THE JOURNAL Egyptian Archaeology - Plymouth City Council

THE JOURNAL OF

Egyptian Archaeology VOLUME 94 2008

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THE COFFINS OF IYHAT AND TAIRY: A TALE OF TWO CITIES * By Aidan Dodson The publication of two coffins presently in the City Museum and Art Gallery in Plymouth, England. Dating to the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, they are interesting examples of inner coffins of their period, that of Tairy having an unusual arm arrangement. They also have an intriguing modern history, and an attempt is made to trace them from their first appearance at the Bristol Institution (ancestor of the modern City Museum & Art Gallery) in 1834, through the Bristolian private collection of midnineteenth century collector and traveller Thomas Pease (1816–1884), to their arrival in Plymouth in 1919.

The origins of what is now Bristol’s Museums, Galleries & Archives 1 lie in the foundation, in 1823, of the Bristol Institution for the Advancement of Science and Art, sharing brand-new premises at the bottom of Park Street (fig. 1) with the slightly older Bristol Literary and Philosophical Society. The building was designed by Sir Charles Cockerell (1788–1863), who was later to complete the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and to build St George’s Hall, Liverpool.   In April 1871, the Institution merged with the Bristol Library Society, and in 1872 moved to a new building at the top of Park Street, which was extended in 1877 (fig. 2). In 1894, the Museum and Library, struggling financially, were transferred to Bristol Corporation. In 1906, the Library moved to its current home on College Green, while in 1899 the tobacco baron Sir William Henry Wills (1830–1911, later Lord Winterstoke) offered to fund a new City Art Gallery & Museum of Antiquities, which was built adjacent to the 1872 Museum building, and opened in February 1905. The Egyptian collection was moved into the new structure, and has remained there ever since. *   For their invaluable assistance in the preparation of this paper, I am particularly indebted to Sue Giles, Curator of Ethnography and Foreign Archaeology, Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery (BCMAG), Rachel Smith, Assistant Keeper of Human History at Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, and John Taylor of the British Museum. In particular, Ms Giles and Dr Taylor have facilitated access to earlier research material relating to the topic, including investigations by Nick Dixon of BCMAG on behalf of Dr Taylor in 1985. Thanks are also due to Sally-Ann Ashton of the Fitzwilliam Museum; Amber Druce and Samantha Hallett of BCMAG; Christopher Denman of the Society of Friends Redland Meeting; Dyan Hilton; Christine Hughes of the Sisters of Nazareth General Archive; Margaret McGregor, Archivist at Bristol Record Office; Brenda Moon; Chris Naunton of the Egypt Exploration Society; Gurney Pease; James Russell and Gwynne Stock of the Bristol & Avon Archaeological Society; Alex Thompson of Harts House, Almondsbury; and Wendy Cawthorne, Assistant Librarian, Geological Society of London, for their help. 1   For an overview of the history of the Bristol Egyptian collection, see A. Dodson and S. Giles, ‘The Egyptian Collection of Bristol City Museum’, in V. Solkin (ed.), Древний Егыпет, II: к 150-летию со дня рождения Bладимира Семеновича Голенищева/Ancient Egypt, II: On the Occasion of the 150th Birthday Anniversary of Vladimir S. Golenischev (Moscow, 2006), 11–20, and id., ‘Ancient Egypt in the City and County of Bristol’, Kmt 18/4 (2007–8), 20–32. Much useful detail on the later years of the City Museum and Art Gallery as a whole is contained in K.-M. Walton, 75 years of Bristol Art Gallery (Bristol, 1980).

The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 94 (2008), 107–38 ISSN 0307-5133

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  The main focus of the original Institution was the natural sciences, but from the very beginning it was collecting Egyptian material, albeit in small quantities: during the first ten years, only twelve out of about 1,250 donations were Egyptological items, and three of those were books. The tenth item received was a ‘fine Mummy’ (later

Fig. 1. Freemasons’ Hall on Park Street, Bristol, originally completed in 1823 to house the Bristol Literary and Philosophical Society and Bristol Institution for the Advancement of Science and Art (author).

Fig. 2. The building erected in 1872 as the new Bristol Museum and Library, after its 1877 rearward extension (from Bristol in 1898–9 (Brighton, 1898), 36).

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Bristol Museum’s H540 and still later Ha7385),2 presented by John Webb, a Bristolian resident of Livorno, Italy, on 29 March 1823, and on 6 March the following year a further mummy was given to the Institution by the City Chamberlain of Bristol, Thomas Garrard (1787–1859).3 Curiously, the accompanying Eighteenth Dynasty ‘white’ coffin of a certain Tay (H630) was not mentioned in the Institution’s Donations Book — although at some stage the coffin itself received a painted inscription recording its donation by Garrard. This failure to note the coffin(s) enclosing a mummy is a phenomenon that is repeated later. This mummy was unwrapped before an audience on 9 December that year.4 This was carried out by a team led by Dr James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848), a surgeon, psychiatrist, and physical anthropologist who had also written on Egyptian mythology.5 Webb presented a further mummy, that of a child, on 6 April 1826, together with part of another juvenile body.6   On 22 March 1834 ‘the offer by a Member to allow one of the fine Mummies sent to him from abroad to be opened’ was reported.7 The ‘Member’ in question was Garrard, and on 31 March, a series of lectures by Dr Prichard began with the unwrapping of the new mummy. An extremely detailed contemporary account of this event runs as follows:8 The Mummy, which from the face of the case was believed to be that of a female, was enclosed in two sarcophagi of sycamore wood each of which was formed of a back and a front portion, dovetailed, mortised and dowelled together. The outside of each case was covered with paintings and hieroglyphics. On the inside of the external case was a female figure in profile; and the inside of the internal case was covered with hieroglyphic writing.   These cases having been removed the mummy was exposed to view enveloped in its bandages. Of these the external ones were narrow, turned in at their edges, and cruciform. Beneath these was a large wrapper of dark red cloth, which enveloped the 2   As with many museums, the Bristol collection has used several numbering systems over the years. The Bristol Institution numbered its donations in their order of acquisition, but these numbers were never marked on the objects, nor apparently used to refer to them. Then, in the late nineteenth century, a system of numbers was adopted that is now referred to as ‘False Accession Numbers’; these were still not marked on the objects. In parallel, since 1898 individual departments had started their own registers (each with their own letter-prefixes), and from 1 December 1913 Antiquities also did so, prefixing its numbers with the letter ‘H’. The first object so numbered (H1) was a shabti given by a Mr F. P. Browne, followed by newly arrived objects from the Egypt Exploration Fund and British School of Archaeology in Egypt, taking numbers up to H63. Older material was added to the ‘H-Register’ as and when time was available, so that some of the very earliest Bristol ægyptiaca were at length given numbers in the H500 and H600 series in 1917 (cf. below, p. 114 and n. 25), while the Mapp Collection, received in 1956, was only registered during 1973–77, documentation continuing into the current decade. Certain items were inadvertently numbered twice, which seems to have been the case with H540/Ha7385. The ‘H’ register was closed and the ‘Ha’ register inaugurated in February 1971; this continued the serials used in ‘H’, H5230 being followed by Ha5231 (although strictly speaking, to follow Museum procedures, it should have begun at Ha1). 3   He was then City Treasurer from 1836 to 1856, following the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835; see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter ODNB), XXI, 516. 4   An account appeared in the four principal Bristol local newspapers; cf. A. B. Granville, ‘An Essay on Egyptian Mummies’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 115 (1825), 291. 5   An Analysis of the Egyptian Mythology (London, 1819); its third edition was incorporated into Prichard’s Analysis of the Historical Records of Ancient Egypt (London, 1838); see W. R. Dawson, E. P. Uphill, and M. L. Bierbrier, Who Was Who in Egyptology, 3rd rev. edn (London, 1995), 343; ODNB, XLV, 329–32. 6   Neither body can be identified today, unless the former mummy is H5597, cf. D. P. Dawson, S. Giles, and M. W. Ponsford (eds), Horemkenesi, May He Live Forever: The Bristol Mummy Project (Bristol, 2002), 25. 7   Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 22 March 1834. 8   ‘Bristol Institution — Opening of the Mummy’, Bristol Mirror, Saturday 5 April 1834.

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whole front of the body, and which was laced behind with shreds of linen. Under it were found a few beads of semivitreous substance which might have been originally on a string but no vestige of it was left. Layers of bandages of a lighter colour then presented themselves, wound transversely round the body, alternating with others passing longitudinally which generally formed a cross over the chest. After five of these alternations the head bandages were separate; and there was a series of folded compresses over the whole body, beneath which a very remarkable cross was seen. The bandages then became adherent showing dark patches of bituminous matter ...   The wax figures which were found … were probably those of two children, and a representation of a jackal-headed deity [(fig. 3)9]. They all bear marks of the thumb and were evidently prepared in a hurry. On a fragment found with them is an eye, with a line under it ... Beneath these was found a wax plate, representing a wing, and a basilisk. Which form together half the emblem of the Agathodaemon.[10]   The length of the body itself was five feet and half an inch. The cuticle appears to have been removed; the hair is rather long and of a dark auburn colour, but matted together by asphaltum. The ears are not bored: the nose is tolerably preserved but somewhat compressed; its internal structure was broken down for the removal of the brain; the sockets of the eyes were filled up with resinous matter, probably in part myrrh. The mouth is slightly open and the teeth are in good preservation ...   The collar bones are prominent, and the shoulders unnaturally brought forward. On the left side on a level with the last dorsal and first lumbar vertebrae is a large circular incision through which the viscera of that cavity were extracted: the cavity being filled up with resin mixed with earth ... The foot was small and well-proportioned, with a high instep, like those of the Greek statues ...   At the conclusion of the lecture last evening [i.e. 4 April], Dr. Riley[11] suggested that it was very desirable that the skeleton of the mummy should be preserved, in order that comparisons might be drawn from it with those of other races in the present day. To this proposition its liberal possessor immediately assented.

Fig. 3. The three wax figures of sons of Horus recovered from the mummy unwrapped in 1834 (BCMAG H1111: Amber Druce, courtesy Bristol’s Museums, Galleries & Archives). 9

  Now BCMAG H1111, noted as ‘Taken from the abdominal investments of an Egyptian Mummy opened at the Institution in 1834’; for another four such figures, see p. 114, below. 10   Presumably actually an embalmer’s plate incorporating a winged uraeus; this cannot now be identified in the Museum collection. 11   Henry Riley, MD (1797–1848), was physician to the Bristol Infirmary between 1834 and 1847, and was also a lecturer at Bristol Medical School from 1833 to 1846. He gave popular lectures on various subjects at the Institution, including comparative anatomy, zoology, reptiles, and ‘palæosaurians’, donating the proceeds to the Institution.

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There survives a painting by the local watercolorist John Skinner Prout (1806–1874) entitled ‘The Theatre of the Bristol Institution, Park Street, during the Delivery of Dr Prichard’s Lectures on Egyptian Antiquities’ (fig. 4).12 A considerable number of Egyptian antiquities had been assembled to provide a backdrop for Prichard’s presentations. Those visible include three mummies, one unwrapped, and five coffins.13   The coffin atop the pedestal at the rear of the display (1) is the aforementioned example belonging to Tay. At the front of the display is the newly unwrapped mummy (2); the three wax images found during the unwrapping are to be seen on the table behind (11), with another item that may be the closure of the embalming wound.14   The mummy lying in the coffin trough at the right (3), adorned with a mask and cartonnage panels, is Webb’s 1823 gift, H540 = Ha7385. Today, the mummy lies in an old zinc-lined box in which it has been assumed to have been brought from Egypt: it may have been temporarily placed in this trough for display purposes only. To judge from its size, and the podium under the feet of the trough, it may be that it is from the coffin whose lid is on the far left of the painting (8).   The wrapped mummy on the left (4) closely matches the description given above of the external appearance of the mummy unwrapped on 31 March, and must be a second specimen donated by Garrard. This is listed along with the unwrapped body in an entry made during May 1834 in the Institution’s Donations Book under the number 1280: ‘Two Egyptian Mummies. One male and the other female; the former in its original bandaging, the latter as opened at a lecture there on March 31st 1834 & intended for a skeleton’.   Although no coffins are mentioned as accompanying these two mummies, the contemporary account quoted above describes the mummy to be unwrapped as being ‘enclosed in two sarcophagi’. These clearly must be two of the four remaining coffins shown in the watercolour (5–8), which are without doubt two outer and two inner coffins of typical late Third Intermediate Period type.15 That on the far right of the painting (5) can be recognised by virtue of its very unusual arm arrangement as the inner case of the ‘Lady of the House Tairy, daughter of Ashery and Denitenbastet’, now in Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery (Appendix 2b). Its outer coffin is presumably that standing next to it. The inner lid standing on the far left (8) is 12

  Given to the Museum and Art Gallery by Mr F. Newcombe in 1918. The following analysis of the objects shown differs somewhat from that set out in Dodson and Giles, Древний Егыпет II, 12–14. 13   Of the other material visible, the ‘stela’ below Tay’s coffin seems to be a drawing. The corniced stela in front of the unwrapped mummy (10) is identifiable as that of Iytyia, datable to the reign of Thutmose IV or Amenhotep III, and now H637: this could be the ‘Egyptian Monument’ of 1825. Of the group on the table (12), could the canopic jar (not now identifiable in the Bristol collection) be amongst the Morris ‘Idols’? The adjacent stelae on the table are difficult to assess in view of a total lack of detail, but one (possibly the one in the centre) is likely to be that of the Hm-nTr n Wrt-HkAw Penamun, registered in 1917 as H514, and without any history. There are no other complete stelae in Bristol that could be candidates for the remaining pair, although it is possible that an accident later befell one of them, and that it could be partly represented by H2734, the middle section of a broken New Kingdom stela of an Overseer of Cattle. There are no potential candidates for the third stela: perhaps it and the canopic jar were simply lent for the occasion? Alternatively, they may have been part of the Institution’s holdings, but subsequently left the collection in circumstances that are now wholly obscure (cf. n. 81). 14   Their presence shows clearly that the mummy is the newly unwrapped one, rather than the body from the coffin of Tay, unwrapped a decade earlier, as is suggested in Dawson, Giles, and Ponsford (eds), Horemkenesi, 19. It is possible that the latter mummy is hidden from view inside its coffin, which may explain why this piece is lying on its back, rather than placed upright like the rest of the coffins present, but cf. n. 22 below. 15   Cf. further below.

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9

7

6

5 3 8 4

12

11

2

10

Fig. 4. Watercolour by J. S. Prout, made at the Bristol Institution between 31 March and 4 April 1834, during a series of Egyptological lectures by James Prichard (BCMAG M3984, courtesy Bristol’s Museums, Galleries & Archives). Objects that may be identified are as follows: 1. BCMAG H630; 2. Mummy unwrapped on 31 March 1834; 3. H540=Ha7385, in Plymouth, Pease Loan C2(?); 4. Mummy presented with 2.; 5. Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery Pease Loan C3; 6. H631;

7. H629; 8. Plymouth Pease Loan C1; 9. Ha5588; 10. H637; 11. H1111; 12. Stelae not fully identifiable, but that in centre is probably H514; the canopic jar is not identifiable.

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less distinctive, but is consistent with being that of a coffin which accompanied that of Tairy when it arrived in Plymouth, that of the wab-priest of Amun, Iyhat, son of a God’s Father of Amun Pawerma and a nbt-pr Henttawy (Appendix 1b). The decorative elements indicated on the watercolour are all consistent with those to be seen in Plymouth, while the shape of the nose shown suggests the damage to be seen today on the face of Iyhat’s coffin. Although the lid in the watercolour bears a beard, in contrast with the current state of Iyhat’s cover, the broken remains of just such a beard still exist under that coffin’s chin.   This identification of the inner coffins shown in the 1834 painting raises two particular issues. The first arises from a perusal of the published account of the unwrapping. Here, we read that ‘the inside of the internal case was covered with hieroglyphic writing’. This is true of Iyhat’s coffin, but not that of Tairy. There are a number of options here: first, that the sex of the coffin and/or mummy was mistaken in 1834; second, that the correspondent was mistaken; third, that the mummies had been switched at some point; or fourth, that the coffin shown is not after all that of Tairy in Plymouth.   Unfortunately, the sex of the corpse cannot today be verified. In January 1835, it was noted 16 that on display ‘[i]n the Lobby, Hall, and upon the Stair-case [of the Institution] are models, casts, bas reliefs, and busts, together with several mummies and mummy cases, and the skeleton of a mummy’ — doubtless the victim of the previous year’s unwrapping. However, against the 1834 mummies’ aforementioned entry in the Institution’s Donations Book is a later note stating ‘Destroyed — 1906’.17 The destruction of the unwrapped mummy is confirmed in the later General Register of the Museum and Art Gallery, where ‘278 — Female mummy without Binding’, is followed by a note that repeats the wording of the Donation Book concerning its unwrapping and intended employment as a skeleton, plus ‘Destroyed 1906’. Nevertheless, the mummy had been closely examined, and one would have expected any sexing error to have been spotted by the time of the May entry in the Donations Book, especially as it was being skeletonised at the time. The body’s stature would also be in keeping with its being that of a female.18   A correspondent’s error is possible, but given the care taken with detail in the rest of his account this seems unlikely. On the other hand, the fact that Ha7385 seems to have been placed in the trough of Iyhat’s internally-inscribed coffin for the purpose of the display might suggest a source of error. Indeed, most probable would seem to be a switch of mummies, either in Egypt, in transit, or at the Institution: there are many examples of such a situation in the literature. That the coffin in the watercolour might not be the Plymouth example of Tairy after all is made improbable not only by the latter’s apparently unique design (cf. Appendix 2b), but also by what we know of the fate of her outer coffin. 16

  In an account preserved in BCMAG.   This is initialled by H[erbert] B[olton], then the Senior Museum Curator. This destruction probably occurred in conjunction with the transfer of the antiquities collection from the old Museum to the new Art Gallery that had been opened the previous year. Such a piece is unlikely to have been felt appropriate to an institution dedicated to the fine arts. On the mummy, and the identification of the coffin, see now Addendum, pp. 137–8 below. 18   As for the sex of the coffin, this was a subjective view; on the other hand, the visage of Tairy’s case is certainly more female in appearance than that of Iyhat’s. 17

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  The wrapped (‘male’) mummy appears to have been unwrapped a decade or so later. Although no contemporary record has yet been identified, a piece of mummycloth owned by Wandsworth Museum, London,19 is accompanied by a label reading ‘Piece of the bandage of an Egyptian Mummie supposed to be 3000 years old. There was 800 yards of this cloth bound round it. It was opened in Bristol in 1842 at the Museum’.20 In addition, Bristol Museum holds four wax figures from the interior of a mummy, characterised in the H-Register as ‘at the Institute 1852’ (H1112). They are very similar to those from the mummy unwrapped in 1834, and it seems thus likely that they came from this later unwrapping.21 The ultimate fate of the body is wholly obscure, as in the General Register ‘277 — Male mummy in Original Binding’ does not share 278’s statement of doom, yet does not appear in any later registers of the Museum, and is certainly not in the current collection.22   In 1917, the Bristol Art Gallery and Museum of Antiquities, to which the Institution’s collection of Egyptian antiquities had passed in 1906,23 at last 24 registered the Egyptian coffins by then in its possession.25 Amongst them were two 19

  It is that institution’s sole Egyptian item, and is one of a small group of items to survive from a museum that was set up by Battersea Council in 1906 in the Plough Road Institute, alongside a library, a gymnasium, and slipper baths. That museum ceased to exist during the First World War. While there exists some documentation about some of the items in the museum, including an accessions register, this linen appears nowhere in any of this documentation. It was simply amongst a group of items discovered in a cupboard at Battersea Library by the first curator of Wandsworth Museum, in 1986, and some of which were traceable to the old Battersea Museum. The Wandsworth Museum closed at the end of 2007, with the intention that it should reopen in 2008 in a new location under the auspices of the Hintze Family Charitable Foundation, see Wandsworth Museum Newsletter November 2007 . 20   I am indebted to John Taylor for the provision of this information, supplied to Marcel Marée of the British Museum by Sue Barber, Assistant Curator of Wandsworth Museum in January 2006. 21   One does wonder whether one of the dates might be an error, and that the unwrapping might actually have been in 1852. Cf. L. V. Grinsell, Guide Catalogue to the Collections from Ancient Egypt (Bristol, 1972), 67. 22   Neither is the 1824 mummy. The need for a formal proposal in 1834 ‘… that the skeleton of the mummy should be preserved …’ (above, p. 110), might suggest that both other sets of remains were discarded soon after their unwrapping. Cf. Addendum, pp. 137–8, below. 23   For the various moves and reorganizations of Bristol’s museums, see the sources listed in n. 1, above. 24   Cf. n. 2, above. 25   Apart from the two outer coffins discussed in this paper, these comprised: H630

Tay, early Eighteenth Dynasty, from Salt Collection, via Thos. Garrard; unpublished.

H632

Isetweret, daughter of Nimenkhetamun and Nesmut, early/mid seventh century; unpublished.

H633 (ex-H558)

Pedihorpakhered, son of Nesmaat and Tamiu, late eighth/early seventh century: given by C. Helyar in 1917; unpublished.

H634

No name, cartonnage, Twenty-second Dynasty; unpublished and now destroyed (cf. n. 27).

H638

No name, early Twenty-second Dynasty, from Dra Abu el-Naga: given by the British School of Archaeology in Egypt; PM I2, 606.

H641

Horemkeniset, early Twenty-first Dynasty, from Deir el-Bahari: given by the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1905; PM I2, 657; Dawson, Giles, and Ponsford (eds), Horemkenesi.

While nothing is known of how Isetweret’s H632 was acquired by the Museum, it is conceivable that it might be the coffin (then with a mummy) displayed at 18 Milsom Street in Bath in October 1822. Keene’s Bath Journal and General Advertiser, 7 October 1822, describes the mummy as ‘the most Perfect … ever seen in this Country, … lately brought from Bombay, … purchased by the present Proprietors, at the Custom-House, Plymouth, for a considerable sum’. It further states that the ‘Cover of the Inside Coffin is remarkably curious, it being carved and elegantly painted in the Oriental style, exactly agreeable to the features of the Person when Living, and … in the highest state of preservation’. The mummy itself is described as being entirely unwrapped, although a ‘great

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owned, respectively, by a man named Iyhat (given the registration number H629 and ‘false’ accession number 4231) and by a woman named Tairy (H631; 4233). Nothing was stated as to their origins,26 but the owners’ names, titles, and filiations make it crystal clear that they were the same individuals as the Plymouth pair. Sadly, it is not possible to provide further verification by checking whether either outer coffin trough contains ‘a female figure in profile’, as stated by the 1834 correspondent, as both H629 and H631 were destroyed in 1957 without ever having been photographed.27 All that certainly survives in Bristol are manuscript copies of the owners’ names and titles made by Ernest Sibree (1854–1927)28 in 1899, and manuscript descriptions of the coffins by G. R. Stanton,29 written in September 1935 (see Appendices 1a and 2a).30 Nevertheless, it is now impossible to doubt that H629, H631, and the Plymouth coffins represent together the two coffin sets seen in the 1834 watercolour, and came to Bristol with Garrard’s two mummies. Further confirmation comes from the fact that a small board shown displayed at the foot of the coffin of Tay in the 1834 painting (fig. 4.9), and still in Bristol as Ha5588, turns out to be a missing piece of the foot-end of the Plymouth coffin of Iyhat.31   This leads us to the second issue surrounding the identification of the 1834 inner coffins with those now in Plymouth: when and why were these two coffins separated from their outer shells — and one of their footboards — which remained in Bristol? *

*

*

Over eight decades separate the 1834 depiction of the inner coffins of Iyhat and Tairy from their next documented appearance. Then, sometime in 1918, a pair of Egyptian coffins — which turned out to be the inner cases of Iyhat and Tairy — were offered on loan to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge by one Thomas Henry Ormston Pease (1853–1937) — generally known by his last forename. This offer was turned down by the museum, apparently on the grounds of it being a loan, rather than an outright donation.32 quantity of the cloth in which the body was first wound’ was ‘now … presented to public view’. The exhibition charged one shilling (£0.05) entrance. This piece must be distinguished from the two other coffins on display in Bath at the same time, at 10 New Bond Street, which derived, along with other material, from Belzoni’s collection (Bath Journal, 7, 14, 21 and 28 October 1822). The New Bond Street objects all seem to have later passed to the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, the Egyptian collection of which was loaned to Bristol in February 1966; the coffins, of the nbt-pr Nesikhonsu and one Djedkhonsuankh (sic), son of Nihordebha, are now H5062 and H5074/5: I owe this identification to John Taylor. It is intended that all Bristol coffins will be published, along with those in Exeter, Plymouth, Truro and Swansea, in a monograph by the present writer. 26   Likewise the coffin of Tay (H630) was left without provenance, although in that case a note ‘T. Garrard [1824?]’ was later added, probably by G. R. Stanton, for whom see below. 27   ‘Destroyed Oct. 1957 as in very poor condition, riddled with woodworm’ (note in Museum register). For the possible survival of one fragment, see below, p. 125. Also burned at the same time were the lid of H630 and the Twenty-second Dynasty cartonnage, H634, registered in 1917. See now further Addendum, pp. 137–8, below. 28   Since 1896 Lecturer in Oriental Languages at University College Bristol. For Sibree’s career, see A. Dodson, ‘Ernest Sibree: A Forgotten Pioneer and his Milieu’, JEA 93 (2007), 247–53. 29   The Museum’s Assistant Curator (later Curator) of Antiquities and Anthropology from 1926 to 1951. 30   A fragment of H629 may still survive: see p. 125, below; see also further Addendum, pp. 137–8. 31   The join was first recognized by John Taylor in 1985. The piece has now been loaned, along with wax figures H1111, to Plymouth for display in the new Egyptian gallery which opened at the end of 2008. 32   BCMAG Historical File (HF) 506; there are no records of the approach in the papers of the Fitzwilliam Museum Syndicate, nor those of the department of Antiquities (personal communications Sally-Ann Ashton, 19 and 26 June 2007).

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  In September, Herbert Bolton, Director of the Bristol Museum and the Art Gallery from 1912 to 1930,33 was invited by Pease’s half-sister, Marian Fry Pease (1859–1954: for the Pease family, see fig. 8),34 the Bristol educationalist,35 to inspect the same pair of ‘mummy cases’ at ‘Cote Bank’, a large house in Westbury-on-Trym, 4.25 kilometres north of Bristol city centre (fig. 5).36 On 18 September, once Bolton had actually seen the coffins, Ormston Pease offered them on loan to the Museum, and to donate the glass case in which they were displayed outright. Bolton’s view was that this was unlikely to be acceptable, although this would be subject to the views of his Museum Committee. At no point did Bolton apparently have any inkling that the objects he was dealing with had once been part of the collection of the Bristol Institution, and that their corresponding outer coffins still lay in his own museum.   Put to the Museum Committee on 21 November, the offer was refused on grounds of ‘limited space’. In response, Pease queried whether a gift would meet with a more

Fig. 5. ‘Cote Bank’ early in the twentieth century (courtesy Reece Winstone Archive). 33   Formerly the Senior Museum Curator responsible for the destruction of the skeleton from the 1834 unwrapping, and then Director of the Art Gallery alone from 1930 to 1953. 34   Then living at ‘Harts’ — now ‘Harts House’, Almondsbury, on the northern margin of Bristol, cf. n. 43. 35   For Miss Pease’s career, see ODNB, XLIII, 357. I am indebted to Gurney Pease for much useful information on the Pease family, supplemented by a range of census and public birth, marriage and death records, accessed with the invaluable assistance of my wife. 36   BCMAG HF 506; the file is incomplete, a note indicating that the earlier letters were retained by the Pease family.

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positive reaction, but Bolton’s reply condemned the glass case (fig. 6) as unsuitable for a museum, and once more highlighted the lack of space in the museum. In his last surviving letter to Bolton, Pease stated that he now intended to offer the coffins elsewhere on loan, and on 19 February 1919 the coffins (and their case) arrived in Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery on indefinite loan along with other antiquities that comprised the ‘Ormston Pease Collection’;37 they have remained there ever since.

Fig. 6. The coffins of Iyhat and Tairy, apparently in the case that housed them at ‘Cote Bank’ (author). 37   The collection contained over 500 items, of which over 400 were scarabs and amulets, plus various small antiquities, including a complete canopic jar, a canopic lid, and some animal mummies. A manuscript Catalogue of Egyptian Antiquities belonging to O. T. H. (sic) Pease, Esq., Skaigh, Okehampton, is held by Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery. This would appear to have been prepared by the Museum, as the handwriting appears identical to that in another MS catalogue of material received from the British School of Archaeology in Egypt in 1924. It has not yet proved possible to confirm the identity of the author.

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  Ormston Pease was a solicitor, resident at ‘Skaigh’ in Okehampton, Devon, which may have influenced his approach to Plymouth, which at that time had minimal Egyptian holdings.38 However, up until the late 1890s 39 he had previously lived at the family home of ‘Cote Bank’, and at his own establishments in and around Bristol.40 Educated at University College London, he had been admitted as a solicitor in 1877, and practiced in Bristol for the next two decades.41   Pease’s desire to deposit the coffins with a museum was clearly linked with the fact that his stepmother, Susanna Ann Fry (1829–1917, a scion of the Bristol chocolate dynasty: fig. 7) had died on 21 September the previous year 42 and that ‘Cote Bank’ was now to be disposed of.43 Ultimately, in May 1920, the house and its 27 acres of land were sold for £11,900 to the Roman Catholic order of Poor Sisters of Nazareth.

Fig. 7. Susanna Ann Fry Pease (1829–1917) (Annual Monitor 107–8 (1919–20), 220).

38   The Museum had been established in 1887 and reopened in its present building in 1910. Material (later transferred to Plymouth Museum) from Garstang’s work at Beni Hasan had been given to the nearby Devonport Museum, but apart from the Pease collection the first significant acquisitions by Plymouth Museum would be donations from W. L. S. Loat (1871–1932: WWWE 3, 258) in 1920, A. L. Lewis in 1921, and the British School of Archaeology in Egypt (Qau and Badari) in 1923/4. The collection is currently being catalogued by the present writer. 39   His last listing in J. Wright & Co.’s Bristol and Commercial Directory is in the 1897 edition. 40   On his marriage to Mary Elizabeth Ellis Cave (1867–1946) on 6 December 1888 in Kensington, he moved into 8 Sion Hill, Clifton, and subsequently acquired ‘Failand Lawn’, at Long Ashton, just across the Avon Gorge from Bristol in Somerset. 41   At first at 2 Lion Court, Broad Street, Bristol. In 1885 he became a partner in Jacques, Pease and Jacques at 28 Corn Street, moving around 1891 to number 41. Pease struck out on his own again the following year, with his office first at 13 Clare Street and finally at Brighton Court, 6 St Stephen’s Avenue. All these locations were within 200 metres of each other, within what is now Bristol’s ‘Old Town’ (Wright’s Directory, various editions). 42   Only a few months after her youngest son, Oswald — who had emigrated to Canada in the 1890s — had been killed in action at Vimy Ridge, France, on 31 March/1 April 1917. Mrs Pease was cremated on 25 September and her ashes interred at Kingsweston Quaker Burial Ground, north-east Bristol, alongside the body of her husband: see n. 73 below and fig. 9. I am indebted to Gwynne Stock (personal communication 18 October 2007) for information on the interments of the Pease family, and for relocating their gravestones on 10 November 2007; on the Kinsgsweston cemetery, see G. Stock, ‘A Survey of the Quaker Burial Grounds in Bristol and Frenchay Monthly Meeting’, Bristol and Avon Archaeology 13 (1996), 4–5. 43   Her companions during her last years at ‘Cote Bank’ had been her daughters Marion and Rosa Elizabeth Pease (1858–1951); on 16 April 1918 they together purchased ‘Harts’ at Almondsbury, 15 kilometres from ‘Cote Bank’. That property had been built as a cottage in the sixteenth century as part of the Tockingon Manor estate, and gradually expanded until auctioned off by the Rev. James Legard Peach in September 1890 to Robert Todd. The Peases bought the house from his widow, Fanny Todd.

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It opened as the Nazareth Orphanage Home for Boys in September 1921, but closed in 1929;44 the site is now occupied by houses built in 1934–5.45   A curious footnote came twenty years after the coffins had been moved to Plymouth when, two years after Ormston Pease’s death, his son, Thomas Ormston Cave Pease (1890–1974)46 wrote to Bristol Museum asking if it had ‘two mummy cases formerly at Cote Bank, Westbury-on-Trym’, which the correspondent thought ‘were presented to the museum many years ago’.47 The Director, Herbert Maxwell, could only reply that they had been ‘offered on loan in 1918’, but that it been decided not to accept ‘owing to lack of space’. This approach may be linked with the fact that Ormston Pease’s will failed to mention the Egyptian collection,48 although his son’s ignorance of the failure of the 1918 approach is odd, since the younger Pease had been involved in the earlier stages of that episode, while staying with his aunts at Almondsbury. *

*

*

Ormston Pease was not, however, the originator of the collection that now bears his name. He was one of the fifteen children of Thomas Pease (1816–1884), in Ormston’s case by his second wife, Martha Lucy Aggs (1825–1853), who had died on 8 November 1853, only five weeks after Ormston’s birth.49 The elder Pease had been born in Park Place, Leeds, on 31 January 1816, the only surviving son of Thomas Benson Pease (1782–1846), a wealthy Quaker stuff (i.e. woollen textile) merchant 50 and Martha Whitelock (c.1787–1828).   Thomas was educated at Darlington School, County Durham, and then joined the family firm to learn his trade. He married Lucy Fryer in 1842,51 and settled in the house in South Parade, Leeds, where he had been resident for a while prior to his 44

  In 1929 Bristol Corporation had decided to exercise its right to build a road (now Falcondale Road) through the grounds, and as a result the orphanage was moved 2 kilometres away, to ‘Sneed Park House’, in Stoke Bishop, in the summer of that year, where it finally closed in 1970. The former ‘Cote Bank’ was sold for £15,000 in early 1930 and was demolished soon afterwards. Details of the building’s history as the Bristol Nazareth House are contained in Sisters of Nazareth General Archive DE/1/1/2, 121, DC/1/3, 319–20, and FGG/1/4/1, 1–41. 45   Number 30 Downs Cote Park — well to the west of the site of the old house — was given the name ‘Cote Bank’. The site of the house itself is now occupied by 2–14 Downs Cote Park, BS9, with the eastern part of the garden covered by 138–150 Westbury Road, and the remainder under Falcondale Road and the streets directly south of it. 46   By then of Rusland House, Butcombe, Blagdon, Somerset. 47   Letter of 15 August 1939 to the Director of the Museum and Art Gallery. 48   Data supplied to Nick Dixon in 1985 by W. H. Scutt, then Assistant Keeper of Archaeology and Local History at Plymouth Museum. 49   ‘Martha Lucy Pease’, in Annual Monitor, or Obituary of the Members of the Society of Friends In Great Britain and Ireland NS 13 (1854), 116–31; S. A. Fry Pease, Account of the Life of Thomas Pease who died in January 1884. Written by His Widow for their Children (produced for private circulation, copy now in Leeds University Library, MS.369), 10. This latter booklet is a source of a number of the family details in the present paper; further data has been derived from decennial English census data. For the Peases, see also J. Foster, Pease of Darlington, with Notices of the Families of Robson, Backhouse, Dixon and Others, the Descendants of J. Pease (London, 1891), esp. 19–25, and E. H. Milligan, Biographical Dictionary of British Quakers in Commerce and Industry 1775–1920 (York, 2007), 331–2. 50   A cousin of Edward Pease (1767–1858), the railway promoter and patron of Robert Stephenson (ODNB, XLIII, 350–1), Thomas Benson Pease was a native of Darlington, who had come to Leeds in 1802, becoming the principal of the Leeds firm Aldam, Pease & Co. (later Aldam, Pease, Heaton & Co. and then Pease, Heaton & Co.). First elected to the town council in 1836, he became an alderman in 1841 and owned property at Sheepscar, north of the centre of Leeds. 51   Having previously been turned down by Jane Backhouse, cf. R. L. Brett (ed.), Barclay Fox’s Journal (London, 1979), 382.

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marriage; their elder daughter Katharine was born on 3 April 1843. However, later that year Lucy started to show signs of poor health, and although Lucy Ann was born on 15 May 1844, her mother died on 2 September.52 1814

Thomas Benson Pease = Martha Whitelock (1782–1846)

1842

(1786–1829)

1850

1856

Hannah Thomas Pease = Lucy Fryer = Martha Lucy Aggs = Susanna Ann Fry Susan (1817–1873) Louisa Ann (b. 1820) (1814–1886) (1816–1884) (1824–1853) (1829–1917) (1820–1844) Isabella (1818–1887) John Edward (1821–1822) Jane (b. 1822) 1888

Mary Gertrude (b. 1851) Margaret (b. 1852)

Thomas Henry Ormston Pease = Mary Ellis Cave (1853–1937)

(1868–1946)

Katharine Aldam (b. 1843) Lucy Anne (b. 1844) Eleanor Mary

Thomas Ormston Cave

Barbara Margaret

(b. 1889)

(b. 1890)

(b. 1891)

Edward Reynolds (1857–1955) Marian Fry (1859–1954) William Benson (b. 1862) Joseph Gerald (b. 1863) Robert Aldam (b. 1864) Anna Dorothea (b. 1865) Caroline Susan (1866–1908) Cyril Arthington (b. 1868) Oswald Allen (1871–1917)

Fig. 8. Summary family tree of the family of Thomas Pease. The more significant figures for the present paper are shown in bold.

  Having himself suffered from ‘hemorrhage from the lungs whilst in Ireland’ six months prior to Lucy’s death, Pease and his family had spent much of the intervening period in the south of England, and had been planning some time in Madeira when Lucy was struck down by her final illness.53 After her death, he spent the winter of 1845–6 in Egypt, described by his third wife, and widow, Susanna, as ‘quite an era in his life exciting a vivid interest in Egyptology and all that relates to that wonderful land which continued unabated through life’.54 She continues: ‘The climate suited him perfectly, he went up the Nile as far as the second cataract receiving impressions which were indelibly fixed in his memory and making the beginning of his valuable collection of antiquities’. While in Egypt, he turned down invitation to accompany George John Browne, 3rd Marquess of Sligo (1820–1896) on a trip to Palestine. Pease was in Germany on his way home when he received word of the sudden death of his father in Bradford on 24 May 1846. Thomas’ first visit to Egypt was over a decade after the Iyhat and Tairy coffins had arrived in Bristol: there can thus be no possibility of his having had any involvement with Garrard’s acquisition of the coffins in 1834 — at which time he was in any case still resident in Yorkshire.   Following his return, Pease removed to Chapel Allerton Hall, Leeds,55 which had been his father’s principal residence since 1826.56 He continued to prefer to winter either in the south of England or abroad, revisiting Lower Egypt (only) 57 in the winter of 1846–7, accompanied this time by two of his younger sisters, Susan and Louisa. 52

  ‘Lucy Pease’, Annual Monitor NS 3 (1844), 93–101.   Ibid., 97–8. 54   Pease, Account, 8. 55   On the corner of King George Avenue and Gledhow Lane, Chapel Allerton. 56   It had earlier been the residence of the botanist Richard Anthony Salisbury (1761–1829). 57   Pease, Account, 8. 53

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  The family’s definitive move to the south — and Bristol — came in the summer of 1852, when Thomas, who had in any case never felt particularly suited to the world of business,58 and his new wife, Martha, whom he had married in March 1850 at Winchmore Hill, London,59 took up residence in a rented Georgian mansion named ‘Henbury Hill’, in Westbury-on-Trym;60 they brought with them a young daughter, Mary Gertrude (b. 1851). Martha had been very ill during the months following the birth, and the move had been prompted by Pease’s view that the ‘climate of Yorkshire was not favourable to either of them’.61 That Thomas had connections with the city is shown by the fact that his daughter Lucy had been born at Clifton, in the west of the city. Two further children, Margaret (b. 1852) and Ormston, were born after the move to Bristol.   Following Martha Pease’s premature death, Thomas remarried again in April 1856;62 with Susanna Fry,63 he had a further ten children between 1857 and 1872: Edward Reynolds,64 Marian, Rosa, William Benson, Joseph Gerald, Robert, Anna, Caroline, Cyril, and Oswald. The family moved half a kilometre south to a new home, ‘Cote Bank’, in 1866, this time purchased by Thomas and enjoying magnificent views to the northwest over the Blaise Castle estate.65 Over a year was spent carrying out alterations and additions to the house,66 where the family was attended by a governess and eight servants.   Thomas Pease was heavily involved in various committees and groups in north Bristol, in particular those associated with the Quakers, including Sunday School teaching. He also served on his local Poor Law Board of Guardians, becoming ViceChairman, and funding a British School 67 in Westbury for some two decades. His wider interests in botany, geology, architecture, and archaeology found various outlets. A founder member of the Bristol Naturalists’ Society in 1862 (Vice-President 1864– 71), he had been elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of London on 1 February 1860,68 his supporters (proposers) being the renowned geologist Sir Charles Lyell 58

  ‘Thomas Pease’, Annual Monitor NS 43 (1884), 128.   Martha had been born in Bruce Grove, Tottenham, London. 60   Demolished in the 1930s, its site is now occupied by housing on and adjoining Northover and Westover Roads: see Winstone, Bristol’s Suburbs in the ’20/30’s (Bristol, 1977), figs 53–4. 61   Pease, Account, 10. Chapel Allerton Hall was later owned by Sir John Barran, Bart. (1821–1905) and his heirs; the house still stands, divided into flats. 62   At the Quaker meeting house in what is now Quakers’ Friars, in the Broadmead area of central Bristol. This building, incorporating parts of the remains of a thirteenth century friary, was used as the City Register Office from 1962 to 2006. 63   For whom, see ‘Susan. Ann Pease’, Annual Monitor 107–8 (1919–20), 221–9. 64   Co-founder of the socialist Fabian Society in 1883, and its Secretary, then Honorary Secretary, 1890–1938; he was also involved in setting up the London School of Economics and the Labour Party (ODNB, XLIII, 352–4). 65   Originally built for the apothecary William Broderip (c.1747–1826) around 1800, who had sold it in 1815. The owner directly prior to Pease was Thomas Hill, a Corn Street-based merchant trading with Russia (where he had been born, in St Petersburg, in 1794) and his family; they had been there since before 1841, by which year the house had been renamed ‘Cote Hill’. It became ‘Cote Bank’ again before 1851. For the house’s history and development prior to Pease’s purchase, see J. Russell, ‘Repton & the Rich Apothecary: New Light on Cote Bank’, Avon Gardens Trust Journal 1 (2006), 15–23; for a series of views of the house and its grounds in the early years of the twentieth century, see R. Winstone, Bristol’s Suburbs Long Ago (Bristol, 1985), figs 69–74. 66   For which see Russell, Avon Gardens Trust Journal 1, 19, 20. 67   A school founded under the auspices of the British and Foreign Schools Society, which promoted the establishment of a system of non-sectarian schools for the poor. These institutions were effectively superseded with the arrival of state education in 1870. 68   As Fellow number 1927. 59

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(1797–1875),69 Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807–1889), sculptor of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs,70 and the palaeontologist John William Salter (1820–1869) 71 — a list that indicates his standing in scholarly circles. He joined the Bristol Institution in the same year and became Joint Secretary of Finance of the Bristol Museum & Library Association in 1871, i.e. at the time of the move of the collections from the bottom to the top of Park Street.72   Following this move, the displays in the museum building had concentrated on geology and natural history, the antiquities collection being relegated, owing to a lack of space, to the attics, with the exception of at least some of the Egyptian material. This is known to have been displayed on the landing of the back staircase, but nothing is known as to exactly which objects were then exposed to view, nor when more space was made available for the antiquities in an 1877 extension. It is thus not possible to say whether or nor the inner coffins of Iyhat and Tairy were ever present in the new Museum building.   Thomas is recorded as a shareholder of Museum and Library Association (with 22 shares) through the 1870s. After his sudden death at the Quaker Meeting House — the place of his marriage — on 15 January 1884,73 his shares appear to have transferred

Fig. 9. Kingsweston Quaker Burial Ground with, inset, the grave-markers of Thomas and Susanna Pease (author). 69

  ODNB, XXXIV, 852–6.   ODNB, XXV, 907–8. 71   ODNB, XLVIII, 763–4. 72   Plans and papers relating to the construction of the new building were still in the hands of Thomas’s daughter Marian as late as 1949 (BCMAG HF 506). 73   He collapsed while actually speaking during a meeting: Annual Monitor NS 43, 134–5; he was buried at Kingsweston Quaker Burial Ground on 19 January, where his widow’s ashes would be interred alongside him over three decades later (see n. 42). 70

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to his widow, Susanna.74 Five shares were also held by his son Ormston, presumably purchased at the same time, since their numbers follow on directly from those held by Thomas. Other members of the family were also involved with the Museum over the years, making a number of donations.75   The Peases’ home at ‘Cote Bank’ was little more than half a kilometre from ‘The Larches’, Amelia Edwards’ house in Eastfield, also part of Westbury-on-Trym. Thomas’s widow remarks that ‘[h]is friendship with Miss Amelia B. Edwards was a great source of pleasure to him in the last few years of his life’.76 Unfortunately, no mention of him seems to survive amongst the Edwards papers,77 nor were any of the family apparently subscribers to the Egypt Exploration Fund.78   While there is thus a clear connection between the Pease family and the Bristol Museum going back to 1860, this is still twenty-five years on from the crucial 1834 Bristol Institution display, and does nothing to explain how the coffins found their way to ‘Cote Bank’. Given his deep interest in Egyptology 79 and his existing Egyptian collection, it is clearly Thomas Pease who is the crucial figure, rather than his son, on whom the collection ultimately devolved.80 In particular, in view of his 1871 position in the Museum and Library Association (presumably covering the ‘Museum’ side of its affairs), he must have been deeply involved in the move of objects the 300 metres up Park Street between the old and new buildings. Might it be that during this work the two coffins 81 were transferred to ‘Cote Bank’, perhaps to temporarily 74   Thomas Pease is replaced in the lists by ‘Mrs Pease’ from 1 January 1885 onwards. Curiously, Thomas continued to be listed in Wright’s Directory of Bristol as resident at ‘Cote Bank’ for two decades after his death, his widow only replacing him in 1905! 75   For example, Marian attempted (unsuccessfully) to donate a work by the Serbian sculptor Ivan Meštrović (1883–1962) in 1919. In December 1949, as she and her sister Rosa were moving from Almondsbury to Wraxhill Cottage, Street, Somerset (‘Harts’ was sold to Cyril Quantick in January 1950, who retained it until 1965; the house still exists), they donated a pair of buddhas to the Museum. A number of other items from their former home also went to the city’s Blaise Castle folk museum. Edward lent a collection of British Bronze Age and Roman material in 1893 (the year that the Museum was transferred to Bristol Corporation), which became a gift in 1921 (BCMAG HF 506 and 3189M). 76   Pease, Account, 17. 77   Personal communication from Brenda Moon, 29 May 2006; she is the author of the latest biography of Miss Edwards: More Usefully Employed: Amelia B. Edwards, Writer, Traveller and Campaigner for Ancient Egypt (London, 2006). On the other hand, that the Pease and Fry families were not unknown in Miss Edwards’ circle is shown by a record made on 6 December 1889 by her friend Kate Bradbury (WWWE 3, 181) during their visit to the USA. Speaking of their host, ‘a nice Quaker lady’ in Plainfield, New Jersey, Bradbury notes: ‘Foxes, Peases, Frys, &c. — she knows them all!’ (Moon, personal communication 2 June 2006). 78   Personal communication, Chris Naunton, 17 May 2006. 79   Susanna Pease remarks to his children: ‘He was much interested in archaeology and the mythologies of various nations which gave him the taste for collecting idols — and none of you will forget his knowledge of Egyptology’ (Account, 17). 80   Thomas’s will (dated 26 February 1883) does not mention his Egyptian material at all, which was presumably amongst the ‘household goods, chattels, furniture and effects whether for ornament or use (except Plate and Plated articles money and securities for money) as shall be in and about my residence for the time being at my decease’ bequeathed to Susanna, who also received ‘Cote Bank’ itself for life. Susanna’s will (dated 13 March 1914) is also unspecific, merely directing that her ‘furniture books pictures collections ornaments china silver and plated objects’ be distributed by her executors (Ormston, Edward, Marian, and Rosa) ‘at their discretion … among and to all the surviving children of [her] late husband and the husband or wife or eldest child of such children …’. It would thus appear that Ormston may have only acquired the collection on his mother’s death, although it is not impossible that it could have been given over at some point during Susanna’s lifetime. On the other hand, the fact that the principal items (at least) remained at ‘Cote Bank’ until 1919 would argue against this. 81   Although one might be tempted to wonder whether that the now-missing items from the 1834 Bristol Institution display (see n. 13) could have left at the same time, there is no trace of them in the Pease Collection. It has no stelae whatsoever, while the canopic material does not include a jar or lid resembling that recorded in 1834.

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ease the aforementioned space problems? Thomas’s unexpected death may then have obscured their true status, leaving both the family and the Museum authorities ignorant of the history of the coffins.   Unfortunately, no material seems to survive with any further bearing on the problem,82 although one wonders as to what may have lain behind Ormston’s insistence that the coffins should only be lent, rather than donated. Thus one can but present the facts as they are currently known, and hope that some data may yet come to light that will complete the tale of the coffins of Iyhat and Tairy. Appendix 1: the coffins of Iyhat

ä (var. dä ) and `‰ ; Iyhat’s paternal / à· à· Is ‰

Ñ∑"   son of s f/ Owner: ∏˙∑˘ sÑ à! p§ grandparents were sp∑˘ and Ê s. = Provenance: Thomas Garrard, 1834.

1a: the outer coffin of Iyhat

Number: Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery H629 (destroyed in 1957); face and front of headdress are probably now Ha5594.1 (q.v.). Dimensions and Description:83 Heavy wooden outer coffin … 7 ft high [213 cm] 27 inches [185 cm] wide. There are no figures on the coffin or lid. The head portion of the lid is covered with canvas and plaster, and painted with the usual striped headdress and deep collar. The remainder of the lid & coffin has been painted, perhaps in yellow. The inscription on the lid is in three columns down the middle of the front, in blue hieroglyphs, with red or blue border lines. The total width of the 3 columns is 8 inches [20 cm], the middle one being about 3½ in [9 cm].   The face is 8 inches [20.3 cm] long. There was a beard. The inscription on the body of the coffin is a band from head to foot, along the middle of each side, from 3 to 4 inches [7.5 to 10 cm] wide; in blue hieroglyphs & red lines.   Either this coffin, or the outer coffin of Tairy, contained on the floor of its trough ‘a female figure in profile’.84 This will presumably have been an image of either Nut or the Goddess of the West, which is common inside outer coffins of the Twentyfifth/Twenty-sixth Dynasty.85 82

  Nothing apparently survives at the Museum, while Susanna Pease’s Account, while fairly detailed about Thomas’s life before they married, is frustratingly vague about the events after it. While referring to his many interests, nothing is mentioned of his related activities, other than a few of those concerning religion and charity, and oblique mentions of a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Aberdeen in 1857 and a ‘Conference at the Hague’ soon before his death. 83   The italicized text is taken directly from Stanton’s 1935 record of the coffin (see p. 115 above), reproduced courtesy Bristol’s City Museums & Archives, with the present writer’s interpolations in square brackets and Roman. 84   See p. 109 above, and Addendum, pp. 137–8 below. 85   J. H. Taylor, ‘Theban Coffins from the Twenty-second to the Twenty-sixth Dynasty’, in N. Strudwick and J. H. Taylor (eds), The Theban Necropolis: Past, Present and Future (London, 2003), 117.