The Coffin Texts are a collection of ancient Egyptian funerary spells written on coffins beginning in the First Intermediate Period. The texts are derived in part from the earlier pyramid texts, reserved for royal use only, but they contain substantial new material related to everyday desires that reflects the fact that the texts were now used by the common people. Ordinary Egyptians who could afford to have a coffin had access to these funerary spells and the pharaoh no longer had exclusive rights to the afterlife.
As the modern name of this collection of some 1,185 spells implies, the texts are mostly found on Middle Kingdom coffins. However they are sometimes inscribed on tomb walls, stelae, canopic chests, papyri and even mummy masks. Due to the limited writing surfaces of some of these objects, the collection was often abbreviated, and this gave rise to long and short versions of some of the spells, a number of which were later copied in the Book of the Dead.
Read more about Coffin Texts: Content, The Book of Two Ways
Famous quotes containing the words coffin and/or texts:
“Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I know that I will always be expected to have extra insight into black texts—especially texts by black women. A working-class Jewish woman from Brooklyn could become an expert on Shakespeare or Baudelaire, my students seemed to believe, if she mastered the language, the texts, and the critical literature. But they would not grant that a middle-class white man could ever be a trusted authority on Toni Morrison.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American scholar and educator. Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B2 (July 27, 1994)