large the best examples are those from
Free movement   X         the bottom of the table where only a single coffin side is
Ba and body     X       connected to a particular keyword, although we do need
Osiris myth       X     to weed out a few of the more idiosyncratic ones such as
Tomb X ‘glosses’ and the ‘Osiris myth’ which is based on a couple
construction of spells from one of the mythologising mortuary liturgies
Nut         X   just mentioned.
Purification         X  
Uniting body         X   As can be seen from this list, apart from the rites connected
parts to the head, Barta’s classification concentrates much more
Glosses           X on the thematic contents than on specific body parts.
A number of these themes are explicitly cosmological,
Given the state of Coffin Texts research at the time, Barta’s and as such they offer a good cue for moving on to the
list was an important step forward, and in some respects second main theme to be discussed here, namely that of
it has not yet been superseded. However, in a number cosmological references in the coffins.
of cases subsequent research has enabled us to nuance
Barta’s initial observations. I will focus on just a couple Cosmos in the coffin
of examples where we can now offer alternatives to the
interpretations put forward by Barta. The earliest and most stable effort to situate the coffin
cosmologically is found in the most frequent formulation
Coffin Texts spell 605, for instance, is known in two copies of the ornamental text on the outside of the two long sides.
from Assiut,33 in both cases written on the front side of the Each of the two sides typically carry a Htp-dj-nsw-formula,
coffin. Barta categorises the spell as belonging to a group the one on the front or east side addressed to Osiris and the
of spells dealing with the relationship between the ba and one on the back or west side addressed to Anubis. The east
the body, because the short spell ends with the statement formula stresses the access to invocation offerings, while
‘My weary ba sleeps’. However, the text carries the title the west side deals with the burial in the western desert,
‘Spell for a bed’ and occurs below a depiction in the object thus situating the coffin squarely between the two main
frieze of a bed. concerns of the deceased: The continued contact with the
living associated with the eastern cardinal direction and
In the light of Willems’s demonstration of the principles the repose in the tomb associated with the west.35
underlying the distribution and placement of frieze objects
on the one hand, and their ritual background on the At the same time, this early formulation is also the
other, we might suggest classifying this spell instead as beginning of a very long Egyptian tradition of surrounding
belonging to the offering theme and consider its placement the deceased with gods. This is mostly done by distributing
on the front side of the coffin in light of the general layout simple phrases of the type jmAxj xr followed by the
of the object friezes of the coffins in question, whereas the name of the god in question. This pattern of decoration
reference to the ba sleeping would then be seen in the light is so ubiquitous that Willems labels it the ‘standard
of the interactive properties of the bed with which the spell formulation’.36 Willems has also argued in favour of a
is associated rather than as constituting a specific theme specific ritual background of the distribution of gods,
determining the place of the spell in its own right. namely that the divine names refer to the ritual officiants
standing around the coffin at the Stundenwachen taking
Another example is Barta’s distribution across a number place on the night before the funeral. This is corroborated
of different themes of spells which are now known to be by the occasional further development of the phrases where
distributed as part of a more or less fixed sequence, notably each god is associated with particular actions carried out
32 34
BARTA, 1982: 37-42. This analysis also forms the main basis for the ASSMANN and BOMMAS, 2002.
35
overview of the question at WILLEMS, 1988: 232-233. WILLEMS 1988: 123-124.
33 36
S1C and S5C. WILLEMS, 1988: 138.

34
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium
Rune Nyord: Permeable containers: Body and cosmos in Middle Kingdom coffins
for the benefit of the deceased, mostly dealing with the
typical Stundenwachen themes of bodily reconstitution
and protection from enemies, e.g. the frequent phrase
known also from the Pyramid Texts ‘Your mother Nut has
spread herself over you that she may cause you to be a god
without enemies’.37
Cosmological elements on the inside of the coffin are
primarily concentrated on the up-down axis expressed
by the lid and the bottom, and the vertical space between.
The connection between the lid and the sky (and hence
the goddess Nut) is indicated by the occasional presence
of the formula just cited on the lid,38 and several other
decorative elements affirm the celestial association of the
lid as viewed from the inside. Thus, the inside lid is the
location of the so-called diagonal star clocks indicating the
periods of visibility of the decanal stars.39 Apart from the
doubtless ritual importance of the data in the matrices, as
they deal with phenomena of the night-sky, the placement
on the lid is highly pertinent. This is true to an even greater
degree of the unfortunately very badly preserved lid from
the coffin of Heny from Assiut, carrying what appears to
have been a precursor of the kind of detailed astronomical
maps best known from the later examples in the tomb of
Senenmut and elsewhere.40
With much less detail, the same basic idea is confirmed
by the occurrence of the icon of a starry sky-hieroglyph
on the top of the vertical sides of Bersheh coffins.41 While
this phenomenon does not presumably hold a similar ritual
importance to the detailed astronomical representations on
the lid itself, they serve to clearly render the cosmic scale
of the space between the coffin walls.
If the top of the coffin is thus clearly associated, or even
identified, with the sky, it stands to reason that the four
corners of the coffin could be identified with the four
pillars holding up the sky in Egyptian cosmology, and
Willems has adduced some indications that the four Sons
of Horus whose names usually occur in the decorative
bands at the corners of the coffin could play this role in
Egyptian cosmology and mythology.42
There are thus good reasons to think that the Egyptians in
different ways made use of the association of the lid of the
coffin with the sky. The opposite cosmological association
of the bottom with the earth is also quite clear. Thus, a
number of coffins, especially from Beni Hasan, Meir
and Thebes, are decorated on the bottom with depictions
of a watery landscape with canals and ‘islands’ forming
the background on which the spells on the bottom are
written.43 Willems has pointed out that there is a special
37
Cf. WILLEMS, 1988: 134.
38
See WILLEMS, 1988: 174, with some possible further indications of
such a connection ibid.: 140-141 and 233.
39
WILLEMS, 1988: 235-236 and WILLEMS, 1996: 328-337.
40
GUNN, 1926.
41
WILLEMS, 1988: 193.
42
WILLEMS, 1988: 139-141 GRALLERT, 2007: 46-57, each text is presented here in a standardised,
43
WILLEMS, 1988: 235-236; 1996: 328-337, and most recently
COCKCROFT and SYMONS, 2014
35
tendency for the spells written in this way to be ferryman
spells dealing with the permission to cross a body of water,
so that a clear connection can further be made between text
and iconography.
Apart from this phenomenon, the more famous composition
of the Book of Two Ways is very frequently found on the
bottom of Bersheh coffins, and as it shares the ‘map’-
like structure, the rationale may again be the similar one
that the bottom represents a ‘landscape’ naturally located
under the body and hence opposed to the sky on the lid.
It should be noted, however, that this placement may also
have been motivated in part simply by the fact that a large,
coherent composition like the Book of Two Ways would
easily conflict with the fixed decorative programmes on
other coffin sides, whereas the bottom could more easily
be cleared for the purpose of accommodating the Book.
A similar cosmographic composition in the Coffin Texts
is the representation of the Fields of Hetep associated
with spell 466. While this place is clearly presented as
a cosmic location, the ‘Two Fields of Offerings’ is also
sometimes found as a concrete designation of the offering
table,44 and although as a cosmic location the Fields are
sometimes connected with the direction east, it is likely
this ritual association with the offering rite that predicated
the placement on the front side of this vignette and the
accompanying spells.
Connections between body and cosmos
The final group of examples focuses on a phenomenon that
has already been brushed a few times, namely combinations
where the coffin establishes a relation between body and
cosmos. Such references are relatively frequent in the
spells of the Coffin Texts, and for the present purposes, I
will simply give a couple of examples.
A group of formulae which appears to belong to a
separate textual tradition from the Stundenwachen-related
inscriptions concerning the services of the gods for the
deceased written in the decorative bands on the outside of
the coffins, but the overall contents of which are broadly
similar to such statements is the inscriptions found on
mitres, dowels, and other generally inaccessible spaces of
the coffin.45 Each of these short texts is often associated
with a particular side of the coffin and often combines the
bodily reconstitution with cosmological incorporation, as
can be seen from these examples of the most frequently
attested such formulae:46
A (Foot) Recitation: O Geb, (put) your arms around me
that you may illuminate my face and open my eyes!
44
See the references given at WILLEMS, 1988: 235, n. 234.
45
GRALLERT, 2007.
46
1st person version and with an indication of the coffin side(s) with which
it is mainly associated.
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium
Body, Cosmos and Eternity
B (Head) Recitation: O my mother Nut, come to me,
that you may remove my bandages upon me from
the hand of him who acted against me.
C (Back) Childhood is upon me! I will not be tired,
these body parts of mine will not be weak.
D (Head/Foot) Recitation by Nut: I have placed Isis/
Nephthys under your head/feet
E (Head) Recitation: Surround me, kinsmen! These
body parts of mine will not be weak.
F (Bottom) Recitation: O Nut, raise me up! I am this
son of yours. May you remove my weariness from
the hand of him who acted against me
The roles of Geb and Nut here a mainly cosmological,
Geb being associated with the feet and hence the direction
down, and Nut with the head, and thus the direction up
(construing the deceased here as a living being standing
upright, as discussed further below). Somewhat more
surprisingly, Nut is associated instead with the bottom of
the coffin in text F, but this connection may be motivated
by the importance of the notion of ‘lifting up’ the deceased
from his situation of weariness on the bottom of the coffin.
On the other hand, the roles of Isis and Nephthys and
their particular bodily associations in text D are clearly
motivated by the ritual, rather than the cosmological, roles
of these goddesses and priestesses incarnating them in the
ritual.47
An even clearer example of a group of spells connected to
particular sides of the coffin is the small group of Hymns
to the Coffin Sides.48 In these texts, each of the sides of
the coffin is personified as a goddess performing the tasks
of protection and bodily reconstitution usually connected
with the Stundenwachen. As such, these texts can be seen
as a further development of the idea of the presence of
the Ennead around the deceased, as the coffin boards
themselves come to be addressed as goddesses. While
the head and foot board naturally come to be associated
with the roles of Isis and Nephthys, and the lid goddess
is similarly connected to Nut, by and large the goddesses
appear to be primarily personifications of the coffin sides,
rather than, as elsewhere in the coffin decoration, a pre-
existing deity being assigned a role on a particular part
of the coffin. In other words, the hymns for the most part
would not make much sense without the medium of the
coffin, so it is a reasonable suggestion that the texts have
been composed particularly for this medium, although still
clearly based on the ritual themes of the Stundenwachen.
Possibly for this reason, the hymns express an unusual
degree of systematicity, so that it is even possible, as I have
argued elsewhere, in some sense to regard the distribution
of themes in the hymns as a classificatory task. Here, we
will concentrate on just a few important aspects of the
hymns in this regard.49 In the hymns to the four vertical
coffin sides, each of the goddesses is addressed with a
47
WILLEMS, 1988: 135.
48
See most recently NYORD, 2007.
49
Drawn from the analyses in NYORD, 2007.
36
variant of the formula ‘you at seeing whom X rejoices’,
where X is a being or group of beings encountered in the
cosmological journey envisaged in the hymns. In the hymn
to the head board, this is the god Re,50 on the foot, it is
‘those of the Duat’,51 on the west it is ‘the westerners’52
and on the east, it is Osiris53 who is often associated with
the eastward journey of the deceased in the Coffin Texts.
Thus, a cosmological scheme emerges where the coffin is
being observed from four different directions. While the
cardinal directions of east and west are straightforward
enough, we once again find the association of the head
and foot, not with their corresponding cardinal directions,
but rather with up and down respectively – in other words
the proper associations if the deceased had been standing
upright rather than lying down.54
As a corollary of such cosmic associations, each goddess
is also responsible for pertinent parts of the reconstitution
of the body of the deceased. Thus, the goddess of the head-
board is not only responsible for guarding and attaching
the head and neck of Osiris and hence for carrying out a
similar service for the deceased, but is also able to protect
against beings threatening to cut off the head. Thus again,
the body of the deceased becomes involved in the cosmos
through the associations connected to each of the coffin
sides.
2. The coffin-concept
As has been seen, both textual and pictorial elements of
the coffin decoration contain numerous references to the
body and the cosmos. Our common-sense interpretation
of texts and images as primarily communicative devices,
however, is thwarted by the fact that we are dealing with a
coffin, which, especially as far as the inside is concerned,
is as unsuitable a medium for communication in the
ordinary sense as one can think of. Accordingly, recent
contributions have tended instead to stress the ritual nature
of the coffin in the specific sense that the coffin decoration
serves to render permanent the effects of the funerary
ritual, especially the Stundenwachen.55 This perspective,
where the coffin is approached primarily as a surface for
writing and iconography of ritual significance, provides a
clear point of focus, which is also very much a focus of the
coffin decoration, namely the deceased, so that the central
question becomes: what is the benefit to the deceased of a
particular element of the decorative programme? There is
no doubt that this is a very sensible focus, completely in
keeping with the purpose of producing the coffin in the
first place, but it leaves another interesting question in its
wake, which I would like to take up here, namely for the
coffin to work as the decoration seems to indicate that it
would, what kind of thing is an Egyptian coffin, and can
50
CT III, 294c [229]
51
CT III, 302g [236]
52
CT III, 307d [237]; VII, 28s [828].
53
CT III, 320e [239]; 324h [241].
54
NYORD, 2007, 20-21.
55
See especially the monographic treatments by WILLEMS, 1988; 1996
and MEYER-DIETRICH, 2001; 2006.
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium
Rune Nyord: Permeable containers: Body and cosmos in Middle Kingdom coffins
we gain further insights by focusing also on its nature as a
material object?
In a 2007 volume entitled Thinking through Things:
Theorising artefacts ethnographically, the editors pose
the interesting question ‘What would an artefact oriented
anthropology look like if it were not about material
culture?’.56 Behind this apparently paradoxical formulation
lies the call for a particular methodological move which can
be described as ‘rather than providing data to which theory
is applied, revealing the strengths and flaws of an existing
theoretical model, the things encountered in fieldwork
are allowed to dictate the terms of their own analysis –
including new premises altogether for theory’.57 In a later
contribution, Martin Holbraad presents the suggested
method very succinctly: ‘Put very simply: instead of
treating all the things that your informants say of and do
to or with things as modes of representing the things in
question, treat them as modes of defining them.’58 Apart
from thus offering important new heuristic opportunities
for the analysis of objects, this move has important
implications for the way we understand the goal of such
analyses, traditionally understood – in Anthropology
as well as Egyptology – as a matter of delineating and
interpreting the thoughts of the people studied: ‘On this
view, anthropological analysis has little to do with trying
to determine how other people think about the world. It
has to do with how we must think in order to conceive a
world the way they do’.59 In the present case, the question
then becomes what kind of coffin-concept we would need
to account for an object which is at once a part of the body,
an ensemble of gods and a cosmos; an object which, when
painted and inscribed, incarnates objects and ritual acts
and becomes selectively transparent by painting on it a
pair of eyes.
We are, however, clearly in a different situation than the
anthropologists editing and contributing to the volume in
question, as we cannot (or only to a very limited degree,
as we shall see shortly) rely on informants to provide us
with the raw materials for the necessary conceptual work.
In studying a dead culture, we need, in other words, to rely
to a large extent on our capacity to ‘let the thing speak’ for
itself.60 Nonetheless, the Egyptians’ thinking about coffins
will provide a suitable, if fairly limited, point of departure
for the present discussion.
Egyptian thoughts about coffins
At first we may note that the coffin was not surprisingly
regarded as a crucial part of the burial ensemble, and several
different types of texts attest to the notion that ‘coffin
and linen’ are an idiom capturing the two most essential
parts of a burial.61 Thus, the rubric of Coffin Texts spell
56
HENARE et al., 2007: 1.
57
HENARE et al., 2007: 4.
58
HOLBRAAD, 2011: 12
59
HENARE et al., 2007: 15.
60
HOLBRAAD, 2011.
61
Thus for instance in the inscription of Djau (DAVIES, 1902: pl. 13, ll.
8-14), and the stela of Antef (FRANKE, 2007: 157-158).
37
345 identifies the text as a ‘Spell of justification before
Thoth, the prince of the gods by a man in Heliopolis. For
a man’s linen and a man’s coffin (ors.t) not to be taken
away from him in the necropolis’,62 and the spell proceeds
to effect this purpose in mythological terms by paralleling
the various rites of purification and embalming performed
for the deceased with the mythological precedent of Osiris.
While there are other spells that assume a definite
mythologisation of the coffin as the body of the sky-
goddess Nut,63 they do not refer explicitly or concretely
to the coffin, nor otherwise inform us about the nature
of the object. Other texts, however, provide some insight
into certain metaphorical conceptualisations of the coffin
and its function. Thus, through references to the coffin
sides as ‘dams’, we can deduce that the coffin could be
viewed metaphorically as an agricultural canal or water
receptacle, the corollary perhaps being that the deceased
rests in a state of potentiality akin to a grain of corn in an
irrigated field.64
Another coffin metaphor is based on nautical terminology,
where the coffin is conceptualised as a boat, serving
as a vessel for the notional journey undertaken by the
deceased.65 Both of these conceptual blends are clearly
at the same time related to material and artistic practices.
Thus, the coffin-field blend has clear conceptual affinities
with the ideas underlying corn Osirises like those already
mentioned in relation to the Khoiak Festival and earlier
practices such as clay figurines with inserted grains of
corn.66 The conceptualisation of the coffin as a boat seems
to be highly relevant for understanding the whole genre of
funerary boat depictions in two and three dimensions, apart
from whatever rites may have served as their inspiration.67
Certain later references are interesting in this regard, but
fall outside of our current purposes, such as Ikhtay’s coffin
being conceptualised as a messenger mediating between
the letter-writer and the deceased recipient.68
A similarly very general picture is found if we employ what
has become another traditional approach to word meaning
in Egyptology, namely by looking at the ways in which
the most frequent noun for ‘coffin’, ors.t was classified.
Apart from the classifier connected to the root ors, ‘bury’,
we find only the very straightforward classification with
wood as well as some instances with a so-called ‘repeater’
sign, that is, a sign depicting the item in question, rather
62
CT IV, 369a-c [345].
63
Cf. BILLING, 2002.
64
NYORD, 2007: 26-27.
65
NYORD, 2007: 27-28.
66
Cf. Szpakowska, 2008: 56.
67
This is especially clear in Middle Kingdom model funerary boats,
often with poles decorated with striped bands similar to those found at
the edges of the sides of coffins, and with wDAt-eyes on the prow. I am
grateful to Gersande ESCHENBRENNER-DIEMER for pointing out that
this parallelism is particularly clear in examples like the Bersheh boat
models now at Boston Museum of Fine Arts (e.g. FREED and DOXEY,
2009: 175, fig. 135) which show a pair of wDAt-eyes (rather than just a
single one) on the sides of the prows.
68
O. Louvre 698 (ČERNÝ and GARDINER 1957: pl. 80), cf.
FRANDSEN 1992 and COONEY 2007: 275-276.
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium
Body, Cosmos and Eternity
than classifying it.69 Even if there are naturally details that
have been left out here, the overall conclusion must be that
the great conceptual wealth of coffin decoration is highly
underdetermined in preserved Egyptian discourses about
coffins.
One further, perhaps more important indication of what a
coffin can do is found, not, as it happens, in the Coffin
Texts, but rather in certain rubrics from the Book of the
Dead. Thus, for instance the rubric to Chapter 72 in the
Papyrus of Nu reads ‘As for him who knows this spell or
upon whose coffin it has been made, he can come forth
by day in any shape that he wishes. He is given bread and
beer and a large cut of meat on the offering table of the
great god. He can go forth to the Field of Reeds, and barley
and emmer is given to him there. Thus is he sound as he
was on earth’.70 Such rubrics hold the potential for lengthy
discussions in their own right, including questions about
the need and nature of knowledge, as well as the whole
‘mysticism’ debate taken up some decades ago by Wente.71
For the present purposes, though, what is of primary
interest is the fact that the coffin is explicitly said to be
capable of functioning as an alternative to knowledge of
the spells in question. Unfortunately the relation between
the two uses of the spell is not elaborated.
Jan Assmann has recently suggested that we should
distinguish, in the Coffin Texts, two different uses of text,
one which goes back to the Pyramid Texts and is essentially
a ‘prosthetic voice’ that pronounces recitations eternally,
while the other texts are rather codifications of knowledge
and function thus as a ‘prosthesis of recollection’.72
Neither type of text is, of course, meant to be actually
read, so that the prosthetic use Assmann suggests (whether
or not one follows his precise distinction between the two
types) seems to be a clear consequence of the Book of the
Dead spell just cited. Whatever a coffin is, it is the type of
surface on which ritual texts can be written to alleviate (or,
perhaps rather, fulfil) the need for actually knowing them.
Boxes with Eyes and Doors
While the latter point will be seen to be of some importance,
it appears that it would be useful at this point to set aside the
Egyptians’ own statements about coffins and return to the
object itself. The most immediately apparent characteristic
of a coffin like those of the Middle Kingdom, indeed of
any wooden box, is its fundamental separation of inside
and outside and the corresponding ability to contain and
keep in or out. A closely connected concept is that of the
impenetrability and opaqueness of the box, preventing not
only movement between the two sides, but in fact any form
of interaction. Taking our point of departure in this fact,
we may note right away that the two most widespread and
enduring elements of coffin decoration, the false door and
69
GOLDWASSER, 2002: 15.
70
LAPP, 1997: pl. 20, l. 12-14.
71
WENTE, 1982.
72
ASSMANN, 2005: 248-249.
38
the wDAt-eyes, serve precisely to nuance this fundamental
feature of the coffin.
The wDAt-eyes have already been touched upon above,
but the false door has so far been passed by, mainly
because it belongs neither to the bodily, nor to the strictly
cosmological, but rather to a third conception of the coffin,
which we could label as architectural.73 In a short notice
published in 1897, Ludwig Borchardt pointed out that
the chronological development of the false door motif
on coffins might provide us with a clue to its conceptual
importance.74 He suggests that the original rationale of the
false doors on coffins should be sought in a group of fairly
early coffins which show the false door on the inside rather
than the outside of the eastern coffin side, corresponding
incidentally to the practice of depicting door bolts as a
sign that the false door shows a door seen from the inside,
rather than the outside of the notional building of which it
is a part. A medial stage is then found with coffins with no
interior decoration, but where the necessity of including
a false door must have been clear enough to prompt the
artisans to make it part of the outside decoration instead,
still on the part of the coffin closest to the head of the
deceased. This then leads to a further development where
several doors can be included on the outside of the coffin.
The false door is thus conceived of in the first instance as
a door for the deceased, clearly derived from the origin
of the false door in tomb chapels. In this original usage
of the false door, it serves to localise the presence of the
ancestor during the offering rituals taking place in the
chapel. While discussions about the function of a false
door usually centre on the alleged ‘beliefs’ of ancient
Egyptians about souls and the like, as Lynn Meskell has
pointed out, the phenomenological experience of a door
which cannot be opened and the presence of an ancestor
who cannot (normally) be seen, may be more important
than more intangible beliefs – and, we may add, since
no contemporary texts explicate the believed function of
a false door, as a matter of methodology, it may be less
problematic to explore. Lynn Meskell has already called
attention to an evocative description from Bachelard’s
Poetics of Space in this connection detailing the emotions
and experiences,75 especially those of the range of
possibilities of sociality, change and movement that
adheres to the door. In this connection, we might add some
of Lang’s remarks on the ‘Dwelling door’ which also seem
highly apposite to the understanding of Egyptian false
doors:76
Though a door can be seen purely as a physical object
... it also can be viewed as a new access and disclosure
of the world. To think of the house as embodied, as a
kind of second body, means to see it in all its aspects
not as thing but as access to things ... it is first of all
73
Cf. also the contribution by van WALSEM in this volume.
74
BORCHARDT, 1897
75
MESKELL, 2003: 41.
76
LANG, 1984.
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium
Rune Nyord: Permeable containers: Body and cosmos in Middle Kingdom coffins
access to an inside and an outside, it is disclosure and
closure, it yields or resists, it beckons or rejects.
This general phenomenological property of the door
as a promise of access gains a further dimension in the
case of the special Egyptian construction of the false
door, where the function of the door as ‘physical object’
referred to in the quote is deliberately thwarted by what is
essentially only a depiction of a door as cultic focus with
its suggestion of a space and a presence beyond the door
which is accessible only indirectly in the ritual interaction
with the ancestor. It should be borne in mind that in the
Old Kingdom, the false door formed part of a complex
consisting also of other ‘dummy’ architectural features
such as the inaccessible tomb chamber and the serdab
slit which does allow one to look through it but hardly to
observe much of what is inside, and once again certainly
not to access the area beyond in the usual sense. Taken
together, such elements of the tomb serve to establish a
phenomenological experience of the deceased as a half-
perceived presence with which it is possible to interact
during the ritual.77
Following the idea that the false door on coffins was
originally thought of as belonging on the inside, it may
simply have been conceived as part of the cult place
depicted on the inside front of coffins, but it is also very
possible that it was conceived as having a connection
with the false door in the actual tomb chapel, as it is often
posited in Egyptological discussions.78 When the false door
is moved to the outside of the coffin, its meaning appears
to be less concretely tied to the situation of the offering
rite, but rather to retain the experience of the presence of
the deceased as well as the corollary penetrability of the
coffin. The presence of several false doors on the outside
of coffins can thus perhaps be understood a bit more
abstractly than Borchardt’s interpretation that the soul was
thereby provided with more exits, namely as a general
stressing of the notional permeability of the otherwise
materially solid and impenetrable wooden coffin. Possibly
related to the same idea is Coffin Texts Spell 242, titled
‘Spell for opening a door for the ba’ and inscribed on the
front sides of several Assiut coffins, where the intended
direction movement, however, is that of the ba desiring to
enter to see the body, rather than leaving it.79
This point leads us back to the question of the pair of eyes
and their function. Paralleling to some extent the meaning
of the false door just analysed, we have already seen that
the pair of eyes serves to make present the deceased in the
context of stela decoration. Thus from the point of view
of the question of permeability, the eyes serve a similar
function to that of the door. The conceptual consequences
are somewhat different, however. Given the ritual role
of the eyes as mentioned earlier, it becomes an obvious
possibility to view the eyes as in some sense being
77
Cf. NYORD, 2013.
78
E.g. the depiction in FISCHER, 1977: 40, fig. 42.
79
CT III, 327c [242]. For the possible relation to the false door, see
WILLEMS, 1988:228, n. 210.
39
those of the deceased, a point of view which appears to
be corroborated by the emphasis of the head and eye in
the Akhmim coffins discussed above. The occurrence
precisely on an otherwise non-anthropomorphic coffin,
however, gives the impression of an undifferentiated being
whose only point of inchoate differentiation is a pair of
eyes. This characterisation has some important correlates
in Egyptian mythology, but before exploring them in more
detail, I would like to show that we can arrive at a similar
conclusion from another avenue of approach.
Divine relations
It has been seen that the ornamental hieroglyphic bands of
the outer decoration of Middle Kingdom coffins portray
the deceased as being surrounded by gods, a situation
which probably alludes to the rites carried out during the
vigil before the funeral. The ‘standard formulation’ of
this is a spatially distributed collection of jmAxj-phrases,
but occasionally more detailed statements of the services
performed for the deceased are found.
A relatively neglected aspect of such references is that they
often stress the family relations between the actors. Thus,
Geb and Nut often stress that the deceased is their son (or
conversely his relationship to them as parents is stressed),80
and in an interesting textual tradition from Dahshur, the
bond of ‘love’ between the gods is stressed and paralleled
with Nut’s love for the deceased:81
Recitation by Nut: N is my daughter, N is my beloved
with whom I am pleased, just like I love my father Shu
and just like I am pleased with my mother Tefnut.
(…)
I love my beloved daughter N just like I love my
husband Geb and just like I love my firstborn, Osiris.
This family entanglement reminds us that Jansen-Winkeln
has suggested that the etymological origin of the notion
of imAx so important in Egyptian mortuary religion lies in
the root mAx, with a basic meaning of a sheaf or bundle.82
Thus, Jansen-Winkeln argues, the origin of the religious
notion of imAx is a metaphorical extension of this concrete
idea to denote a social dependence or entanglement with
another person.83 Leaving aside the difficult linguistic
point for the moment, it is clear when we examine divine
speeches on coffins that there is a definite subtext of
family entanglement, in addition to the more obviously
Stundenwachen-related themes of bodily reconstitution
and protection.
80
See e.g. the examples of Nut-spells cited by WILLEMS, 1988: 133-
134.
81
CT Temp 331. Treated most recently by RUSSO, 2012: 85, but note the
different reading of the 1st person pronouns in the rendering here, which
avoids the problems of referring to Tefnut as masculine hy, ‘husband’ and
to the male Osiris having a wp-Xt, ‘firstborn’ (lit. opener of the womb).
82
JANSEN-WINKELN, 1996.
83
JANSEN-WINKELN, 1996, cf. also ALLEN, 2006: 16f.
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium
Body, Cosmos and Eternity
Such relational entanglements are a much more general
feature of Egyptian religion. Jan Assmann in particular has
pointed out that, with the possible exception of Aton in the
Amarna Period, Egyptian gods are not generally defined
by some internal essence that makes them what they are,
nor originally by the narrative roles they play, but rather by
the relationships, or, to use Assmann’s term, constellations
in which they participate.84 From this point of view, the
text just quoted expresses a ‘mother-child’ constellation
between Nut and the deceased and parallels this to the
various other constellations between Nut and her close
kin: ‘mother-child’, ‘husband-wife’, and ‘son-mother’.
Assmann originally noted this phenomenon in the particular
case of hymns where constellative expressions are used to
describe the god in question in the ritual situation. The
god being addressed is thus being defined through the
hymn with reference to the constellations in which it plays
part. Similarly, in our case, the dead is defined as Osiris
inter alia by Nut addressing him and treating him as her
offspring.
With the ritual focus that has been prevalent in the more
recent studies of Middle Kingdom coffins, it has been
natural to focus on the portrayed relation between each of
these various gods and the deceased.85 However, with our
current focus on the coffin as object and especially on its
role as separator between the spaces outside and inside, it
becomes clear that there are at least two ways of looking
at the gods surrounding the deceased, corresponding to
what anthropologist Marilyn Strathern terms external
and internal relations, depending on whether the related
entities pre-exist or are brought into existence by the
relationship.86 The first of these possibilities corresponds
to the ritual interpretation where the dead and the priests
all pre-exist before the ritual, ready to take on the ritual
roles for a limited time, and the coffin simply renders
this already-existing relation permanent. The second
possibility would be that the relationship established by
the coffin brings into being both the role of Osiris and
the role of Nut, a reading which can be connected to
the definitional role of Assmann’s constellations. In this
interpretation, the deceased becomes Osiris precisely by
entering into the myriad of constellations posited by the
coffin. In this way, the walls of the coffin become not just
wooden barriers blocking movement and sight, but at the
same time conceptual boundaries, so that the connections
between the protective gods and the deceased can be seen
as external boundaries between pre-existing entities when
viewed from the inside where the mummy is surrounded
by the walls of the coffin, or as internal when viewed from
the outside where the relations bring into being the gods
that they relate, including, most importantly, the role of the
deceased as Osiris.
84
First in ASSMANN, 1969.
85
E.g. WILLEMS, 1988; 1996.
86
STRATHERN, 1995: 18f, cf. also more generally on such constitutive
relationships STRATHERN, 1988.
40
Such a relational approach might help to resolve a slightly
surprising consequence of the dominant interpretation of
the coffin as a perpetual suspension of the situation of the
Stundenwachen rites. With the focus on defeat of enemies
and bodily reconstitution, as well as their temporal
character as a ritual phase taking place on the night before
the funeral, in the famous nomenclature of Arnold van
Gennep, the Stundenwachen constitute a liminal phase.87
This phase is characterised by malleable categories and
corresponding danger, and in general it is a temporary
phase eventually overcome by the incorporation phase in
which the categories become fixed and the danger averted.
This latter phase, in which the new status of the initiand
is affirmed and rendered permanent, would, on the face
of it, be a much more likely candidate for the ritualised
environment of the coffin, and this would conform better
with the relational interpretation suggested here, where the
deceased becomes an Osiris precisely by the enactment of
the appropriate relations within the divine world. While
Willems has shown cogently the close connection of Middle
Kingdom coffin decoration with the Stundenwachen, we
can also choose to focus instead on the more permanent
side of the procedure where the deceased becomes a son
(of Geb and Nut), a brother (of Isis and Nephthys), a father
(of Horus), all bound together mythologically, as in the
quoted spell, by a bond of love and pleasure (mrwt and
Htp) and ritually by the entanglement of the jmAx-relation.
Thus, the kinship and other relationships stressed in the
text are not a mere by-effect of the identification with
Osiris, but rather, as in a hymn, the god is continuously
defined through the constellations into which he enters. It
will be noted that this ‘creative’ or ‘performative’ way of
establishing an identity doesn’t really conform to our usual
understanding of the word ‘definition’, and anthropologist
Martin Holbraad has suggested the neologism ‘infinition’
or ‘inventive definition’88 to express this kind of acts which
define the person talked about as a new kind of being by
positing new relations.
It is worth noting here that this line of thinking approaches,
in a roundabout way, an interesting suggestion advanced
by Mark Smith concerning the correct understanding of
the juxtaposition of the name of the individual deceased
with that of Osiris in mortuary texts. Proceeding from
a number of late instances where an n intrudes between
Osiris and the name of the deceased, Smith argues that
the relation should always be understood as a genitive
(be it direct or indirect) and that Osiris is thus not a new
87
van GENNEP, 1960: 21 et passim. Just before the manuscript of this
paper was submitted, an article by Harold HAYS (2013) appeared,
announcing ‘the end of rites of passage’ by calling into question the
relevance of this category for the Egyptian material, primarily on
the grounds that the basic schema does not appear to correspond to
the structure of Egyptian representations of ritual. This interesting
critique raises too many questions to be fruitfully addressed here, but
among the points that could be debated (the ultimate result of which I
suspect might be a slightly more positive view of the usability of the
analytical framework of rites of passage than that argued by HAYS) is the
equation of the tripartite structure of rites of passage with a continuous
narrative plot, the specific equation between temporal ritual structure
and representational layout in Egyptian depictions, and the insistence on
commensurability between emic and etic approaches.
88
HOLBRAAD, 2012: 220f.
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium

Rune Nyord: Permeable containers: Body and cosmos in Middle Kingdom coffins

identity for the deceased, but rather to be understood as an

aspect or form. Thus, ‘[a]t the end of the embalming rites,
having been returned to life and freed from imputation of
wrongdoing, the deceased was endowed with an Osiris-
aspect’.89 It is probably safe to say that Smith’s general
argument shows a certain imbalance in favour of Late
Period evidence, and that the most literal application of
his suggested interpretation works rather less well for the
earlier periods.90 However, on a more general level, and
leaving aside for the moment the grammatical question
of genitive or apposition, the notion that the divine status
attained by the deceased can be regarded as a potential
which is realised by the funerary rites is highly germane to
the view of the coffin I have advocated here.

To return to the question of the types of relations between

the deceased and the gods, if, as I have suggested, they
can be regarded as internal connections in the sense that
they cause the related entities to exist as such, a question
presents itself, namely ‘internal to what’? The obvious
answer is the coffin itself, which thus comes to contain
the entire totality of gods including the relations between
them. In discussing the bodily aspect of the coffin, I Fig. 4 - Vignette of East and West
suggested earlier that there might be a mythological standards bearing offerings from the
correlate to the undifferentiated being with two eyes as the front side of the inner coffin of Senebtisi
only delineated body part, and as it happens, this line of (L2Li). Gauthier, J.-E.; Jéquier, G., 1902:
thinking converges with the idea of a being incorporating pl. 23. Courtesy of the Institut Français
all of the gods and their relations. d’Archéologie Orientale.
Thus, in the Pyramid and Coffin Texts spells dealing with
the divinisation of the body parts, we find precisely a
portrait of a being who incorporates all the gods of the
pantheon, sometimes identified explicitly as Atum,91 and at
other times only hinting at this identity through puns, e.g.
‘Complete (tm) as every god have you come into being’92
playing on the root tm, which most probably does not just
denote simple totality, but more specifically a totality
consisting of heterogeneous elements such as a human
body or for instance ‘the complete Ennead’. A similar
conception is found in Coffin Texts spell 75 where Shu
stresses his coming into being inside the limbs of Atum,93
so that he can attain his role as mediator between Atum
and the rest of the creation. Later on in the same spell,
he accordingly claims to first create the Entourage and
then setting up those who are around the shrine for Atum,
Fig. 5 - Diagram of internal/external
89
90
SMITH, 2008: 3. relations implied by the coffin decoration.
Cf. the detailed discussion by HAYS, 2012: 167ff, and note that
not only the occurrence of the genitive adjective, but more generally Drawing: Henrijette Vex Nyord.
the vast majority of the material cited in support of SMITH’s (2006)
interpretation is of late date, and, more importantly, the general idea
is difficult to attest in earlier times. In short, it does not seem possible both no doubt references to the gods of later generations.94
to sustain a similar argument based on the pharaonic material, so that Here, the way in which Atum contains within him all of the
the most immediate conclusion from SMITH’s important observations
would seem to be that a reinterpretation of post-mortem fates took place other gods is conceptualised as the relationship between a
over the millennia. SMITH’s (2006: 336) methodological point that body and its parts, whereas the ‘intensive multiplicity’95
single interpretations covering the whole span of the ancient Egyptian
history should be sought would impose a highly static view of Egyptian 94
CT I, 393d-394a [75].
95
religion that seems unwarranted, except in cases where such continuity In the sense of philosopher Gilles Deleuze. It goes beyond the scope
can be established as probable based on representative sources covering of this paper to explore this conceptual framework and its usability for
the whole chronological span. analysing Egyptian thought more fully, and I hope to be able to do so
91
Pyr. 135a-b [213]. elsewhere. For some introductory remarks on this approach, see NYORD,
92
CT VI, 391h [761]. 2013, and for a fuller discussion of Deleuze’s notion of multiplicity, see
93
CT I, 342b-346b [75]. de LANDA, 2002.

41
 Copyright material: no unauthorized reproduction in any medium
Body, Cosmos and Eternity
of gods and relations between them contained within the
coffin is perhaps a slightly more abstract conceptualisation
of the same basic situation.
In a similar manner, the eyes on the front side of the coffin
is at least once associated with the two eyes of the creator
god which are at the same time the first differentiation or
hypostasis of the creative act.96 Thus in the depiction shown
here (Figure 4), the eyes are paralleled by the standards of
the East and West presenting offerings (as the vignette is
closely associated with the offering list), which in turn are
labelled as the day-bark and the night-bark respectively,
and the accompanying spell CT 607 stresses this link to
Shu and Tefnut as the two eyes of the creator.97
If Atum is thus understood as a kind of superordinate
category containing all the gods occurring on the coffin,
this would explain the otherwise somewhat curious
absence of this god from the coffin decoration. Willems
tentatively suggests that the reason for this absence could
be that the deceased on occasion takes on the mythological
role of the sun god, and by extension also apparently that
of Atum in addition to the more obvious and usual role as
Osiris.98 In the view argued here, this would be essentially
correct, but we can add more precisely that the deceased
is Osiris when viewed from the inside of the coffin where
his relationships to the other gods are external, whereas
when viewed from the outside of the coffin, so that the
relationships are internal, the deceased (or rather the whole
ensemble) becomes Atum (Figure 5).
The coffin thus oscillates between the internal Osirian
perspective with external relations and the external Atum
perspective with internal relations. The role played by the
body and the cosmos in each case is rather different. To
Osiris, the limbs are gathered and restored to life, while he
is protected from Seth. The cosmic elements usually focus
on journeys and cycles and cardinal correspondences. To
Atum, on the other hand, the concern is with differentiation
of his intensive multiplicity, often expressed in the texts as
interactions with the first generation of gods who are the
first to become hypostasised. The cosmos in this case is
contained wholly within the god with only vague primeval
exceptions such as Nun and the primeval mound. The
other gods, in this conception, are differentiated on the
surface of the coffin with their internal relations hidden.
Due to its containing and separating structure, the Middle
Kingdom coffin is able to instantiate both notions in one
and same thing.
3. Conclusion
This paper has attempted to point out a new direction of
approach to ancient Egyptian coffins (and, by extension,
other Egyptian artefacts). Taking its point of departure
in traditional understandings of bodily and cosmic
symbolism, we went on to suggest that Egyptian coffins
96
97
See e.g. BICKEL, 1994: 99-100 with references to the Coffin Texts.
CT VI, 220r [607]. Cf. BORGHOUTS, 1984: 711ff for the spell.
98
WILLEMS, 1988: 154-156.
42
offer a more fundamental challenge to conventional ideas
about communication and representation and that we
need to take up those challenges if we are to gain a fuller
understanding of the way the objects were supposed to
work. Such a rethinking would clearly move well beyond
what it is possible to explore in a single paper of limited
scope, as one would need to address questions such as
Egyptian notions of representation and ritual efficacy
much more broadly than just questions about coffins.
As a first step in this direction, however, I have suggested
some possible approaches for beginning to explore the
conceptual affordances of Egyptian coffins, making use of
their basic nature as impenetrable and opaque boxes which
become notionally permeable by virtue of their decoration.
It was seen that this fundamental set of concepts enable us
to ‘think through the coffin’, drawing both on Egyptian
mythological notions and the properties of the coffin as
material object to arrive at analyses the terms of which are
extracted from the objects themselves. In this way, painted
eyes become an indicator of perceptual permeability and
inchoate corporeality and being surrounded by gods can be
seen as an establishment of divine relations constitutive of
the identity of the body within the coffin. Apart from such
concrete hermeneutical avenues opened up by the analyses
suggested here, I hope also to have taken a first step
towards an approach to Egyptian objects where Egyptian
conceptual categories (such as the attributes of the gods
in mythology) can be used to think through the inherent
properties of objects such as Middle Kingdom coffins (e.g.
containment and permeability) to help us re-forge our own
categories to accommodate the at first sight strange and
mysterious objects the Egyptians have left us.
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