One Mummy, Many Coffins: Egyptians Intended to Transform Deceased from Human to Deity

Aug. 23, 2013 — The Egyptian elite was buried in a coffin placed inside another coffin -- in ensembles of up to eight coffins. This was intended to ensure the transformation of the deceased from human to deity, according to Anders Bettum, Egyptologist.

"Boxes and other forms of containers are technologies that arise at given points of time in various cultures. Everybody knows the ancient Egyptian practice of mummifying their dead. What is perhaps less known is that they placed the mummies inside layer upon layer of coffins," says Anders Bettum, Egyptologist at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo.

A similar idea can be found with Russian dolls, Chinese boxes and even Norwegian poetry traditions.

"The Egyptian coffin sets are based on the same principle that we can observe with Chinese boxes and Russian nested matryoshka dolls, where objects are nested inside each other to constitute a complete ensemble," he says.

Ancient Egyptian history encompasses a period of nearly three thousand years, up to the Roman conquest in the year 30 BCE. Today, museums all over the world possess mummies or coffins that have contained mummies of more or less prominent men and women.

The child king Tutankhamun (1334-24 BCE) was buried in as many as eight coffins, according to Bettum.

"For men and women who were members of the ancient Egyptian elite at that time, three or four coffins were not unusual," he adds.

Passing on

The funeral rituals of ancient Egypt and the belief in celestial resurrection have bequeathed an unusual legacy and an essential artistic record for their descendants and for scholars.
Jenny Jobbins shows that although times changed, many of the old funeral customs lingered on

The painting in the Theban Valley of the Nobles, on the south wall of the tomb of Ramose, a governor of Thebes and vizier during the reigns of Amenophis III and Amenophis IV in the 18th Dynasty, shows a group of female mourners wailing in lamentation. Other images of funeral processions show mourners waving palm branches. Palms — a symbol of longevity, rebirth and the afterlife — have long been associated with death. They were cast before Christ as he entered Jerusalem to be tried and crucified, and they are still placed on graves in Egypt, where they are said to bring a blessing on the grave.

Many years ago I discussed this rich heritage with the Egyptologist Kamal Al-Mallakh, who referred to the Mosque of Abu Haggag within the walls of Luxor Temple and the similarity of the events at his moulid (saint’s day), when a model of his boat is ceremoniously carried through the streets of Luxor, to the ancient Feast of Opet when Amun’s sacred boat was carried from Karnak to Luxor Temple. He told me: “There has to be some significance. Isn’t [Abu Haggag’s] mosque right there in the temple? And some of the rights at his moulid are purely pharaonic.”