WHILE A POSTDOCTORAL researcher at the University of Cambridge, Melanie Pitkin became interested in a particular Egyptian limestone stela held by the university’s Fitzwilliam Museum. She had been working with the Fitzwilliam Egyptian Coffns Project, during which time she and her colleagues found that the practice of recycling wood from older coffns to make new ones was much more common in ancient Egypt than previously known. Pitkin was curious as to how the practice of reusing objects translated to other materials. Her Fitzwilliam colleague, Egyptologist Helen Strudwick, encouraged her to investigate the limestone stela, also known as a false door, which had been used for the tomb of a woman named Hemi-Ra during the First Intermediate Period (ca. 2150–2030 B.C.). This was a time of political breakdown and disruption, during which control of Egypt was divided between rival power bases in Herakleopolis in Lower Egypt and Thebes in Upper Egypt.
False doors, or life force, of the deceased to move back and forth between the tomb and the afterlife. “Family members and priests would come to the tomb where the false door was standing and they would recite the name of the deceased and his or her achievements and leave offerings,” says Pitkin, who is now senior curator of antiquities at the University of Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum as well as an affliated researcher at the Fitzwilliam Museum. “The ka of the deceased would then magically travel between the burial chamber and the netherworld. It would come and collect the food, drink, and offerings from the tomb to help sustain it in the afterlife.”
