The gate of the year

Corn-mummy from Tihna el-Gebel, datable to the Ptolemaic Period (about 330-30 B.C.), now in the British Museum. The sarcophagus lid represents the god Sokar, a god related to the Memphis necropolis, usually depicted as a mummy with a falcon head, while the mummy in the interior reproduces the features of the God of the dead, Osiris.
The “corn-mummies” were small mummies made with a mixture of clay, sand and grains of corn, modelled in human shape and wrapped in layers of bandages, then put into small wooden sarcophaguses, which generally had the shape of the falcon-god Sokar. Such mummies were fashioned during the annual rituals in honour of Osiris and expressed the Egyptian conception according to which the grain was a living being, impersonating the correlation between death and regeneration. A strict relationship was indeed postulated between the periodic vicissitude of the cereal plant, growing in the fields, harvested and sowed again into the soil, which reappeared again as new sprout, and the cycle of existence embodied by Osiris, the God of the dead, in which the dead constituted a repository of vital energies from which the generative and fertilizing powers sprang forth.

[Image: http://www.ancient-egypt.co.uk/british%20museum/pages/BM,%20Nov-2007%20377.htm]




World of the Dead

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Corn-mummy from Tihna el-Gebel, datable to the Ptolemaic Period (about 330-30 B.C.), now in the British Museum. The sarcophagus lid represents the god Sokar, a god related to the Memphis necropolis, usually depicted as a mummy with a falcon head, while the mummy in the interior reproduces the features of the God of the dead, Osiris. The “corn-mummies” were small mummies made with a mixture of clay, sand and grains of corn, modelled in human shape and wrapped in layers of bandages, then put into small wooden sarcophaguses, which generally had the shape of the falcon-god Sokar. Such mummies were fashioned during the annual rituals in honour of Osiris and expressed the Egyptian conception according to which the grain was a living being, impersonating the correlation between death and regeneration. A strict relationship was indeed postulated between the periodic vicissitude of the cereal plant, growing in the fields, harvested and sowed again into the soil, which reappeared again as new sprout, and the cycle of existence embodied by Osiris, the God of the dead, in which the dead constituted a repository of vital energies from which the generative and fertilizing powers sprang forth. [Image: http://www.ancient-egypt.co.uk/british%20museum/pages/BM,%20Nov-2007%20377.htm]