Coffin of King Sekhemre-Herhermaat Intef
Unknown · Reign of Sekhemre-Herhermaat Intef, c. 1580-1575 BC (Seventeenth Dynasty)
The second royal coffin in the crypt is smaller and plainer than its gilded neighbour, and that plainness tells a story. The king wears the nemes headcloth with a cobra, a broad collar and a shroud covered in the painted feather pattern of a rishi coffin, in red, black, blue and yellow over stucco. His face is painted black and his eyes are inlaid; the false beard has gone. Turn to the foot end: the goddesses Isis and Nephthys kneel there, each marked by the hieroglyph of her name on her head, raising their hands in mourning and protection as they did for Osiris. The hieroglyphs give the king's throne name and birth name and ritual formulas for his passage into the next world.
Sekhemre-Herhermaat Intef reigned only a few years around 1580 BC, and the modest finish of the coffin, painted rather than gilded, may reflect a burial prepared in haste. Like the coffin beside it, it came from the royal cemetery of Dra Abu el-Naga at Thebes. In June 1854 the Austrian consul general in Cairo gave it to Auguste Mariette, who passed it to the Louvre at the end of that year.
Did You Know? The face of this king is painted black, the colour of the fertile Nile silt and therefore of rebirth, not of mourning.
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