The coffins of Dismutenibtes (C47708) and Aaiu (C47709) in the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo were given scholarly attention in the 1860’s and 70’s, but have not been studied since. In 2006, it was discovered that Dismutenibtes was the mother of Osirmose, whose coffins today are located in Liège and Brussels. The discovery gave the author of this article the incentive for a thorough study of the coffins and their modern history. Both coffins were donated to the museum by Giovanni Anastasi, possibly in the year 1826. From an eyewitness account recorded in a letter form 1862, it can be discerned that the coffins arrived together as one ensemble containing a single mummy. Due to the different names, a connection between the coffins was never considered by the 19th century scholars. In this article, the connection has been reexamined with regard to stylistic, textual and historic criteria. It is concluded that both coffins most probably belonged to a woman named Dismutenibtes, known also by the pet name Aaiu/ Iuiu. Along with Osirmose and his father Padiamunet, whose coffins are now in the British Museum, she was buried in an unknown family tomb in the Theban necropolis around 700 BC. The tomb must have been discovered by Anastasi’s agent in the early 19th century, and its contents distributed to Europe in two separate shipments.

In his corpus of the 21st/22nd Dynasties yellow coffins published in 1988, Andrzej Niwinski identified 458 coffins disseminated in the museums of twenty-seven countries, among these 44 were in France. We present an updated list with 43 more coffins identified in public and private French museums and collections. Most of these 87 coffins arrived in France in the nineteenth century through antique dealers (Perrot, Raynaud) and collectors (Bois-Aymé, Cailliaud, de Chassiron, Clot Bey, Déchelette, Durand, Godard, de Moncabrié, de Montulé, de Saint-Ferriol, Thédenat-Duvent, Tyszkiewicz). Beside these transfers, they were gifts of the Egyptian government. Among these, the most important were the coffins from the Bab el-Gasus cache offered to France by the Khedivial government in 1893.

In 1893, the Egyptian Khedive offered several coffins to the Swiss Federal Council. The coffins had been found in an intact Cache-tomb at Western Thebes a few years earlier and belong to the most elaborately decorated specimens known from ancient Egypt. The contribution outlines the story behind this remarkable gift and presents the four coffins sets with their most interesting particularities.

Study of the iconography and texts on sections of a 21st Dynasty coffin in the collection of the Museum of Banat in Timisoara, Romania, shows that the vignettes as well as the texts are unusual for such coffins. A notable feature is that the deceased is nowhere shown on the fragments, and bands of text (that on other coffins end with the name of the deceased) fill the entire area leaving no room to add the personal name. The lack of a name, the corrupt texts, unusual iconography, and the lack of varnish may reflect the lack of resources of the coffin’s owner. A fragment in Budapest (51.325) is shown to join the Timişoara coffin sections. The dismantling/sawing of an object to make it more portable and saleable was obviously an established practice of late 1800s and early 1900s Egyptian antiquities market. Key words: Egypt, 21st Dynasty, anthropoid coffin, vignettes, Abydos fetish, Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, Thoth

This volume proposes a theoretical and methodological framework for the study of “yellow” coffins, which is one of the most extensive corpus of funerary objects from Ancient Egypt, and the most complex in terms of decoration. It presents a synthetic view on Egyptian coffin decoration during the II millennium B.C. together with in-depth examination of a sample of nine previously unpublished burial assemblages. Dating from the 21st-22nd Dynasties, these objects were chosen to showcase the stages of development in coffin decoration detected in the “yellow” corpus, as well as variations in style and layout. A new formal typology of this corpus is proposed, allowing a better understanding of the dynamics of coffin decoration in Theban workshops.