Identification
Title Coffin of Heny
Type Astronomical Representation
EAT3 Number and Name 1 Heny
EAT3 Pages and Plates 8-10, Fig 1
EAT3 Decan List Family ?
Publications Wainwright and Gunn (1926)Gunn (1926); Pogo (1932b); Willems (1988); Lapp (1993); Zitman (2010)
Location Interior of coffin S1X from the Asyut necropolis, outside Tomb I; the coffin is now lost
Date Dynasty 12
Content
Registers The content occurs in two places:  the interior of the coffin lid (northern constellations and attendant deities) and the inside of the left wall of the coffin (decanal deities in the upper register, presumably below their decan names, unidentified content in the middle register, and numbers of stars in the lower register.
Circumpolar Group and Deities Yes, traces and labels for the circumpolar group.  Columns for at least 9 attendant deitiy labels behind hippo; and 7 opposite.
Planets None preserved
Decan Names Only traces preserved
Decanal Stars Yes, but their numbers were not recorded by Gunn
Personifications of the Decans Unknown
Cluster Numbers Unknown
Depictions of Decanal Constellations Unknown
Decanal Deity Names Yes
Decanal Deity Figures Unknown
Lunar Months Unknown
Civil Months Unknown
Nut Unknown
Notes

This is the earliest known astronomical diagram in Egypt from the archaeological record, although it does not survive to the present.  Coffin fragments were found by Wainwright in 1922 in front of the tomb of +fA=i-Hapi I, in a burial inscribed for a steward named @ny (Zitman, 2010, p. 68).  Wainwright believed the burial to date to dynasty 11 (Wainwright and Gunn, 1926) but this is not now considered secure (Zitman, 2010, p. 339).  Zitman himself places it in the early part or middle of dynasty 12 (Zitman, 2010, p. 343).  One of the coffins, designated S1X, was decorated internally with an astronomical representation, of which only a sliver remained.  Gunn describes some of the astronomical content as occuring on inside of the lid and other on "part of the left side of a coffin" (Gunn, 1926, pp. 166 and 169). 

Schematic & Decan List

Too little remains to create a schematic of what must have been a very unusual arrangement of astronomical material in this coffin.  The remaining traces of decans and deity name were recorded by Gunn thus (Gunn, 1926, pp. 169),

 

01Heny decans

 

and the fragment of lid thus (Gunn, 1926, Plate).

01Heny cpg