Post # 4 - Met Museum Paper

            Egyptian religious believes in life after the death. The preservation of the human body was essential to this culture. Bodies of the most important people in this society were embalmed, putting in a sarcophagus that was special elaborate to them. They were buried in a pyramid or in under the ground tombs.

      The mummification is the preservation of a body, either animal or human. The death body became a mummy by embalming and drying. Egyptians believe than the mummy can be alive again by doing different rituals mention in the Book of the Dead. However, to keep the body alive, they embalm and desiccate it.  In the embalm process the Egyptian remove all the organs of the body accept the heart. Then Egyptians collocate it in a sarcophagus decorate with a characteristic physics of the person.

     The Egyptian sarcophagi are different to others in many aspects. A common coffin of these days is a square and does not as much designer as an Egyptian sarcophagus.  The Egyptian sarcophagi were fashionable with a great body structure that looks like a tridimensional pharaoh statue. They were made of solid gold or plate, stone and sometimes wood. Around it, there are many painting in the body that showed the history of the pharaoh or an exemplification of things than the pharaoh did.  Egyptians were carving and painting the pharaoh face in the sarcophagus.

     Sarcophagus of Horkhebit is an example of funerary box made of  solid limestone bedrock. It  were shaped to a resemble the human form with a carved head of  Royal Seal Beare. The body has hieroglyphic base on the Papyrus. This coffin is a sixty feed deep tomb of Horkhebit who was a "Royal Seal Bearer, Sole Companion, Chief Priest of the Shrines of Upper and Lower Egypt, and Overseer of the Cabinet"

Citation

"Sarcophagus of Horkhebit [Egyptian; From Saqqara] (07.229.1ab)". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/07.229.1ab (October 2006)