When our story began, the great deity Osiris was living on Earth, and reigning as Pharaoh in Egypt. He was a good monarch, who looked out for the best interests of his people, teaching them agriculture and good governance. But all was not well. Osiris’ brother, Seth, jealous of his success, plotted against him, seeking to obtain the throne for himself. His plan was simple, and went without a hitch. He invited Osiris to a dinner party at his residence. There, he presented his brother with a great chest. He informed Osiris that this chest was designed in a special way, such that it would exactly fit anyone who tried to lay inside it. Incredulous, Osiris climbed in, and, of course, the box fitted him perfectly. Seth slammed the lid on, nailed it shut, and threw Osiris in the River Nile. Drowning in the river was the only way that a god could die, and Osiris passed away. But Seth knew that Osiris’ wife, Isis, was a powerful magician, and could resurrect him. So Seth found the chest, where it had washed up on the bank, and removed Osiris’ body, dismembering it. He scattered the remains across the Earth, knowing that, without his full body, Isis could not resurrect her husband. All seemed lost, but Isis, instead of mourning her beloved husband, set about on a mission to find and re-assemble all the pieces of his body. This she did – the fourteen pieces of Osiris’ body were recovered from across Egypt, and even further afield – with (according to the version recorded by the Greek historian Plutarch) one glaring omission. His penis had been consumed by an Oxyrhynchus fish (Egyptian medjed, probably a freshwater elephantfish, family Mormyridae, five species of which are known in the Nile), and was thus unrecoverable. Isis made a new phallus from Nile mud, which she imbued with her unique magic, and was thus able to resurrect Osiris. With his newly fashioned appendage, Osiris and Isis engaged in carnal relations, and from this union, their son Horus was conceived. Osiris was resurrected, but could not resume his place on his earthly throne. Instead, he became the perpetual monarch of the Underworld, while his son Horus grew up to challenge his uncle Seth, eventually winning the throne of Egypt.

The role of Isis in securing her husband’s resurrection made her a popular subject for funerary goods. Indeed, Isis is credited – through the process of embalming her husband’s remains back together – with inspiring the process of mummification. As a goddess of magic, whose own magic was increased by learning the secret name of the sun god Ra, she became an important guide on the journey into the afterlife. The Book of the Dead, which is substantially less ominous than its name suggests, was a guide to passing by the various traps and ordeals set up to prevent the unworthy from entering. In this vital manuscript, Spell 18 lists Isis as one of the assessors for entry into the Field of Reeds (sekhet-iaaru), the paradise that awaits Egyptians. It is appropriate for various reasons, then, that Isis should feature prominently on this mummy case. She is depicted standing, with her symbol, a stepped throne, atop her head. This throne refers to her heavenly role as mother of Pharaohs, since she begat Horus, whose earthly avatar was the King himself. Her arms are spread protectively across the mummy case, as though embracing the deceased. She is winged, which further adds to her protective guise – the wings of the god Horus, depicted as a falcon, are often shown enveloping the Pharaoh himself – while also revealing her ressurective power and her special responsibility for the dead. She is depicted with green skin, which likens her to her husband Osiris, whose association with the vegetation of the Nile, and with the resurrection of the dead, was symbolised by the common depiction of his skin as green or black. According to one version of the Osiris myth, Isis and her sister Nephthys transformed themselves into birds (usually kites, Milvus aegyptius, or kestrels, Falco tinnunculus) in order to fan air back into Osiris’ nostrils with their wings, this imbuing him with life-force. She wears a sheer dress, in red, which exposes her breast. This emphasises her motherly capacity, as the ultimate materfamilias of the reigning Pharaohs, as well as her association with birth and rebirth. The notion of rebirth is further referred to by the ankh amulets held in each hand, the symbol of life itself.

Isis is flanked by two images of the god Anubis, depicted as a reclining jackal (Canis lupaster, commonly known as the African wolf) seated atop a shrine. Jackals were a common scourge of the earliest Egyptian cemeteries, where the dead were not properly mummified, but rather left in relatively shallow graves to allow the natural heat of the desert to mummify them without human intervention. Jackals and other wild dogs were frequent visitors to cemeteries, hoping that they could scavenge from any grave left unattended. Through a process of reverse assimilation, Anubis became a protector of graves. He, and another dog-headed companion, Wepwawet, was associated with embalming and guarding tombs. Anubis perhaps invented the process, when he was involved in the re-composition and mummification of the body of Osiris. Sem-priests, the religious officials in charge of mortuary processes, would sometimes wear jackal masks when carrying out the process of mummification. But Anubis’ most important role was to weigh the hearts of the dead. The concept of the weighing was simple. The heart (ib) was considered by the Egyptians to be the seat of the intellect and morality; all the actions one carried out in life were somehow recorded in its structure. A perfect human heart, whose good and bad balanced out, was the exact weight of a magical feather, known as the feather of ma’at. If a heart was burdened with misdeeds, the weight would be out of balance. In order to determine one’s worthiness to enter the afterlife, the god Anubis, one of the guardians of the Underworld, weighed the heart on a great set of jewellers’ scales. If one failed the test, the heart – the most necessary part of the anatomy to enter the afterlife – was devoured by a lion-crocodile-hippopotamus hybrid known as ammut. Fortunately for wealthier Egyptians, there was a route around this fate. One could cheat. A heart scarab, an amulet in the form of the beetle Scarabaeus sacer, was inscribed with a spell which invoked the heart not to give up one’s secrets. Anubis, too, was also invoked to help us on our way to the afterlife. Images of the ceremony show Anubis steadying the arms of the scales, or even adapting he complex plumb-bob, which calibrated the scales, in order to assist individuals into the afterlife.

Anubis and Isis, two judges of the dead, were then invoked on this mummy case, in hopes to ensure that the deceased would enter the afterlife without risk of being condemned to oblivion. This same theme is reflected in the prayers inscribed either side of the main scene. Another essential requirement for entering the afterlife was that sufficient sustenance be granted to the soul, kꜣ, of the deceased. This essential need is seen to by the two inscriptions which flank the central scene, written in the loose, almost calligraphic, script of a confident scribe. On the left, an inscription records the ‘words spoken by’ Ra-Horakhty, the sun-god Ra in his guise as the morning sun. The link between the sunrise and resurrection was more than metaphorical. Every night, the sun god Ra, in his guise as the ram-deity Atum (literally ‘the complete one’), guided the setting sun into and through the underworld. Each night he would be confronted by the same dangers as would meet the deceased on their journey to the Field of Reeds; the eventual re-emergence of the sun represented, then, not only the renewed daylight, but also the success of the sun-god against the demons of the underworld led by the snake-spirit Apep. After listing various titles associated with Ra-Horakhty, the inscription invokes him, in his own voice, to make an invocation offering (in other words, an offering brought into being by the magic of his words) of oxen, waterfowl, incense, wine, and milk. The end of this inscription is missing, but the inscription on the right, its direct parallel, but dedicated to Osiris rather than Ra-Horakhty, allows us to reconstruct it: ‘and every good [inscriptions usually add ‘pure’ here] thing on which the god lives’.

The top of the surviving panel depicts a snake, which has encircled the abdomen of the mummy below the chest. This snake, with its own tail in its mouth, is known by its Greek name ouroboros. The earliest example of this motif is from a funerary text, the Enigmatic Book of the Netherworld, which is first attested in the intact tomb of Egypt’s most famous King, Tutankhamun. The snake ties together our two inscriptions, since it depicts the cyclical union of the gods Ra and Osiris in the Netherworld. According to the myth whereby Ra, in the guise of Atum, descends into the underworld, just before his emergence at the Eastern Horizon, Ra must regenerate himself through a union with Osiris. The exact nature of this union is unclear, and it may have been a symbolically sexual union. Both Ra and Osiris fill each other with their essence, in order that Osiris can renew his mandate over the underworld, and Ra can be reborn in order to leave the underworld. This apparently homosexual encounter is, however, not as it at first appears. Atum, the guise in which Ra enters the underworld, was all things, including male and female, and so any involvement with Osiris would not be straightforward. It is important to note that references to Ra’s sexuality, even in the creation myth whereby Atum masturbates into the primordial sea (nun), are largely symbolic or allegorical rather than to be taken literally. Atum, whose name (tm) is listed as one of the epithets of Ra-Horakhty in our inscription, is the god of pre- and post-existence. As Ra in the underworld, Atum symbolically commanded life both before birth and after death.

Translation: [Left hand inscription, read right to left] Words spoken by Ra-Horakhty, the Great God, Master of Heaven, He who Goes Forth to the Horizon, the Complete One [= Atum], the Lord of the Lands of Iunu [= Heliopolis], that he may give invocation offerings of oxen, fowl, incense with braziers, linen clothes, wine, milk […]
[Right hand inscription, read left to right] Words spoken by Osiris, Foremost of the Westerners, in the West, the Great God, Lord of Abydos, that he may give invocation offerings of oxen, fowl, incense with braziers, linen clothes, wine, milk […] good […] t- […] mw- […] and every good thing [on which the god lives].

References: similar Isiac coffin iconography can be found on mummy-cases in London (British Museum EA20745 and EA.21650),