Coffin Lid of Hetepit

Rectangular flat coffin lid, in poor preservation, formed from at least seven long planks of wood 55 mm thick. The planks held together by internal wooden pins and three cross-supports across the width (each about 420 mm long, 60 mm wide and 50 mm tall). They leave a gap of about 50mm around the edge so that the lid can sit flat upon on the trough. White plaster on the underside. The cross-supports are now all loose as in one end plank (there is a separate box containing fragments from the lid and the box). No trace of inscription or decoration. The sides of the coffin box are inscribed for Hetepti, the sole royal ornament, the priestess of Hathor, the daily watcher of Min, acquaintance of the king. The lid became separate from the box after the collections were evacuated from the museum in the Second World War. The lid was later presumed lost and then lay unrecognised in the collections. It was assigned a temporary number in about 2000 when it was moved to a new store (DP Temp 4833). The lid was identified by Ashley Cooke in January 2014 and reassigned the original accession number with ‘b’ as suffix (i.e., 13.10.11.26b). The coffin was excavated by Percy Newberry and Hugh Whitaker in 1911 in the cliffs to the north-east of Akhmim (in error called el-Hawawish) Two other coffins from the same tomb are now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. In the 1912 publication of the fieldwork by Newberry he refers to the coffin as “Coffin No. 2” which in error is noted as being in Cairo, rather than Liverpool. Compare with a coffin from the same tomb published by Diana Magee, 'An Early Middle Kingdom Coffin from Akhmim in the Ashmolean Museum (No. 1911.477)' in Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities volume 13 [4], p.241-248.