Talk: Coffins as Magical Machines: Visualizing Ancient Egyptian Funerary Texts in 3D with Professor Rita Lucarelli
Date: Sunday 12 April, 15.00
Location: Online on Zoom
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Magical texts for the dead are best known from papyri, most notably from the corpus conventionally referred to as the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the variants of these texts inscribed on coffins, which are often unpublished or treated independently of their physical context. Yet it is precisely on three-dimensional objects such as coffins that the logic of funerary magic becomes most apparent.
Coffins functioned as surrogate bodies and ritual devices, in which magical texts were carefully mapped onto interior and exterior surfaces according to their protective and regenerative purposes. The placement of spells, their interaction with accompanying images, and their close relationship to the architectural structure of the coffin itself are essential to understanding how funerary magic was conceived and activated.
This paper presents a selection of annotated 3D models of coffins decorated with Book of the Dead spells and other magical texts and vignettes, developed within the Book of the Dead in 3D project. The coffins discussed are housed at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and with the presented case studies it will be demonstrated how 3D visualization makes it possible to recover the spatial, material, and functional dimensions of funerary texts, offering new perspectives on the materiality of ancient Egyptian magic for the dead in the First Millennium BCE.
Rita Lucarelli
Rita Lucarelli is an Associate Professor of Egyptology at UC Berkeley and Faculty Curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Her research centers on ancient Egyptian religion, especially funerary texts, demonology, and the modern reception of Egyptian religion. She also leads The Book of the Dead in 3D, a digital humanities project that combines philology and 3D modeling to make Egyptian coffins more accessible for study.
She is currently completing a monograph on ancient Egyptian demonology and teaches courses on Egyptian and comparative religion through the Mount Tamalpais College program at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. Her work highlights an interdisciplinary approach that blends digital innovation, public scholarship, and the study of ancient religious thought.
She has co-edited The Handbook of the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead by Oxford University Press (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-the-egyptian-book-of-the-dead-9780190210007?cc=us&lang=en&) and recently also published an essay on Sun Ra and the ancient Egyptian religion: A Solar-Ship Voyage: The Ancient Egyptian Religion as Inspiration in the Life and Music of Sun Ra and the Astro-Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra (open access at: https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/aegyp/article/view/105653).