AN ANCIENT EGYPTIAN COFFIN IN THE AUSTRALIAN 



MUSEUM. 



Translations and Explanations of the Hieroglyphs 



i;v 



A. RowK 



(Lecturei' on Archaeology for the Workers' Educational Association, 



Adelaide, and author of " Guide to Egyptian Antiquities 



in South Australian Museum.") 



(Plate xxvii.) 



One of the most interesting and valuable objects in the Archaeological 

 Collection of the Australian Museum, Sj'dney, is undoubtedly the wooden 

 box-sliaped ancient Eg^-ptian coffin which was found some few years ago, 

 in a tomb, at a place in Upper Egypt called Beni-Hasan. According to 

 the printed descriptive label attached to the glass containing case, it 

 seems that when the tomb was opened up it was discovered that the gi^ave 

 had been rifled and the mummy i-emoved from the coffin. It is quite 

 possible that the latter itself has suffered somewhat as the result of the 

 depredations of the unknown thieves, for the inscriptions and paintings 

 are in a rather poor state of preservation ; indeed, in some instances, the 

 hieroglyphs are entirely obliterated. 



The style of the coffin shows us that we can date it to the 12th 

 Dynasty, that is to say, to somewhere about 2,300 B.C., at which time 

 Amen-em-hat III. was the ruler of Egypt. This king carried out large 

 irrigation works in connection with the great natni'al reservoir in the 

 Fayyum, which was known to the Greeks as Lake Moeris. He is also 

 thought to have built the Labyrinth, which the old historian Herodotus 

 says contained twelve courts, and three thousand chambers, one thousand 

 five hundi'ed above ground and one thousand five hundred under ground, 

 and covered an area about 1,000 feet long and 800 feet broad ; this huge 

 building was dedicated to the crocodile-god Sebek, and many sacred croco- 

 diles were buried in a place specially set apart for them. 



At the early date of which we are speaking the great Babylonian 

 Empire had not been founded ; the whole of Europe — with the exception, 

 perhaps, of the isles of Cyprus and Crete, which were in the Early Bi^onze 

 Age — was in the Stone Age culture ; while the great Aryan influx from 

 west central Asia did not take place for at least another two hundred 

 years. The Hebrews, themselves, must have been simply wandering tribes 

 living in Bedawin fashion amid the vast sandy wastes of Northern Meso- 

 potamia, where they possibly originated, and worshipping the tribal god 

 Yaweh, whom, at a later date, they identified with the God of the L'ni- 

 verse. As a matter of fact, it is generally held that it was not until the 

 time of Khammurabi, a king of the First Babylonian Dynasty (about B.C. 

 2,000) that the traditional tribal leader Abi'aham led the Hebrews down 

 from Northern Mesopotamia, thi'ough Syria, where he defeated the five 

 kings, to Southern Canaan. 



