Read this Q&A with Kara Cooney as she discusses her latest book, Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches (AUC Press, 2024), and reveals ancient Egyptian practices, the reasons behind the ancient Egyptians’ reuse of coffins, the stories of the Theban Royal Caches, and what these practices tell us about resourcefulness, beliefs, and the evolution of burial customs in ancient Egypt.
What initially sparked your interest in studying coffin reuse during the Ramesside and early Third Intermediate periods? How long did it take you to thoroughly study this topic?
This project is the culmination of a life’s work of exploration into how people compete socially. My study on the coffins was not initially about death at all. I wanted to look at how rich people showed off their wealth, and how they contended with each other for status in the community. Since elites bought coffins systematically through time, not paintings or altar shrines, this was the object type to track. And since so much documentation for coffin purchases exists for the 19th and 20th Dynasty in Western Thebes, I focused on this period. My dissertation was all about how elites made display choices about how and where to spend their money in a coffin set; that book The Cost of Death appeared in 2007.
While working on that research, I visited museums with Egyptian holdings all over the world, and on one of those visits, I found myself standing in front of the 20th Dynasty coffin lid of Muthotep, which had been reused. Renowned coffin expert John Taylor stood next to me as I pointed this reuse out, and he blithely said, “Yes, someone should work on that.” That tiny, offhand remark nestled deep in my soul until I finally jumped into finding and tracking coffin reuse in 2011. Reuse did not start in New Kingdom Thebes until the 20th Dynasty, so moving my work into the 21st and 22nd Dynasties made perfect sense. After learning to identify reuse through work in European and American museums, I wanted to tackle a big dataset in Egypt. In 2015, I applied to document the coffins found in the Royal Cache Theban Tomb 320 in the Cairo Museum at Tahrir. I am thrilled that the comprehensive results of that work are finally available, a decade later.
Your book focuses extensively on coffin reuse during the Ramesside and early Third Intermediate periods. Could you explain why this period is particularly significant for understanding Egyptian funerary practices?
I always tell my students at UCLA that you cannot ask whatever research question you want; you can only ask research questions that the data can answer. The 19th-22nd Dynasties provide ample evidence for my research questions because there are so many preserved coffins from this time and because there is so much supporting ancient textual evidence—like price texts, dockets, and letters—to allow a holistic economic and social study. Theoretically, one could do similar studies of funerary arts using data from the end of the Old Kingdom or the Middle Kingdom. Still, we do not have as many coffins preserved in the archaeological record, and elite Egyptians of that time did not record quotidian details like coffin purchases.
The Ramesside and Third Intermediate Periods also allowed me to encompass one time when the economy was thriving—the 19th Dynasty—and another time when the economy was disrupted—the 20th and 21st Dynasties, letting me track changes in funerary arts commission, spending, and reuse over time. This is a study of coffin reuse and funerary behaviors, yes, but this data also provides information for a much larger human negotiation that we call the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Reused coffins were revealed when native wood stands became unavailable when trade routes had shut down, and when elites could not commission a new coffin except by reusing another. These coffins demonstrate that elites negotiated these troubled times not by abandoning grand funerary displays, but by using coffins short term.
The economic situation disrupted elite funerary consumption, for certain, but it was the strong Egyptian elite culture that demanded the reuse of their relative’s coffins with adaptations that used body containers as short-term, transformational devices, not as permanently owned objects of the dead.
Your book mentions the reuse of coffins and the removal of gilding or inlay. What do these practices reveal about the different facets of the community, for example, social, economic, cultural, and religious aspects, in ancient Egypt during that period?
The removal of gilding and inlay is so interesting because it provides insight into past agendas.
For instance, take the coffin set of Nodjmet; it’s clear that cultural memory of her was so positive that craftsmen did not remove all the gilding. Instead, they were ordered to work around particularly important texts and images, only taking gold from areas that would not affect her status in the realm of the dead or, presumably, her feelings towards the living. Such patterns of theft indicate there was a great deal of anxiety surrounding reuse and recommodification.
Reusers were worried about angering the dead or cutting off communication with an important ancestor. They were also worried about what other people thought, shielding themselves from accusations of greed or inappropriate appropriation.
For instance, the coffin in which Thutmose III was reburied shows that it was regilded after it was opened and its most valuable commodities taken. This means that craftsmen removed a layer of more valuable materials, probably gold sheeting and inlay, but then they were ordered to repaint the interior with the name of Thutmose III and to regild the exterior of the coffin. The coffin of Thutmose III tells us that Theban agents were interested in showing other elites that they were taking good care of their chosen ancestor kings, even at the same time when they were also systematically removing royal tomb goods and even stripping royal mummies of any ornaments on their mummies.
The coffin of Thutmose III was regilded with a very thin layer of gold, probably in the 21st Dynasty, but when it was cached in the 22nd Dynasty, a new set of agents ordered that even this thin layer of gold be chiseled away.
The result is the brutalized coffin for Thutmose III that we see today, with a final removal of gilding so rough that there are breaks into the face and chest of the piece. These new 22nd Dynasty agents were not interested in displaying their care of these ancestor kings. For whatever reason, these royal mummies were not important for them to display anymore. Each coffin is really like a complicated archaeological site; they each have a mind-boggling stratigraphy with multiple layers that define different series of actions; they demonstrate use, reuse, and discard over generations.
How did you navigate the difficulties of bringing together scattered data from this time to create a cohesive analysis?
I use this little program called Notability on my iPad in the field, which allows me to put text and images together from the very beginning of my examination. I have some 400 notes on coffins from around the world collected in this database. I include a bibliography here, screenshots from other publications, and my own iPad photos that I annotate with red markup and captions so I can immediately identify what I was thinking at the moment. This database allows me to constantly go back and check my work; it’s like a constant system of self-collation. Now when it comes time to present this work in a formal volume, it took a community to bring together all that scattered data and information into a coherent analysis. I am grateful to be part of a dynamic and generous group of coffin scholars who host conferences and create edited volumes where we share our work.
I sent this Royal Cache work to many scholars in the early days of this volume; they saw it when it was more of a rough idea than a rigorous presentation and analysis. None of this would be possible without them. I also stand on the shoulders of giants, scholars like George Daressy who did the initial documentation of the Royal Cache coffins, or Jaroslav Černý who recorded so many ancient West Theban texts. And I relied on my UCLA graduate students to see this project through. Some acted as photographers, others as registrars, and one, Kylie Thomsen, laid out the volume in InDesign so that I could work with images and text together from the very beginning. Amber Wells was also instrumental in getting all the details ironed out.
Could you describe the most surprising or significant findings from the study on this topic?
I am most surprised at how the coffins reveal so much about the political agendas of the High Priests of Amen in the 20th and 21st Dynasties. I can see which ancient personages they wanted to associate themselves with—Seqenenre Tao, Amenhotep I, Ahmes-Nefertari, Thutmose III, Ramses II—and which they considered problematic—sun kings like Amenhotep III and most 20th Dynasty kings.
The coffins reveal that the High Priests used these ancient kings as religious talismans, defending their actions, proving their right to rule, and showing them as caretakers. These are extraordinary findings from a set of beat-up coffins, and I am so grateful that the cache exists at all for us to study this turbulent time of economic and social change.
Click on the banner to watch the recording of the virtual book talk with Kara Cooney
