The inscribed objects found in or associated with the burial chambers of
Middle Kingdom officials and other individuals provide an important
addition to our understanding and appreciation of ancient Egyptian
funerary culture. These include the coffins and sarcophagi as well as
canopic chests and jars, mummy masks, ivory wands, miniature coffins,
and shawabtis. This volume incorporates all such inscribed material
associated with more than one hundred burial chambers and graves found
at Lisht North and Lisht South, two sites excavated by the Egyptian
Expedition of The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1907 until 1934 and
from 1984 to 1991. Two kings, several members of the royal family, and
many elite persons, as well as a community of middle-class people found
their resting place in and around the royal pyramids at Lisht, which
served as the principal cemetery for Egypt's capital during the Middle
Kingdom (ca. 2030-1650 B.C.). The material in the corpus published here
represents a sequence of seven chronological phases at Lisht that range
from the reigns of the kings Amenemhat I and Senwosret I through the
late Dynasty XIII and the Second Intermediate Period. The inscribed
texts presented in this corpus are transliterated and translated, and
are accompanied by extensive drawings that meticulously detail these
texts, as well as annotations to some previously published material. The
lavishly illustrated volume includes heretofore unpublished photographs
from the Department of Egyptian Art's archives. Each object described in
Inscriptions from Lisht has been assigned a code referring to the
primary individual associated with it, and its description includes
transliterations of the deceased's name(s) and title(s). Because the
location of an inscription on a coffin or sarcophagus is usually
significant and because some of these include multiple texts, the author
has designed a system of references that reflects the location on the
object. Further, the catalogue of objects draws on Museum archives and
also provides information concerning the findspot and current location
of the object as well as relevant archival material and bibliography.
