Vatican Museums

In June 2013, the Vatican Museums hosted the First Vatican Coffin Conference, organised by the Vatican Museums Department of Egyptian and Near Eastern Antiquities, in collaboration with the Musée du Louvre and the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden of Leiden.

This publication in 2 volumes, available in English only, collects the interventions of the four study days and illustrates the results of complex scientific research – undertaken in 2007 as part of the Vatican Coffin Project – on groups of sarcophagi of the Third Intermediate Period from Museums worldwide: the wooden polychrome Theban sarcophagi in the Vatican, the corpus of Bab el-Gasus, the “stola” coffins conserved in Leiden, various collections from the Musée du Louvre, from the Egyptian Museum in Florence and in Turin, and specimens from Stockholm, Moscow and Cairo.

This comprehensive study, bringing together internationally renowned specialists, is accompanied by a vast photographic apparatus, and through a multidisciplinary approach analyses in particular the constitutive materials, production techniques, art and conservation history, attributes and provenance.
The appendix includes reproductions of the posters displayed on the day of the conference and an extensive bibliography. The volume concludes with an index of the catalogue numbers of the artefacts in the museums to which they belong.