When Is It Ok to Recycle a Coffin? The Rules of the Reuse Game in Ancient Egypt
february 2025 | Vol. 13.2
By Kara Cooney
Why devote so much time and attention to the study of coffins? Funerary materials — like coffins, tombs, and papyri — are social documents. Each object is a product of craft specialization that occurs within a vibrant and changing social system. To study coffins is to resurrect a materialized social system. The purpose is to use a mass of data to reverse engineer some of the social processes that went into not only coffin production but also coffin reuse. The idea that Egyptians reused coffins may be unsettling to us, but the evidence of coffin reuse during the Twentieth to Twenty-second Dynasties — which experienced overlapping social, security, and economic crises — is overwhelming. This reuse represents the absolute refusal on the part of elite Egyptians to abandon the body container even in the context of extraordinary scarcity.
If the benefits of funerary materiality drove people to reuse no matter what the ideological or moral implications, then what were the limitations set on whose coffins could be reused, where, and when? Coffin reuse had to be worked out among multiple players from multiple social systems. Was there an appropriate “social time” when a coffin could be used again for another? Do we see a passing of years that allowed people to think it was appropriate to move in and take a given coffin set in their family tomb? Was there a socially acceptable way to openly reuse body containers without hiding that reuse? As the funerary data shows, some ancient Egyptians seem to have waited for what was deemed a suitable time to pass, perhaps thus treating their ancestors with “respect,” or at least creating the conditions to lessen anxiety on the part of the reuser and/or mollify an ancestor.
Detail of the Twentieth Dynasty inner coffin lid of Muthotep (BM EA 29579). The Twentieth Dynasty exterior decoration was painted directly over a Nineteenth Dynasty layer of decoration. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
This is perhaps what one of the earliest instances of reuse, the Twentieth Dynasty coffin lid of Muthotep (pictured above), shows because the two layers of decoration suggest that six or seven generations had passed before the coffin was reused for another dead person. But if an appropriate passage of time was a consideration for this particular instance of reuse, this rule did not hold as coffin reuse ramped up. Many later Twenty-first Dynasty coffins prove that coffins were taken from the dead in quick, serial reuses so that the coffin was employed four or even five times in succession, as shown by the stratigraphy of wood and plaster on a given piece, e.g. the outer coffin of Ankhefkhonsu:
Detail of an example of name reuse on the outer coffin of Akhefkhonsu (Florence 8523). Photo by UCLA Coffins Project, Courtesy of the Egyptian Museum Cairo. From Recycling for Death by Kara Cooney, used by permission of the publisher, AUC Press.
The royal cache coffins prove that rules of proper reuse behavior were created, renegotiated, and then renegotiated again. Twentieth and early Twenty-first Dynasty reusers of Theban royal funerary goods made their first pass to recommodify gilding, wood, and inlay carefully and “respect-fully,” i.e., following accepted ideological strictures created during times of prosperity. Such decorum demanded that agents refashion coffins for kings with their names newly inscribed upon them in hieroglyphic or hieratic text, even after each king had been removed from his original gilded and nesting coffins. The reusers felt the need to cover the corpses of the kings and queens with inscribed linen shrouds to mark and contain them. If metal implements, like the crook and flail or the cobra uraeus, were removed, then new wooden versions were put in their place, as we see on the royal coffins remade for Thutmose III (CG 61014) and Ramses II (CG 61020). But, as time went on, each successive pass of these kings’ and queens’ coffins resulted in rougher treatment as more commodities were taken from the coffins and the bodies, too, as bandages were ripped aside to see if any amulets had been missed, as every last inch of gilding was removed, as even the whole body container itself was taken and reappropriated, often leaving a king or queen with just a poor substitute coffin taken from someone else, or leaving the royal dead lying in a lid or case, or a shared container as they were shoved in with another inhabitant without much ceremony. The continuance of scarcity over time created new rules, new ideologies, new moralities, new norms of how ancestor-care was meant to work —defining what was too much and what was acceptable.
There is also the question of where reuse actions were occurring — were they private or public? Most of the reuse actions on royal bodies and coffins must have happened out of the glare of the spotlight after the ancestors had been ritually displayed and reinterred within a secure group burial. The privacy of a secret tomb allowed rougher, quicker reuse actions. If social norms were eventually broken even for (or especially for, given the riches surrounding them) the kings of Egypt, and if reuse actions were perpetrated by those at the very top of Theban society the high priests of Amen and their agents — then we should assume that scarcity drove similar negotiations and adaptations of funerary reuse down the elite social spectrum, all over Egypt. Every rich Egyptian family must have been making similar negotiations with the valuable funerary materiality of their own ancestors in their own family sepulchers.
In her work on reused Roman structures, art historian Anne Marie Yasin created an axis between utilitarian reuse and intentional appropriation of a given late antique Roman building, in a sense creating a negotiation between pragmatism and ideology. It is a useful model to apply to Egyptian coffin reuse, as both act simultaneously on a given reuse action. There was the pragmatic need for a body container to hold the newly-dead elite, but there was also the ideological need of the living elite to display power by means of symbolic materiality. The coffins’ transition to their new owners could be messy, underhand, and hidden, or it could have happened in a transparent and accepted manner, even displayed to social peers, perhaps given the oracular consent of the gods. Indeed, there is no mutual exclusivity to how reuse actions were done; instead, it is a question of where, when, and why reuse actions were performed.
The outer lid of Panedjem I (CG 61025/JE 26217). Note the extensive chiseling of gilding. Photo by UCLA Coffins Project, Courtesy of the Egyptian Museum Cairo. From Recycling for Death by Kara Cooney, used by permission of the publisher, AUC Press.
The pragmatic and ideological agendas overlap. Perhaps the mummy of a king was left in his stripped coffin because it was believed religiously charged. But that same symbolic belief could encourage the reuse of that royal coffin. Indeed, the outer coffin of the High Priest of Amen and King Panedjem I was made from the reused coffin of Thutmose I (pictured above), stripped of its gold and inlay and covered with a thick layer of plaster, paint, and gilding for Panedjem I’s reuse. The royal coffin had been retained up to this point, ostensibly to show respect to Thutmose I, perceived to be a great royal ancestor. Did Panedjem I claim this royal coffin precisely because it belonged to this ancestor king? Perhaps this appropriation granted Panedjem more ideological power among his elite base. Thus, the more important the object was perceived to be, the more likely it was to be retained; and yet, the greater the symbolism of the object, the greater the need to reuse it and show that its power had been appropriated. From this perspective, the former greatness of the coffin inhabitant did not protect the coffin; it painted a target on it.
The reuse of New Kingdom and Twenty-first Dynasty coffins was likely problematic to the Egyptians (and to us, the researchers) because anthropoid coffins were made to look like people. These coffins are human shaped, gendered — with earrings and flat hands for women, fisted hands for men — wearing wigs and head cloths, smiling, with wide-awake eyes. Coffins were believed to have an animist power in that they were seemingly alive from their own side, with eyes and nose and mouth activated in complex rituals so that they could look out at the world around them, ready to act, to speak, to see, and hear, and be able to stand. Such visually active imagery must have acted upon the minds of necropolis workers as well. Indeed, perhaps the anthropoid coffin itself was defensively developed at the end of the Middle Kingdom as a means of stopping coffin reuse. An anthropoid coffin demands that reusers somehow — physically, ideologically, psychologically — break the link between the coffin body and the mummy inside. But after the anthropoid coffin had been around for a few hundred years, its defensive power had waned. By the Twentieth Dynasty, the coffin could be stripped of its gilded face and hands, scrubbed of its old decoration, and given a completely new layer of decoration.
In other cases, the coffin could be broken down completely into wooden boards that were used to make new coffins. Some reusers decided not to redecorate the anthropoid piece, but to remove only the name of an old ancestor and insert a new one. Name removal was ostensibly a means of breaking the link between coffin and mummy for those who were literate — i.e., craftsmen and elites — while leaving the coffin itself unharmed. Perhaps name reuse of a given coffin was perceived as a more respectful, less destructive kind of appropriation within a family context. Perhaps such removals and reinscriptions had a ritualized aspect to them for the people who performed and witnessed them. Indeed, multiple coffins have the old name of the deceased preserved in less visible places — that of Nauny in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (30.3.23a-b), for instance, retains the name of the previous female to be placed in the coffin set, namely Nauny’s mother Tabekhnet. In such cases, we can imagine that the full erasure of an ancestor was too problematic, too harmful — undesired even — as most such individuals were related. In such cases, the link between ancestor and coffin was never completely severed. The name’s retention could speak to its perceived power for those who remembered that particular deceased person, indicating only a short time had passed before the coffin was reused.
The anthropoid coffin’s complete redecoration, on the other hand, might suggest a non-remembrance, a willful forgetting of that particular ancestor, or a recommodification many steps removed from the original coffin inhabitant. If no one living remembered a particular ancestor any longer, taking out the name and redecorating the surface were likely easier, and it may have happened without much anxiety. Craftsmen were useful third-party actors in this regard, and we can imagine many elite families pulling their old coffins from ancestral sepulchers to places where coffin reuse was performed systematically and discretely. Maybe some families asked the craftsmen to come to their tombs in order to remove the mummies for them, so family members didn’t have to, and cart the coffins to their workshops, expecting an updated coffin a few months later. Giving a coffin set to a third party allowed denial of moral culpability for those ordering the action, allowing them to avoid personally recycling the containers of their ancestors and thereby taking on the associated guilt.
Kara Cooney is Professor of Egyptian Art and Archaeology at the University of California Berkeley. This article is adapted from her latest book, Recycling for Death: Coffin Reuse in Ancient Egypt and the Theban Royal Caches, published by The American University in Cairo Press (2024).
How to cite this article:
Cooney, K. 2025. “‘When Is It Ok to Recycle a Coffin? The Rules of the Reuse Game in Ancient Egypt.” The Ancient Near East Today 13.2. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/recycle-coffin-egypt/.
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