Coffin of the Lady Madja
Unknown · Reigns of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, 1479-1425 BC
A woman's coffin painted white shows her wrapped in a shroud with a heavy tripartite wig and a broad collar, her hands hidden. Four jackals of Anubis lie on shrines along the lid, and the sides of the box are painted with the whole ritual of her burial: at the head stands Isis, at the feet Nephthys, and along the flanks the coffin is dragged to the tomb followed by four mourning women, Osiris in his white crown receives offerings, two men carry a leg of beef and a duck on a pole, and a seated couple share a meal. Look at the wedjat eyes painted on the side, through which the dead woman could look out towards the rising sun.
The coffin was found in tomb thirteen seventy of the eastern cemetery at Deir el-Medina, the village of the workmen who built the royal tombs at Thebes, during the French excavations of Bernard Bruyère. Its style places it in the reigns of Hatshepsut and Thutmose the Third, in the fifteenth century before Christ, when white-ground coffins of this kind were fashionable. It came to the Louvre in nineteen thirty-five under the division of finds.
Did You Know? Madja was buried in the village cemetery of the men who cut the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and the painters of her coffin were probably her neighbours.
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