The coffin published in this book represents a type that had some popularity in southern Upper Egypt in the early Middle Kingdom, but which, despite its extraordinary decoration had not attracted attention so far. The most striking feature of the decoration is that the object friezes - the pictorial rendering of ritual implements usually found on coffin interiors of the period - also include complete ritual scenes, some of which are attested only here. Apart from this, the decoration includes an extensive selection of the religious texts know as the Coffin Texts. The author first studies the archaeological context and dating of the coffin and attempts a reconstruction of the construction procedures from his technical description of the monument. The detailed account of the decoration in the rest of the book interprets the ritual iconography and offers fresh translations and interpretations of the Coffin Texts. A methodological innovation is that he regards the scenes and texts not as individual decoration elements, but as components of an integral composition. The background of this composition is argued to be a view of life in the hereafter in which the deceased is involved in an unending cycle of ritual action which reflects the funerary rituals that were actually performed on earth. On the one hand, these netherworldly rituals aim at bringing the deceased to new life by mummification, on the other the newly regenerated deceased partakes in embalming rituals for gods representing his dead father (Osiris or Atum). These gods, in their turn, effectuate the deceased's regeneration. The entire process results in a cycle of resuscitation in which the afterlife of the deceased and of the 'father gods' are interdependent. The sociological bias of this interpretation, with its emphasis on kinship relations, differs significantly from earlier attempts to explain Egyptian funerary religion.

Theban Tomb 188 is the sole archaeological site in the ancient Theban necropolis securely dated to the reign of the “heretic pharaoh” Akhenaten (1353–1336 BCE). The result of several years of clearance and recording by Dr. Susan Redford, director of the Akhenaten Temple Project’s Theban Tomb Survey, this richly illustrated book provides a detailed description of the remaining wall scenes and texts of this historically important ancient monument. In the fourteenth century BCE, Pharaoh Akhenaten attempted to institute a radical religious reform and moved his capital city to Amarna. This book publishes important evidence related to the Amarna period in ancient Egypt, specifically the plans, reliefs, and inscriptions of Theban Tomb 188, belonging to Parennefer, the tutor and butler of the king. Dr. Redford’s detailed archaeological study traces the rapid evolution of ideology, iconography, and iconoclasm, as revealed in Parennefer’s tomb. The decoration kept pace with the momentous changes in the king’s thinking, so that, when dovetailed with the pictorial evidence from the excavations of the great Gem-pa-aten temple at Karnak, it becomes possible to chronicle these rapid changes. This definitive study of the tomb of Parennefer will appeal to archaeologists, Egyptologists, historians of religion, and art historians working on the ancient Near East.