Renpit Nefert Comments

One of my favourite places here in my home town of Adelaide is the South Australian Museum and one of the museum’s most interesting rooms is the Ancient Egypt gallery, a room that I have visited countless times, I can tell you. One of the most beautiful and valuable of the museum’s possessions is the coffin and mummy of a woman called Renpit Nefert. She was bought by the museum in the 1890’s and judging from the style of her gorgeously painted coffin, she lived during the late Ptolemaic Period, (c.100 –30 BC) so she may have been a contemporary of Cleopatra. It is not known exactly where in Egypt Renpit Nefert was found as records were rarely kept in the 19th century and no other biographical details about her are revealed by the texts on her coffin which are, as tradition dictated, of a standard religious nature. But due to recent work on her by the museum, it has been revealed that she is well preserved and died in her late teens or early twenties and, judging by the quality of her coffin, her family were at least wealthy enough to afford to have her buried in style. She may well have been married and a mother, but we well never know. Her name means ‘Beautiful Year’.
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