Although small and comprising only sixty-five items, the breadth, quality and importance of the coffins in Edinburgh and published here make this catalogue an important contribution to the literature. Both the authors are highly respected Egyptologists noted for their extensive and useful publications on ancient Egypt and with especial knowledge in the fields of hieroglyphic texts and funerary material. The catalogue goes beyond coffins to include other relevant funerary items in the collection such as wooden and terracotta mummy masks, mummy trappings, portrait boards, shrouds and a mask from a stone mummiform coffin.
The Egyptian collection in Edinburgh owes much to Alexander Rhind (1833–63), whose ‘earnest desire’ in 1856 was to form a collection of Egyptian antiquities that ‘will form a fair comparative representation of the extraordinary people who lay so near the primary foundations of civilisation’. In this he was ahead of his time, and totally successful, as reflected in his seminal Thebes: its tombs and their tenants ancient and present (1862), which is still a major source book.
The catalogue is divided into seven parts, reflecting the major divisions of Egyptian chronology, and each has a short explanatory introduction. Overall the collection is a remarkable microcosm, with representative coffins from all the major periods, from the Middle Kingdom to Roman (which is also true overall of Rhind's collection of Egyptian antiquities). The foundation was the Rhind Bequest made at his untimely death aged twenty-nine in 1863, but major additions from provenanced sources such as Petrie's excavations, the Egypt Exploration Society and the British School of Archaeology in Egypt, as well as judicious later acquisitions by purchase or donation (two from the Prince of Wales, later King Edward vii, in 1869) have made this a major provincial collection, A former Keeper, the late Cyril Aldred, recorded that ‘much of the material he [Rhind] brought back and left to the nation is of first-rate importance’.
The overall quality of the coffins is very high, and well evidenced in the splendid and carefully chosen colour illustrations. There are several major items among the collection, notably the complete burial of the ‘Qurna Queen’, possibly a king's wife of the 17th Dynasty, and the associated ‘Qurna Child’, an unknown woman and child that ‘yielded the largest group of gold work that had left Egypt’ (nos 3 and 4), and apparently is the only intact royal burial group from ancient Egypt on display anywhere outside Egypt itself as Petrie had received and agreed to keep the entire find together. Another major item is the coffin of Calisiris, Overseer of the Army, and a remarkable canopy (nos 48 and 49) found with it by Rhind at Thebes. Some of the coffins are splendid works of art in themselves, especially that of Tairtsekher, unusually represented as a living person wearing ordinary clothes of the finest white linen (no. 7).
The catalogue is not only a visual delight but an extraordinary and detailed presentation of a remarkable collection; it is very readable and accessible while also providing all the necessary concordances and details that make it a prime exemplar that, it is to be hoped, other collections will mark, learn, digest and follow.
