Same Gods, Different Fates: What Two 25th Dynasty Coffins Reveal About Social Rank in Theban Society

 by Mary Harrsch © 2026

They lived within a generation of each other, both men of the Theban elite, both buried during the remarkable century when Nubian kings from the kingdom of Kush ruled Egypt and made themselves the most ardent guardians of its classical past. Yet the coffins that housed Horankh and Padikhonsu on their journeys to the afterlife tell quietly different stories — not just about two individuals, but about the spectrum of Egyptian social reality beneath the grand archaizing program of the 25th Dynasty.

Horankh's coffin,that I photographed at the Dallas Museum of Art, is the more ambitious object. Fully anthropoid — sculpted to follow the contours of the mummy within — it presents a face rendered in the deliberate green of Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, with inlaid obsidian and calcite eyes that would allow the deceased's ba to witness the sunrise and participate in the solar cycle of regeneration. The plaited, upturned beard marks him not as a living man but as one already transformed into a divine being. The outer surface is restrained, almost austere — a conscious echo of Middle Kingdom models that the Kushite pharaohs promoted as the benchmark of theological and artistic purity. This was not poverty of decoration but a sophisticated visual argument: that Horankh, and the dynasty that shaped his world, stood in legitimate continuity with Egypt's greatest past. Technical documentation of the coffin, formerly available through the Michael C. Carlos Museum's Odyssey Online resource, recorded that it was built from native Egyptian wood with gaps between planks filled with mud — a practical solution rather than the imported Lebanese cedar used in the finest contemporary burials — though the bronze fittings, almost certainly imported, reflect a selective investment in prestige materials carrying both structural and symbolic weight. That Horankh could afford what was almost certainly a multi-coffin assemblage — with inner cases and possibly a cartonnage mummy board, each carrying its own protective imagery closer to the body — places him firmly among the elite, even if the construction of his outer coffin suggests he did not command its highest resources.

Coffin of a middle elite individual serving the 25th dynasty named Horankh photographed at the Dallas Museum of Art by Mary Harrsch.

Horankh himself remains somewhat enigmatic. The inscriptions on the base of his coffin give us his name and an invocation to Osiris, but no title or professional designation has been recorded — leaving his precise social role unresolved. The Osirian invocation might tempt an inference toward priestly connections, since devotion to Osiris was particularly intense among the Theban priesthood of the period. But Osirian funerary formulae were standard across the elite regardless of profession by the Late Period, and the formula alone cannot establish a priestly identity. Men at Horankh's apparent social level could equally have been mid-ranking priests, temple administrators, scribes, or civil officials — categories that were not always sharply separated in any case, since many administrative roles carried priestly dimensions. The coffin tells us where he stood in the social hierarchy with reasonable clarity; what he did within it remains an enigma.

Padikhonsu's coffin, excavated by Sir Robert Mond in 1905–1906 from a pit in the courtyard of the Theban tomb of User (TT 21) at el-Qurna and now in the Royal Ontario Museum, is also fully anthropoid, its surface carrying an ambitious painted program of figural registers, hieroglyphic text columns, and divine imagery running the full length of the body. The face is painted in the conventional red-brown flesh tone of Egyptian men rather than the theologically loaded green of Horankh — conventional portraiture rather than divine transformation. A broad painted collar evokes the wesekh necklace; a chaplet of water-lily petals encircles the crown.

Coffin of Padikhonsu, a lower ranked individual serving the 25th dynasty in Thebes. Image courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum

Padikhonsu's coffin represents what scholars identify as the lower elite of Thebes — a social stratum that in the 25th Dynasty typically encompassed junior temple personnel such as wab priests (the most junior priestly rank, concerned primarily with ritual purity), chantresses and singers of Amun, minor scribes serving temple or state bureaucracies, and administrators of the considerable agricultural estates attached to Karnak's vast temple complex. Thebes was a city whose economic and social life orbited almost entirely around the cult of Amun-Re, and its temple employed a large staff across many ranks — the lower tiers of which represent exactly the social world Padikhonsu's burial suggests. It is even possible he worked within the Theban funerary industry itself, since coffin makers, embalmers, and necropolis workers formed hereditary occupational communities that fell at precisely this social level. Whatever his profession, his coffin tells us he was a man for whom a proper burial was achievable but whose resources did not extend to the multi-coffin assemblage that a man like Horankh could command — nor to commissioning the workshop's most skilled painters. The figural work, while iconographically complete, shows the simplified, somewhat hurried execution consistent with a lower-tier commission: divine figures rendered competently but without the crisp elegance of premium work, hieroglyphic columns that fulfill their ritual function without flourish.

Both coffins, in their different ways, participate in the Kushite archaizing program — each echoing Middle Kingdom conventions, each placing the deceased within the protective framework of Osirian theology. But their differences remind us that archaism was not a monolithic aesthetic handed down uniformly from above. It was a flexible visual language, adapted to circumstance, filtered through workshop traditions, and shaped by the economic realities of individual lives. The solemn green face of Horankh and the conventional red face of Padikhonsu are both products of the same dynasty, the same theological moment, the same Theban cultural world — and yet they speak, across twenty-seven centuries, of two men for whom the same gods, the same rituals, and the same funerary language could not quite conceal what the wood beneath the paint and the number of coffins revealed about the social distance between them.

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Mortuary Practice and Iconography in Mimbres Mogollon Pottery (c. 1000-1150 CE)

by Mary Harrsch © 2026

I've been watching the Great Courses lecture series "Ancient Civilizations of North America" presented by Dr. Edwin Barnhart. In it he discusses the achievements of the Mogollon culture of the North American southwest including the development of their distinctive black and white pottery found on the heads or covering the faces of their dead.

I photographed all of these Mimbres bowls, dated between 1000-1130 CE, at the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas.

The bowls shown here belong to the Mimbres branch of the Mogollon culture (Hegmon and Nelson 2002, 2010). Produced in the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico between roughly 1000 and 1130 CE (Hegmon 2002; LeBlanc 1983) , these vessels are notable both for their refined geometric framing and for a varied repertoire of figural imagery, including rabbits, fish, turkeys, bighorn sheep, and human forms rendered with remarkable economy of line.

A defining feature of several bowls in this group is the presence of a deliberately punched perforation in the vessel's interior, commonly referred to as a "kill hole" (Robbins and Westmoreland 1991, 66; Hegmon et al. 2021, 28) . These holes were created through intentional, controlled breakage after the vessel's painted decoration was completed, and they appear with notable frequency on bowls recovered from burial contexts. Excavations at Mimbres sites have documented a consistent mortuary pattern in which such bowls were inverted and placed over the head or face of the deceased prior to interment (Shafer 1982, 2003; LeBlanc 1983) , typically within burial pits beneath the floors of residential rooms, reflecting the broader Southwestern practice of incorporating the dead into domestic space.

Examination of use-wear on recovered vessels has added a further dimension to this picture. Scrape marks and other wear patterns consistent with domestic use have been identified on the interior surfaces of some bowls subsequently placed in burials (Bray 1982; Lyle 1996; cited in Huston 2012, 17-18) , suggesting that these vessels were not produced solely for mortuary purposes but had served in household contexts, likely for food preparation or serving, prior to their incorporation into funerary ritual. This indicates that at least some bowls underwent a transformation in status, moving from everyday utilitarian objects into ritually significant items at the time of an individual's death, rather than being manufactured exclusively as grave goods. Such a pattern would suggest that the mortuary use of these vessels involved the repurposing of objects already embedded in the life of the household, potentially carrying personal or biographical associations with the deceased or their family.

The interpretive significance of the kill hole remains a subject of ongoing discussion among Southwestern archaeologists (Hegmon et al. 2021, 25-28) . Proposed explanations include the ritual "killing" or decommissioning of the vessel, thereby removing it from the realm of everyday use and marking its transition into a mortuary object; the symbolic release of a spirit, whether that of the vessel itself or of the deceased; and the physical termination of the bowl's "life cycle" as part of a broader Mimbres conceptual framework linking objects, individuals, and cosmological cycles. The evidence of prior domestic use lends some support to interpretations centered on biographical transformation and decommissioning, since these bowls appear to have had functional lives before their ritual repurposing, though these interpretations are not mutually exclusive, and the practice likely carried multiple, layered meanings that may have varied across communities and over time.

The practice invites comparison with object "killing" rituals documented in mortuary traditions across the world, including the deliberate bending or destruction of swords, helmets, and other weapons placed in graves in ancient Greek and broader Iron Age European contexts (Brody 2004, 2011; LeBlanc 1983) . While no historical connection exists between these traditions, the recurrence of such practices across unrelated societies suggests a broadly shared mortuary logic: that objects closely associated with an individual may need to be ritually decommissioned, removed from circulation among the living, or otherwise transformed at the point of burial. The specific mechanisms differ considerably, and some Mimbres specialists have questioned whether the term "kill hole" itself imports interpretive assumptions that may not align with Mimbres conceptual frameworks. Nonetheless, the cross-cultural recurrence of object destruction in funerary contexts points to a recurring concern in human mortuary practice more generally: the management of an object's relationship to its owner after death.

The figural imagery on these bowls offers further avenues for interpretation, though caution is warranted in moving from iconography to meaning. The geometric scroll and stepped-frame motifs that often encircle or border figural scenes have been read by some scholars as referencing migration narratives, directional symbolism, or cosmological structuring principles (Brody 2005; Hegmon 2002; Robbins and Westmoreland 1991, 67-70; Huston 2012, 73-78) , though such readings remain provisional. Bowls depicting human figures in unusual postures, including the tumbling or inverted forms seen on some examples, have prompted suggestions that these may represent supernatural beings, ancestral figures, or imagery specifically tied to themes of death and transformation, rather than depictions of ordinary lived experience.

The specific placement of these bowls over the head or face of the deceased has also prompted interpretive discussion, though this aspect of the practice remains less thoroughly addressed than the kill hole itself. Some scholars have suggested that this placement reflects the particular ritual significance of the head as a locus of identity, breath, or vital essence, drawing on patterns documented among later Puebloan peoples, who are generally understood to be culturally related to Mimbres populations (Brody 2004; Hegmon 2002; Huston 2012) . Under this reading, the inverted bowl may have functioned as an enclosure or boundary at an especially significant point of the body, with its painted interior, often featuring geometric framing devices that have been read as cosmological or directional in character, oriented toward the deceased rather than toward living viewers. The sequence of inversion, placement, and perforation has further been interpreted as a coherent ritual action, in which the enclosure created by the bowl was subsequently opened through the kill hole, potentially in connection with ideas about the release of breath or spirit at the site of the head. These interpretations rely substantially on ethnographic analogy with later and partly distinct Puebloan communities, a methodological approach, sometimes termed the direct historical approach, that is widely used but also debated in Southwestern archaeology, since it involves projecting documented practices backward onto earlier populations whose own symbolic frameworks cannot be directly accessed. The specific significance of head and face placement in Mimbres mortuary practice should therefore be regarded as plausible but inferential.

Pottery production itself was a labor-intensive process, generally attributed to Mimbres women, involving coil-and-scrape construction, application of mineral or organic paints with fine yucca-fiber brushes, and firing in a reducing (oxygen-restricted) atmosphere to produce the characteristic black-on-white surface (Brody 2005; Hegmon 2002; LeBlanc 1983) . The skill evident in these vessels, both in the painted compositions and in the technical control required to produce them, underscores their importance not merely as utilitarian objects but as significant cultural and ritual artifacts.

Bibliography

Brody, J. J. 2004. Mimbres Painted Pottery in the Modern World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Brody, J. J. 2005. "Mimbres Painted Pottery: Meaning and Content." In The Archaeology of the Mimbres Region, edited by M. Hegmon, 45-62. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Bray, A. 1982. "Mimbres Black-on-White: A Ceramic Analysis." Master's thesis, University of Texas at Austin.

Hegmon, Michelle. 2002. "Recent Issues in the Archaeology of the Mimbres Region of the North American Southwest." Journal of Archaeological Research 10 (4): 307-357.

Hegmon, Michelle, and Margaret Nelson. 2010. "The Archaeology and Meaning of Mimbres." Archaeology Southwest Magazine 17 (4). Tucson: Archaeology Southwest.

Hegmon, Michelle, Will G. Russell, Kendall Baller, Matthew A. Peeples, and Sarah Striker. 2021. "The Social Significance of Mimbres Painted Pottery in the U.S. Southwest." American Antiquity 86 (1): 23-42.

Huston, Melyssa. 2012. "Metanarrative and Material Culture: A Visual Analysis of Mimbres Pottery and Jornada Rock Art." Master's thesis, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

LeBlanc, Steven A. 1983. The Mimbres People: Ancient Pueblo Painters of the American Southwest. London: Thames and Hudson.

Lyle, L. 1996. "Use-Wear Analysis of Mimbres Classic Black-on-White Bowls from the NAN Ranch Ruin." Paper presented at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, New Orleans.

Robbins, R. Robert, and Russell B. Westmoreland. 1991. "Astronomical Imagery and Numbers in Mimbres Pottery." The Astronomy Quarterly 8: 65-88.

Shafer, Harry J. 1982. "Classic Mimbres Phase Households and Room Use Patterns." KIVA 76 (2): 201-221.

Shafer, Harry J. 2003. Mimbres Archaeology at the NAN Ranch Ruin. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

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