Takabuti’s Coffin - Dr John Taylor
Channel: Takabuti Seminar
Date: 11/05/2021

The mummy of Takabuti is one of the best-known antiquities in the Ulster Museum, Belfast. Takabuti was a young woman who lived in Egypt during a tumultuous period, around 600 BC. Her mummy was unwrapped and investigated in Belfast in 1835. The results of the Takabuti Project (2007-2009 and 2018-2020) have culminated in the publication of a new book – The Life and Times of Takabuti in Ancient Egypt: Investigating the Belfast Mummy (available from Liverpool University Press - https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/54509/)
The project has demonstrated how researchers act as ‘forensic detectives’ piecing together a picture of the life and times of Takabuti. Questions addressed include – Who was Takabuti? When did she live? Where did she come from and where did she reside? What did she eat, and did she suffer from any diseases? Did she suffer a violent death, and how was she mummified and prepared for burial?
This video was part of a one-day online seminar to launch the book and bring the project to the public.

Dr John Taylor obtained his PhD from the University of Birmingham with a study of the stylistic evolution of Egyptian coffins of the Third Intermediate Period. Since 1988 he has worked in the Department of Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum, where his specialist interests have focused on funerary antiquities, mummification, bronze statuary and the history of Egyptology. He has participated in excavations at el-Amarna, Luxor and Hierakonpolis, and has curated a number of major exhibitions, including ‘Journey through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and Ancient Lives’, which presented the results of an extensive study of mummies using CT scanning. He has published numerous books and articles, and is currently working on a catalogue of coffins of the 22nd-24th Dynasties in the British Museum.