We have to watch at Egyptian art as a whole. An iconography is a set of images connected to each other. It is obviously very important to identify what is depicted. However, to find the deepest meaning of an Egyptian iconography it is crucial to see where and how are the images depicted. Because Egyptian art left few loose ends and just thinking of it as a puzzle, we can find the sense of a decoration on a surface.

This what happens for instance in the iconography of the clay coffin of Men. Dismembering the different elements of the conjunf, as if it was a pomegranate, we can understand why the artists (or Men) chosed every character and its location.

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Images in Egyptian art were much more than just designs, specially in funerary sphere. They were a tool for achieving a goal and their effectiveness was out of doubt.

Moreover, the artist also had to choose their location on the surface for creating a coherent composition.

DISTRIBUTION OF THE IMAGES IN THE CLAY COFFIN OF MEN.

Few things are random in Egyptian art and in this coffin the artist took special care about the distribution and location of the iconography.

On the other had, the coffin of Men had barely texts. We just read some concise lines of hieroglyphs, which served to delimitate every scene or image. Thanks to it, we can see three well differentiated areas: body, shoulders and head.

1. Body: The Four Sons of Horus and Anubis.

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Coffins in Ancient Egypt were not made just in wood, but also in ceramic. Although these kind of coffins are much more common in the Middle East, there are some examples coming from the northeast of Egyptian Delta.

Let us pay attention to the clay coffin of Men (Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire de Bruxelles, E.04348), belonging to the Dynasty XVIII and from in Tell el-Yahoudiyeh (tomb 411), ca. thirty mile northeast of Cairo.

This clay coffin belongs to the called “group B”, that is, with cylindrical shape and the head and shoulder not defined

Exterior Decoration

Its exterior decoration and inscriptions draws the attention of this coffin. Its iconography, altough typical of Ancient Egypt, makes this artefact very special; the wig, ending suddenly over the inscription, the lack of wesekh– collar, something that essential for a corpse.

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Thanks to the numerous documents that has come down to us from Ancient Egypt, almost all related to their religious beliefs, we know about their gods, the ceremonies they practiced, their mythologies, and above all how they buried their dead and also how they did to resurrect them.

In the funerary sphere, we know that ancient Egyptians mummified to preserve the corpse and that they carried out rituals to promote the resurrection of the deceased and his rebirth in the Hereafter.

Funerary texts played a crucial role in the regeneration of the dead. Some helped him to overcome the difficulties that hindered his way to eternity and others evoked mythical situations that promoted his resurrection.

At this point, it is interesting to note how the ancient Egyptians, through words, knew how to turn everyday situations into moments with great symbolic potential.

For example, when a funerary text from Ancient Egypt alluded to “chicks inside the nest”, could that have a deeper meaning? The answer is yes.

In my last article we see how in Ancient Egypt banal moments of the world of the living, acquired great importance when they were introduced through the texts in the world of the gods.

Keep safe and protect the others with your actions.

Artists and theologist of Ancient Egypt worked together in the emergence of iconographies and they combined different planes of meaning: images and words.

That is why reading the Egyptian art requires an iconographic and textual analysis.

The Egyptian art: a language of signs.

The Egyptian art is a language of signs and just like the Egyptian language, it uses word games; that is decoration often plays games of images.

Writing of the verb TO CREATE (left) with the substantive EYE (right) in Ancient Egypt.

In the Egyptian language, we find a very graphic example when comparing the verb “to do” or “to create” with the substantive “eye”:

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