"Kara Cooney analyzes the physical evidence of the coffins from the Royal Caches to identify the motivations and changing agendas of those who appropriated and reused them. Based on unprecedented levels of access to the objects, her observations reveal for the first time the surprising complexity of the coffins’ histories and illuminate their possible roles in rituals of legitimation by members of the ruling elite in an age of political uncertainty."

—John Taylor, The British Museum

"Kara Cooney is the expert on coffin reuse, and in this book she brilliantly synthesizes fifteen years of research. After giving a detailed introduction into the social and religious reasons behind why coffins were reused, how they were acquired, and what was done to them, she focuses on the coffins used to house the New Kingdom royal mummies and the High Priests of Amun. Known since the last years of the nineteenth century, they have, until now, generally been ignored by modern scholars, quietly gathering dust, waiting for Kara, the one person who could do them justice. The result is a superb book, an absolute gem for specialists and students alike, abundantly illustrated in full color throughout, by an excellent scholar at the height of her powers."

—David Aston, The Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna

Funerary datasets are the chief source of social history in Egyptology, and the numerous tombs, coffins, Books of the Dead, and mummies of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Dynasties have not been fully utilized as social documents, mostly because the data of this time period is scattered and difficult to synthesize. This culmination of fifteen years of coffin study analyzes coffins and other funerary equipment of elites from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-second Dynasties to provide essential windows into social strategies and adaptations employed during the Bronze Age collapse and subsequent Iron Age reconsolidation.

Many Twentieth to Twenty-second Dynasty coffins show evidence of reuse from other, older coffins, as well as obvious marks where gilding or inlay have been removed. Innovative vignettes painted onto coffin surfaces reflect new religious strategies and coping mechanisms within this time of crisis, while advances in mummification techniques reveal an Egyptian anxiety about long-term burial without coffins as a new style of stuffed and painted mummy was developed for the wealthy. It was in the context of necropolis insecurity, economic crisis, and group burial in reused and unpainted chambers that a complex, polychrome coffin style emerged.

The first part of this book focuses on the theory and evidence of coffin reuse, contextualized within the social collapse that characterized the Twentieth and Twenty-first Dynasties. The second part presents photo essays of annotated visual data for over sixty Egyptian coffins from the so-called Royal Caches, most of them from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

Illustrated throughout with high-quality images, the line drawings and color and black-and-white photographs are ideal for careful study, especially evidenced in the digital edition, where pages can be enlarged for close examination.