Sarcophagus of Iniuia
Unknown · Late Eighteenth Dynasty, 1330-1295 BC
A man in the costume of the living lies on the lid of a hard, dark diorite sarcophagus: a pleated shirt with sleeves, a pleated kilt with a front panel, a duplex wig and a small beard, arms at his sides. Around the box march the gods who protect the dead, each cut in sunk relief: Thoth with his ibis head at the corners, the four sons of Horus, Anubis as a jackal lying on his shrine, and pairs of wedjat eyes. At the head and feet kneel Isis and Nephthys on the sign for gold, and beneath the feet stand a djed pillar and two knots of Isis. Look at the polish of the stone, which took enormous labour to achieve.
The inscriptions include funerary formulas and chapter one hundred and sixty-one of the Book of the Dead. Iniuia was a high official of the Memphite administration at the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and his tomb at Saqqara was rediscovered by archaeologists in the twentieth century. The sarcophagus entered the Louvre in eighteen twenty-three as a gift, among the first Egyptian monuments in the museum.
Did You Know? Instead of a mummy, the lid shows Iniuia dressed as he was in life, in a pleated shirt and kilt, one of the earliest stone coffins of this type.
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