Since 2015 and thanks to funding from two earlier collaborative research grants, I have been building 3D models of selected ancient Egyptian coffins from the Egyptian collection housed at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. This category of artefacts is central for the study and understanding of the ancient Egyptian funerary religion, literature and iconography. Coffins were elite items for protecting a mummy and enabling the deceased’s soul to travel in the netherworld and therefore they were richly decorated inside and outside by scribes and artists of the time.

Expanding on work accomplished through an earlier collaborative research grant, this project aims to build a new digital platform for an in-depth study of the ancient Egyptian funerary culture and its media. The main outcome will be a digital platform that allows to display a coffin in 3D and where users will be able to pan, rotate, and zoom in on the coffin, clicking on areas of text to highlight them and view an annotated translation together with other metadata (transcription of the hieroglyphic text, bibliography, textual variants, museological data, provenance, etc.)