New photography by Shannon Ruff captured with a digital camera-2007.

Coffin Fragment

Artist Unknown

CultureEgyptian

DateLate Period, Dynasty 25-30, 730-343 B.C.E.

MediumCartonnage and polychrome on wood

DimensionsOverall: 1/8 x 3/8 in. (0.3 x 0.9 cm)

Credit LineGift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.

Object number71.2259

Collections

Ancient Mediterranean Art

On View

Chrysler Museum of Art, Gallery 109

DescriptionLong board painted with an alternation of doorways and anthropoid figures in shrines. Three doorways and two shrines remain on the fragment, starting on the left with two pairs door-shrine plus one door on the right. The doorways are made of red up-rights and lintel with a black mat rolled under the lintel. The shrines are represented as dome-roofed boxes with high posts on either side. The walls and roof of these are painted with a broad red stripe between two broad green ones. The anthropoid figures inside are mummiform, standing on a rectangular base. They're dressed in a white shroud, with a long black hair and up-turned beard, and wearing a broad yellow necklace. Their faces are painted yellow with a white eye with black kohl. The space inside doorways and between doors and shrines is painted in white. Holes are drilled in the thickness of the board in order to peg the different sides of the coffin together.;

Label TextCoffin Fragment Late Period, Dynasty 25-30, 730-343 B.C.E. Cartonnage and polychrome on wood Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. 71.2259 Composed of plastered layers of linen or papyrus that were molded while wet, cartonnage was used by the ancient Egyptians to form mummy cases and masks that were then brilliantly painted. This cartonnage panel was originally part of a coffin, probably rectangular in shape. It depicts a pair of underworld deities set in shrines, who alternate with a succession of three doorways. Given the panel's tomb context, the doorways likely allude to the journey of the soul after death. As the sun god Re had to pass through different gates during his nightly trip through the underworld, so the newly deceased had to progress through gateways on his perilous journey into the next world.