Abstract
One of the main episodes of the Osirian myth is the infamous assault of Seth on his brother Osiris. Their father, the god Geb, took all the precautions to protect the body of his murdered son from any future attack by Seth. A well-protected building housed the dead body, where Geb appointed powerful guards to protect the body of Osiris. Fortunately, few coffins from the Middle Kingdom (2055–1650 BC) preserved for us a strikingly interesting record of these apotropaic beings both in word and image. The standard publication of the Coffin Texts gathered the names of these guardians in two spells with numbers 1076 and 1077. Yet, lack of sufficient documentation and predominant textual bias in previous studies caused a great deal of confusion regarding these guardians as far as their number and visual representation are concerned. This contribution addresses these formal issues and analyzes the arrangement of the names and depictions of the guardians in these coffins. The close scrutiny revealed some hitherto undocumented features in the original sources.
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