Anthropoid Coffin of the Servant of the Great Place Teti

I’ve shared a couple of close-ups of this coffin in the past, but this is my photo of the whole thing. It belonged to a man called Teti, who worked painting the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in the mid-18th Dynasty. It’s in the Brooklyn Museum, acc. no.: 37.14E.

It’s one of the earliest known yellow painted coffins, and the decoration is still evolving towards what would be come standard for that style. The gods that are in the four panels along the side are Imsety, Anubis, Duamutef and Thoth.

Yellow painted coffins make me think of a talk by Meghan Strong about artificial light that I went to – part of her work involved investigating how these coffins would’ve looked as the sun went down during the funerary ritual and candle light was the only illumination.

In the sun the coffin looks like a painted piece of wood, but as the flickering light of wick-on-a-stick lamps takes over the coffins shimmer like gold, representing the transformation of the deceased into an akh.