Sarcophagus from Abu Rawash
Unknown · Fourth Dynasty, 2675-2545 BC
A massive rectangular chest of limestone, more than two and a half metres long and nearly a metre high, is carved on its sides with a pattern of deep niches and panels. The motif, known as the palace facade, reproduces the recessed brick walls of the earliest royal palaces, with their doors and tall narrow openings. The carving is bold and geometric, without figures or texts. Look along the side at the rhythm of wide and narrow recesses and imagine the shadows they cast under the Egyptian sun before the coffin went underground.
The sarcophagus was found in the burial chamber of tomb F eleven in cemetery F at Abu Rawash, north of Giza, the necropolis where King Djedefre of the Fourth Dynasty built his pyramid. It belonged to a member of the court buried near the king around two thousand six hundred years before Christ, in the age of the great pyramids, when only the highest officials could afford a stone coffin. The Louvre purchased it in nineteen twenty-seven.
Did You Know? The panelled pattern on its sides copies the niched mud-brick walls of the royal palace, turning the coffin into a house for eternity.
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