Burying the Body of Joseph, illustration from the 1890 Holman Bible (colorized)
Our Mummified Patriarchs: Jacob and Joseph
How was ancient mummification carried out? What does it say about Jacob and Joseph that their remains were handled in accordance with Egyptian burial practices?
Published: January 10, 2017
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
The climate and environment of the desert cliffs beyond the Nile River valley also assisted with preservation.
See discussion in David P. Silverman, Ancient Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2003), 123.
Editor’s note: For a discussion of Ma’at in the context of kingship, see Jan Assmann, “Pharaoh’s Divine Role in Maintaining Ma’at (Order),” TheTorah (2016).
Among royalty, burial location was an important signifier. The head of a new dynasty sometimes chose to initiate a new royal necropolis to communicate the strength of his regime, but after a transition in power, the monarch might return to an older site to establish a link with the past. The point was that the new ruler and dynasty were the direct inheritors of bygone well-regarded predecessors.
Although this narrative comes to us via Plutarch in the first century CE, allusions and oblique references to the Osiris-Horus relationship are evident much earlier.
Another important figure in Egyptian theology, the creator god Ptah of Memphis, takes on some Osirian imagery: he is also depicted as a mummy, and was a patron of artisans and makers.
The story has often been compared to that of Moses and his father-in-law, Reuel/Jethro. The story is available in English in most anthologies of Egyptian literature.
R. B. Parkinson, The Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian Poems, 1940-1640 BC (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 36.
Ibid.
Also, the dearth of surviving evidence necessitates that Egyptologists pick and choose the examples that work regardless of provenance.
At the same time, national borders were more permeable in the second millennium than widely believed. An international style in arts, and especially in luxury goods, spanned Egypt proper and its occasional occupied territories in the Levant. This international production is evident in mummy assemblages, too. Near Eastern trinkets appear in the intact royal necropolis at Tanis and in the better-known tomb of Tutankhamun. And Egyptianizing anthropoid coffins were common among the Phoenicians and around ancient Palestine.
