Late Period Coffins: Sacred Wooden Environments

Coffin decoration throughout Egyptian history had evolved quite extensively from a plain wooden box with limited writing to a distinct anthropoid coffin with an elaborate collection of image and text. Iconography always remained the heart of decoration schemes and highlighted themes surrounding the mummy, funerary rituals of the deceased, the realm of the burial and the funerary texts previously depicted on tomb walls. Coffins of the early Late Period blended such iconographic features, and can be accurately portrayed within a prominent priestly family that spans the 22^nd Dynasty (c. 950 BC) to the end of the 26^th (c. 525 BC), called the Besenmut family. This coherent set of material is cemented by genealogy and can trace the progression of coffin design during this time. Furthermore, the relationship between the iconography and structure of early Late Period coffins (c. 747- 525 BC) blended artistic concepts, such as tradition, innovation and archaism, to demonstrate their function as sacred objects that were used as more than simple preservation mechanisms and rather represented tomb microcosms.