COFFIN, the chest in which dead bodies are interred.

The sepulchral honours paid to the manes of departed friends in ancient times demand attention, and are extremely curious. Their being put into a coffin was considered as a mark of the highest distinction. With us, however, the poorest people are provided with coffins; for, if the relations cannot afford them, the parish is at the expense. On the contrary, in the East, coffins are not made use of; Turks and Christians, as Thevenot assures us, agreeing in this. The ancient Jews seem to have buried their dead in the same manner; neither was the body of our Lord, it should seem, put into a coffin; nor that of Elisha (2d Kings, xiii. 21), whose bones were touched by the corpse that was let down a little after into his sepulchre. However, all agree that coffins were anciently made use of in Egypt; and antique coffins of stone and sycamore wood are still to be seen in that country, not to mention those said to have been made of a kind of pasteboard, formed by folding or gluing together many folds of cloth curiously plastered, and then painted with hieroglyphics. The sacred historian expressly observes of Joseph, that he was not only embalmed, but put into a coffin too, both of which were in use among the Egyptians.

Bishop Patrick, in his commentary on the passage just referred to, takes notice of these Egyptian coffins of sycamore wood and of pasteboard; but he does not mention the contrary usage in the neighbouring countries, which was requisite in order fully to illustrate the text; though even this, perhaps, would not have conveyed the whole idea of the sacred author. Maillet apprehends that all were not inclosed in coffins who were laid in the Egyptian repositories of the dead, but that it was an honour appropriated to persons of consideration; for after having given an account of several niches found in those chambers of death, he adds, “But it must not be imagined that the bodies deposited in these gloomy apartments were all inclosed in chests and placed in niches. The greatest part were simply embalmed and swathed after that manner which every one hath some notion of; after which they laid them one by the side of another without any ceremony. Some were even laid in these tombs without any embalming at all, or such a slight one that there remains nothing of them in the linen in which they were wrapped but the bones, and these half rotten. It is probable that each considerable family had one of these burial places to themselves; that the niches were designed for the bodies of the heads of the families; and that those of their domestics or slaves had no other care taken of them than the laying them on the ground, after having them embalmed, or even without that, which undoubtedly was also all that was done even to the heads of families of less distinction.” After this he gives an account of a mode of burial practised anciently in that country, which consisted in placing the bodies, after they had been swathed, upon a layer of charcoal, and covering them with a mat, under a depth of sand of seven or eight feet.

That coffins then were not universally used in Egypt, is evident from these accounts; and probably none but persons of distinction were buried in them. It is also reasonable to believe, that in times so remote as those of Joseph they might be much less common than afterwards; and consequently, that Joseph’s being put in a coffin in Egypt might be mentioned with a design to express the great honours which the Egyptians showed him at his death, being interred after the most sumptuous manner in use among that people. Agreeably to this, the Septuagint version, which was made for Egyptians, seems to represent coffins as a mark of distinction.

It is no objection to this account, that the widow of Nain’s son is represented as carried forth to be buried in a d’ogo¢, or bier; for the inhabitants of the Levant, who are well known to lay their dead bodies in the earth uninclosed, frequently carry them out to burial in a kind of coffin. Hence Dr Russell describes the bier used for the Turks at Aleppo as a kind of coffin much in the form of ours, only that the lid rises with a ledge in the middle. Christians, indeed, as he tells us, are carried to the grave on an open bier; but as the most common kind of bier resembles our coffins, that used by the people of Nain might possibly be of the same kind; in which case the word ¢ogos was very proper.