![]() ![]() "For men and women who were members of the ancient Egyptian elite at that time, three or four coffins were not unusual," he adds.Īccording to the researcher's recent PhD thesis, "Faces within Faces - The Symbolic Function of Nested Yellow Coffins in Ancient Egypt," nested coffins were not only a status symbol for the Egyptian elite. The child king Tutankhamun (1334-24 BCE) was buried in as many as eight coffins, according to Bettum. Today, museums all over the world possess mummies or coffins that have contained mummies of more or less prominent men and women. "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.Īncient Egyptian history encompasses a period of nearly three thousand years, up to the Roman conquest in the year 30 BCE. 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.Ī similar idea can be found with Russian dolls, Chinese boxes and even Norwegian poetry traditions. Everybody knows the ancient Egyptian practice of mummifying their dead. ![]() "Boxes and other forms of containers are technologies that arise at given points of time in various cultures.
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