A Recent History of the Inner Coffin of The Twenty-Fifth Dynasty Theban Priest Iriru

Abstract

Henry Salt (1780–1827), appointed British Consul-General in Egypt, acquired a vast number of ancient Egyptian antiquities during his service in Egypt between March 1816 and October 1827. Among them was a triple mummy case that consisted of an outer qrsw coffin, rectangular in its base with a vaulted lid, the middle/intermediary anthropoid coffin, and the inner anthropoid coffin with the mummified person inside. In 1835, the triple mummy case was purchased by Thomas Joseph Pettigrew (1791–1865), who unwrapped the mummy on May 27, 1836, before a large audience in the lecture room of the Royal Institution in London. The remains of the mummy were subsequently kept in the museum of his son, William Vesalius Pettigrew (1815–1874), at St. George’s School of Medicine, Grosvenor Place. Thomas Pettigrew later sold the triple mummy case to John Lee (1783–1866), whose collection was in its turn acquired in 1865 by William Amhurst Tyssen-Amherst (1835–1909). Following a pattern, at the auction of Lord Amherst’s collection on June 14, 1921, the entire coffin assemblage of ‘Aroeri-ao’ (also known as Ari, Asiriao, Osiri, Iri-Iri, Iri-Iri Wennefer, and Ir) was purchased by antiquarian Ernest Brummer (1891–1964), who was born in Sombor (present-day northern Serbia) to a Hungarian-speaking Jewish family. The Brummer Brothers (Joseph, Imre, and Ernest) opened their first gallery in Paris in 1906, and a second in New York in 1914. Soon after the 1921 auction, Ernest Brummer donated the inner coffin (bivalve anthropoid with back pillar and pedestal) to the National Museum of Serbia (NMS) in Belgrade. The coffin arrived to Belgrade by the end of 1921. Due to a dispute between two Belgrade transport companies, the coffin only entered NMS in September 1923, when it was added to the permanent exhibition for the following two decades. In the troublesome years following the Second World War, probably 1948 and 1949, in the newly established Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, the coffin vanished from NMS without a trace. Its disappearance survived only in the vague recollection, described in a single sentence, of the retired NMS curator and art historian Miodrag Kolarić (1912–2001), interviewed by the present author in 1993. The coffin unexpectedly resurfaced in 2009 at the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb (AMZ), Croatia. It turned out that it had been unlawfully removed from NMS by the Yugoslav Army officer Đuka Kavurić (1903–1976) from Zagreb, an influential figure in the communist regime who was at the time authorized to confiscate the property of politically undesirable or missing persons although certainly not objects belonging to public museums. He happened to be a private collector himself, so he retained the coffin in his family’s possession for six decades. The Kavurić family sold the coffin to the AMZ in 2008, and, unaware of its previous history, the museum bought it and placed it on permanent display in 2009 (Inventory No. E-782, Figs. 1–4). The actual name of the mummified person is rather rare. The genealogy inscribed on the coffin assemblage identifies the owner as Iriru (jrjrw) a wab priest of Amun (wab n jmn). His father was Wennen-nefer (wnn-nfr), his grandfather Ankh-khonsu (anx-xnsw), his great-grandfather Hor-sa-aset (Hr-sA-Ast), and his great-great-grandfather Nes-pauti-tawi (ns-pAwtj-tAwj). All stated male family members, except for Iriru, bore the priestly title ‘God’s father of Amun’ (jt-nTr [n] jmn), as was customary among the Theban clergy. Iriru’s mother was ‘Lady of the House’ (nbt-pr), Mut-sheri (mwt-Srj) whose name also appears as Mjw-Srj. According to Taylor’s typology, the coffin belongs to type 4B (with Nut figure supporting the collar), while in the classification of Tarasenko and Elias it falls into subtype IYb (Inscribed Yellow bands edged with a blue stripe). Iriru’s Theban style coffin is to be dated to later Twenty-Fifth  Dynasty, circa early seventh century B.C., around the beginning of pharaoh Taharqa’s reign. The whereabouts of Iriru’s unwrapped mummified remains, his qrsw coffin, and the middle/intermediary coffin (possibly together with associated cartonnage) are yet to be discovered.