Egyptian Coffins Reveal Shocking Ancient Practice

My name is Giselle Kidai. I'm an archaeologist and human remains specialist, but today I'm stepping a bit out of my comfort zone. Instead of analyzing human remains, I'll be looking at the boxes that human remains are put in. I'm going to be looking at ancient Egyptian coffins. Today I'm at the Petrie Museum in central London, where I've been given special access to join the team as they investigate some of the oldest coffins in their collection. They're hoping to uncover more about this ancient civilization, how they lived, and perhaps most intriguingly, how they treated their dead. Dr. Anna Garnett is a curator at the Petrie Museum. That is, that is unreal. It's incredible, incredible. So the first time for a long time that this coffin has been outside of its showcase. I've never been able to see something that's behind. It's normally behind glass, and now we're like, wow, wow, what a privilege. So this is a coffin, right? So a lot of people will say coffin and sarcophagus kind of interchangeably. Can you help define that? Coffins are generally made of wood. They can be either the shape of a box, sort of a rectangular shape, or what we call anthropoid, so the shape of the body. Sarcophagus, or sarcophagi, the plural, generally made out of stone, and they are, they can be shaped like the body, but they're often, again, rectangular in shape. So really, it comes down to the material. A coffin is usually made of wood, a sarcophagus is usually made of stone, and it's usually the coffin that goes inside the sarcophagus. And does that mean anything if there's somebody who's placed in a coffin and placed in a sarcophagus? Are they special or anything like that? They, I imagine they will be very rich to be able to afford a coffin and a sarcophagus, and thinking about those different layers that you will be buried within, those layers are all protection for the afterlife. Coffins and sarcophagi aren't unique to ancient Egypt. They were used across the ancient world, but it was the Egyptians who truly turned them into an art form, revealing not only how they honoured their dead, but what they believed awaited them in the afterlife. What we only have here is the lid, actually. We don't have the whole coffin. We don't have the base as well, so we don't know exactly how the coffin was buried. Maybe it could have been within another structure, sarcophagus. But at this period, so we think this dates to around about 2000, 2300 years ago, we're not entirely sure. It's most likely that the body was just placed within a wooden coffin. Okay, and forgive me here, because I'm a human remains specialist in the world of archaeology. Can you kind of put us in that time period? What was it like? Absolutely. So if we're right, if we're correct, and this coffin dates to, again, around 2000, 2300 years ago, that's a period that we call the Ptolemaic period. So this is when the Greeks ruled over Egypt. Might be slightly older than that. So by the time this person lived in ancient Egypt, we don't know their name, unfortunately. The pyramids were already about 2000 years old. And Tutankhamun would have ruled around about 1000 years beforehand as well. So when this person lived, Tutankhamun, Ramesses, all these famous pharaohs, they had already lived 1000 years previously. Lasting from 332 to 30 BCE, the Ptolemaic period was a fascinating chapter in ancient Egyptian history. It began with the arrival of Alexander the Great, whose successor, Ptolemy, started a Greek-influenced dynasty in Egypt. And it ended with the death of Egypt's last pharaoh, Cleopatra VII, bringing an end to Egyptian independence and ushering in Roman rule. So this project that you're doing right now, you're conserving these, is that right? You're actually having a closer look, but it's also part of a conservation of active archaeology after you take it out of the ground. Every object in this museum, most of them have been here for over 100 years, we're still learning something about them every day. And that could be through, for example, scientific analysis. So a lot of the different scientific techniques are developing all the time. So we're consistently learning something new. And the project that we're working on at the moment involves many different researchers, international specialists, coming to the museum to have a look at some of the coffins in the collection, whether that is, as you say, conservation, condition checking, taking the opportunity to get the coffins out of storage and display and just see how they're doing. We also have scientists of different specialisms coming to the museum to learn more about the coffins. So whether that is construction techniques, so how the coffins were made in ancient times, whether that is analysing the different types of pigments, because right now we have the technology that's moving forward all the time to be able to pinpoint the exact pigments, the different varnishes that were used in ancient times for the coffins, any kind of different adhesives, some of the resins that were used in the mummification process, which we still have present on some of the coffins. And we're also getting high resolution photography, different types of imaging. So it's a whole, there's so much going on. It's a really holistic project, which is going on over this month. So we're close to the public in the Petrie Museum to be able to allow this to happen. That is so exciting. I can't wait to look at even more of these. Now we're jumping back to an older coffin dating to the late period of ancient Egypt. It's covered in hieroglyphs and religious imagery, offering us a fascinating glimpse into the beliefs of the people who made it and what they thought awaited them after death. So this is a great example of a coffin that is just covered with religious motifs. So what exactly are religious motifs in this instance? There's a mixture of them here. So we've got different scenes with gods and goddesses. We have hieroglyphic inscriptions. Some of these are ancient spells that are intended to protect the deceased, including spells from what we call the Book of the Dead, which is a bit like a passport to the afterlife. And is that on the top here? Or is that in a different spot? Can you point it out? So some of the spells are just down here, but they're mainly on the underside of the lid and also on the inside of the base, because we've got the base for this coffin as well. And this story of the afterlife, I know that it's so important in that time period, but what does it really mean? What does the afterlife mean? Well, in ancient Egypt, the ancient Egyptian people believed that Egypt was perfect. And we think that they're obsessed with death, but they were actually obsessed with life and with prolonging life. So they really believed that the afterlife was just like a mirror image of Egypt, that there were fields, there were rivers, because why would you improve on perfection? So they wanted to keep living. Yep, exactly. They just wanted to, this was almost like a middle of their life, in a way. After they stopped living, they continued to live in that afterlife. Yep, they believed this was the next step, essentially, to get to the afterlife, which looked exactly like their everyday life. Wow. And this body here, that, well, the body that would have been in this coffin, do we know who that is? Who was in this process of going into the afterlife? We're very fortunate. We think that this was a bespoke coffin for a woman called Nairi Iset Nefer. So her name is just here in the hieroglyphic inscription. We know that from the style of the coffin, from the quality of the coffin, that she was probably from a wealthy, quite elite family at a place called Thebes, which is now modern Luxor in South Egypt. Is this the typical style of a coffin? Is this what most people had? I would say this is very high quality. Okay. So it's high quality in its production and construction, but also in its preservation. It's really beautifully preserved here. So we're looking at a great example of an elite bespoke coffin for a rich woman in ancient Egypt. Wow. The opulent decoration on this coffin tells us it was made for someone very wealthy, but not everyone could afford such an elaborate burial. Another coffin, this time from the third intermediate period, a time when Egypt was divided between rival rulers and political power was much less centralized, gives us a glimpse of a more typical burial. And it hints at the vast industry that had grown up around death and burial in ancient Egypt. Dr. Atena Unkourianou is one of the team of experts investigating this. I've just come over from that coffin lid over there, and that one had a name attached to it. Are all coffins with names attached? Do we know who was in each coffin? So for this particular coffin, or the coffin base, we know that there is no name. They sometimes appear, the names appear around the coffin, but usually when there's one inscribed, it would be next to an image of the monument owner. So we have an image here. And in front of him, there's a list of formulas and names of deities, but there is no name. And because ancient Egypt spans for such a long time, we don't really work in usually, but by period. So for example, for the old kingdom, the age of the pyramids, when the afterlife was almost exclusive for the higher echelons of society, it's usually the case that such object would have a name associated with it. But in later periods of ancient Egypt, including in this period, it's something we call in Egyptology, the democratization of the afterlife, which meant it became available for many people. The democratization of the afterlife is the term historians use to describe a major shift in ancient Egyptian burial practices. Eternal life and the rituals surrounding death were once largely reserved for the Pharaoh and the elite. But over time, these beliefs and practices became accessible to a much wider section of Egyptian society, allowing ordinary people to prepare for the afterlife and hope for eternal life too. And this coffin offers us a unique glimpse into that change. It's a remarkable piece of archaeology and a rare glimpse into the changing beliefs of ancient Egypt. An off-the-shelf sarcophagus where the buyer could simply add their name, and which could later be adapted and reused. It's a fascinating insight into how ordinary Egyptians were increasingly seeking to be honored and buried like the great pharaohs. So you have different levels of art. So for those, again, in the higher levels of society, you usually have names. But for the lower levels, we know that there were workshops that were creating, they were mass-producing coffins. They were mass-producing coffins? Well, yes, they were producing them. There was a high request for them. So they had workshops specifically done for this with carpenters, with painters. Just like you could go and pick out a coffin for yourself and it was more everyday people, not just the highest levels in society. Well, no, they weren't everyday people. They were still individuals who were either in the administration, who'd have scribes, so still those who were... Still middle-class people. Yes. Okay. But it's not just the highest level. Because in my head, I sort of think of someone who can afford something this nice is going to be the highest level of society. But instead, there's these workshops and more people are using them than maybe publicly we all think. Yes. Sometimes they were reusing different parts to put them together, almost like a jigsaw puzzle. And by reuse, it means they were taken out from tombs and then pieced together again. But to go back to your initial question, you have coffins such as this one in which it is clear that it was not designed to add a name. Then you have another type in which they left the name, the sections blank for names. Okay. You could fill it in later. You could fill it in, yes. So you'd have someone come in, potentially see which type of coffin they liked based on personal preference, as you do today, I guess, preparing for the afterlife. And then they would fill in the names. So we know that there are coffins in which names were inscribed. We have those with the spaces left. And then you have the ones that were clearly produced for an individual. And this ranges from someone choosing a particular coffin for specific reasons, as in aesthetics and such. And then we have coffins for individuals who wanted a specific design just to show their status and their part in society. Is this one the first of those three categories? So there's no name, there's no space for a name. It's just a coffin design. That's right. At first glance, that's right. So when we're going to continue with the work and we'll realise, we'll do a full scan, we'll look at x-raying it as well. And then we will see if there were spaces that would have been filled out with other information, for example. That's amazing. At first glance, it looks as though it was produced generically and a name was never added. It's a remarkable piece of archaeology and a rare glimpse into the changing beliefs of An off-the-shelf coffin where the buyer could simply add their name, and which could later be adapted and reused. It's a fascinating insight into how ordinary Egyptians were increasingly seeking to be honoured and buried like the great pharaohs. To uncover every clue, the team carefully inspect these ancient coffins, revealing new details. Dr Jeff Killen, an expert in ancient woodworking, shows me more evidence that suggests this one was reused. Okay, Jeff, I've been looking at this coffin a little bit more and I can see that there's something odd about the end and especially this last little tiny portion here. It just looks a bit different. Can you explain what's happening here? Yeah, normally coffins are made up of long planks. This one is made up of two long planks that attaches to the base and they're attached by dowels. You can see some of the dowels along the side here and we've got the drawing here that's a one-to-one drawing of the actual side of the coffin, but at this end there are two breaks in the coffin and this piece has broken away at some stage, probably in antiquity because it's been repaired. But the unusual thing with this is that although the grain runs in this direction, the pieces of wood that they're using here, the grain is running vertically and they've done that in order to strengthen the bottom. So at some stage they've recycled this coffin. That's so interesting. And this over here, this is the same as these side bits where it's a different grain? No, this is original. The grain is running in this direction. So this is original, that's original, but these are replaced? Replaced to repair the coffin. How interesting. And you said that this was broken probably in antiquity. What could have been the problem that made this break happen? Well, maybe they wanted to reuse the coffin, maybe it was broken during antiquity, maybe they wanted to remove something from the coffin, but they have repaired it in order to make and recycle the coffin for another burial. That's very interesting. So what you're saying is that this is potentially a recycled coffin? Yes. We do know that coffins are recycled. And the reason they were recycled was because the timber that was used in their manufacture was an expensive material in ancient Egypt. And there weren't a lot of trees, were there? No. Potentially, this particular timber would have come from outside Egypt. We have to analyze the timber, but if it is cedar, it would have come from an area where the leavening is at the moment. But if it's sycamore fig, that would have been a native tree to Egypt, but there were limited resources. Of course. So then if there's limited resources, we're looking at potentially over time, multiple people have used this. So multiple bodies have occupied this coffin? Potentially, yes. Wow. The reuse of coffins was widespread in ancient Egypt, particularly during periods of economic instability, political upheaval, or shortages of resources. In some cases, craftsmen even used a technique known as patchwork construction, a process that involved assembling new coffins from broken or salvaged pieces of older timber. Jeff's research could help shed new light on this coffin's long and fascinating life. But it's not just the body of the coffin that survived. Amazingly, its original lid has two. The team are carefully maneuvering it into position so it can be scanned and turned into a detailed 3D model. This could reveal something remarkable, that the lid originally belonged to a different coffin, adding even more evidence that this coffin was reused from multiple burials. So we've flipped the coffin lid, and now you're taking, is it photogrammetry that you're doing with this fancy machine? So we are 3D modeling the lid with a laser scanner, and essentially what it does, it shoots lots of frames, takes lots of photographs, but also produces two types of light. So this light we see now, so the white light helps with the photography, but also generates an infrared light, which is invisible to the naked eye, and that emits a pattern similar to a barcode that is supposed to be straight lines. But when it hits the surface, it gets distorted, so it follows the surface. And that's what the software uses, and the system uses, to generate the very accurate 3D models. So we can go down to pretty much the millimeter in terms of accuracy. So all of these little, tiny cuts and scrapes, we can get all of those on this machine? Everything. Tool marks, cut marks, anywhere on there. And on top of that, you also get the photography, so it's called a texture. So we have a realistic digital twin of this object in this case, or any object we scan with this equipment. And this is going to be very handy, because actually useful for the future, for two reasons. So one of them is 3D modeling an object, creating a digital twin. It's actually one of the best ways to digitize, to preserve an object. So in case something goes wrong, we have documented exactly as it is today. But in this case here, what is going to be really handy is comparing the lid, the fittings on the lid, with the base of the coffin, which is there. Of course, because we're not sure if they match up. Exactly. There's some things here I see slightly different, so these fittings are fairly similar. But once we have both 3D models processed and generated, we can then bring them together and overlay to see exactly if they fit or not. The scans will be carefully reviewed by Antonio and the team, who hope to determine the lid's origins and whether it really did belong to another coffin. I'm now meeting back up with Anna, as she's got one last coffin to show me. So this coffin lid looks quite old. It looks quite worn. The color has faded. It looks a bit chipped away as well. This looks really old. How old is it? Yeah, I mean, you're right. It doesn't look as well preserved as the rest. But actually, this is the newest one. This is the most recent. You wouldn't think it, would you, looking at it? It looks simple as well. All of the details to it are very, I don't know, almost like just symbols rather than detailed hieroglyphics or anything like that. Yeah, I think you're right. So it's like they've taken all those symbols and they've kind of condensed them down to have the most important elements that are there. This coffin lid, we think, dates to the Ptolemaic period. So this is around about 2,300 years ago. So that means this one is about 1,000 years different from that yellow one we were looking at before. Yeah, exactly that. Exactly that. So in the Ptolemaic period, it's about 300 BC. And this is the time when Egypt was ruled by Greeks. And at that time, people still wanted to be buried in an Egyptian style. These people, the person who was buried in this coffin, wanted to display different elements of their identity. So what they're saying here is that they were linked to Egypt, but the style of this coffin in some ways was Ptolemaic, had more Greek influence. So it's kind of a hybrid at that time. It's like a real show of their identity, but in death. That's really cool. And so are you able to figure out where in Egypt that this one was coming from? So we don't know exactly where this coffin was from in Egypt, which is a real shame. But part of this project, the project that we're doing at the moment, is hopefully to gather more of that information, those sort of snippets of data, to help us figure out more about the provenance, about where this coffin, not only where it was made potentially, where this person was buried, but how this coffin lid was taken out of Egypt and how it came to be in the Petrie Museum. And this sort of looks a bit modified. It looks almost like someone, I mean, maybe they cut it, or maybe it was like a crowbar action and actually trying to lift the lid. And then right here, we've got some sort of cut. What happened? Was it a modification like that last coffin or was it something else? So this is something that we're trying to find out as part of this project, because this cut here along the base, so the lid doesn't have feet. So they were removed at some point. It's so clean and sharp of a cut. So we're trying to figure out right now whether this cut was made in ancient times, whether it might have been made in more modern times. Of course, before the coffin came into the museum. And also these sorts of holes and unevenness around the side here. You know, our specialists, they're going to be using different types of microscopes, different types of imaging to look really closely at all of these elements to figure out how this happened and what on earth is going on here. To answer these questions, each item will be carefully analysed and studied by Anna and her team of specialists. But this investigation goes beyond what we can see. As part of the project, they've taken tiny samples of paint and pigment from the coffins to be tested in the lab next door. Dr Kate Fulcher is the scientist in charge of this next crucial stage. For most of the coffins that you were looking at in the museum will have looked pretty much exactly the same. That's unbelievable. Now as when they were made, basically. There's obviously a bit of damage. You could see some water damage, I think, and things like that. But the pigments would have been the same colours, just as bright. Wow, that's amazing. It's because they're very stable mineral pigments. They don't really degrade. With the exception of on the varnished coffin. Yes. That used to have quite a large amount of orpiment on the surface. Orpiment is a bright yellow, really sparkly pigment that could almost be used to pretend it was gold or something like that. It's super beautiful. And it had something special in it, didn't it? Yes, it's an arsenic based pigment. Yeah, it's really toxic. And also it degrades in UV. So that pigment now on the surface of that coffin looks like a whitish, greyish layer. Although if you look really closely, you can see yellow dots in it. But yeah, it used to be a bright, sparkly yellow pigment. And now that's degraded. But the Egyptian blue would have been the same. The reds would have been the same. That's so amazing. So here we are looking at this tiny, tiny little object. What could this possibly tell us about anything on those coffins? So when we went to look at the coffins, we took a look at the surface with the conservators. And we identified areas where there are layers of preparation layers underneath the paint, followed by the painted surface. So kind of like a primer and then layers of paint on top of that. Exactly right. And we're interested in not only knowing about the top layer, but also the other layers underneath. So we wanted to take very tiny cross sections from certain points on the coffin that we identified with the curator and the conservators. And these are really, really, really tiny samples. To be able to look at them properly, we put them in a little mold, which is made of silicone rubber. Then we fill the mold with a resin. And what remains is a flat surface of our layers of paint and primer in a little resin block. So what systems, what are you using to read this little tiny piece of information? We're using a variety of techniques, but the one we're looking at here is the scanning electron microscope. So up here, it produces an electron beam. And the electron beam is used to create a very high magnification image of the sample that you've put into the instrument. So this tiny sample goes into that massive machine. That's right. And then produces this. Yes. And how do we read this? What can we learn from this black and white image here? It can be quite tricky because the image is created with an electron beam and not with light. It's always in black and white, but you can see layers. We can either look at electrons that show us a lot of information about the topography of the surface. So where there's dips and holes and things like that. We can use a different type of electrons to look at the elemental composition of the sample. That's amazing. And the denser the element, the brighter the signal. So denser elements will produce a brighter patch on the screen. OK. And if we're reading this one, can we see that brighter patch? Is that there are brighter patches here and here and then darker patches here and here. So this is denser. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And that only gives you an indication of what you might have. But what you can also do is the electron beam interacts with the sample and produces x-rays. And those x-rays, the energies of those x-rays are typical of the elements that make up the area of your sample. So we can also use this instrument to work out what elements we have present in the sample, which is really useful for pigments, especially ancient pigments, because ancient pigments almost always, not quite always, almost always are made up of minerals. And the way to define a mineral is usually by its elemental composition. So something like blue. Is that cobalt blue or is that just some rumour I've heard? In ancient Egypt, it's nearly always Egyptian blue, which is specific to ancient Egypt. Oh my gosh. And it's a copper. It's actually a synthetic pigment made with copper and sand, essentially. And you heat that up together to about 1000 degrees and it produces this blue glassy pigment. And so this machinery and this technique, you're able to see that copper is involved. That's right. Even better than that, sometimes we can even see that a tiny bit of tin is involved and that tells us that they were using waste bronze scrap to make their copper pigments. OK, so you're telling me that this tiny little piece of coffin pigment and coffin layers of pigment can tell us how it was made, what it was made of and maybe where some of the bits came from. Yes. Oh my God. That's amazing. This pigment analysis is just one of the many techniques the team are using to uncover the stories behind these coffins. It's a fascinating and important project, which will help everyone at the Petrie Museum better understand these incredible objects. I've had a really great time today at the Petrie Museum. I've learned loads about ancient Egypt. I've learned loads about these coffins. And I've learned that analysis doesn't end when an artifact makes it into the museum. It continues way longer.