Interior view of King Tutankhamun's tomb

The earliest coffins were fairly plain rectangular wooden boxes decorated with eyes (so the decreased could see) and Coffin Texts. They sometimes had a false door through which the deceased could ‘step out’. By the Middle Kingdom, human-shaped coffins decorated with horizontal and vertical bands of hieroglyphics that looked like the mummy’s bandages became common.

Coffins were richly painted (or gilded if royal), inside and out, with burial scenes, funeral texts, gods and goddesses and winged scarabs. A white ‘backbone’ painted on the back detailed the deceased’s ancestry.There was often a body-shaped painted board called a mummy board covering the mummy in the inner coffin. Then, up to four nested coffins were placed in a rectangular sarcophagus with a tented lid on which the jackal-headed Anubis sat in protection.