Coffin and Sarcophagus

About Coffin and Sarcophagus

The coffin and the sarcophagus are the containers that held the mummified body in ancient Egyptian burial, ranging from plain wooden boxes to the nested solid-gold inner coffin of Tutankhamun. In Egyptological usage the two terms are distinguished by material: a coffin (Egyptian wt or qrsw) is the inner container, usually of wood or cartonnage, that directly enclosed the body, while a sarcophagus is the outer container, typically of stone — granite, limestone, basalt, or alabaster — within which one or more coffins were placed. The word sarcophagus derives from Greek sarkophagos, 'flesh-eater,' a Greek term for a kind of limestone believed to consume the body; the Egyptian conception was the opposite, for the container was meant to preserve and protect the body, not destroy it.

The form of the coffin evolved across Egyptian history. In the Old Kingdom (c. 2686-2181 BCE) the standard coffin was a rectangular wooden box, sometimes with a vaulted lid imitating a shrine, oriented so the body lay on its side facing east toward the rising sun, with a pair of painted eyes on the exterior allowing the deceased to look out. The Middle Kingdom (c. 2055-1650 BCE) elaborated the rectangular coffin with columns of funerary spells — the Coffin Texts take their name from this practice — and protective friezes of objects and deities painted inside. From the late Middle Kingdom onward the anthropoid (human-shaped) coffin appeared, molded to the form of a mummiform body and identifying the deceased with the resurrected Osiris. By the New Kingdom the anthropoid coffin, often nested in sets of two or three within an outer stone sarcophagus, had become the dominant type.

The coffin was not mere packaging but a ritual machine for rebirth. Its surfaces carried the spells, images, and divine figures that protected the body and assisted the deceased's transformation into an effective spirit. The four sons of Horus guarded the body's integrity; the sky-goddess Nut was painted on the underside of the lid, arching over the dead as she arches over the cosmos, so that the deceased lay within her body awaiting rebirth; Isis and Nephthys were figured at the head and foot as mourners and protectors, repeating their watch over the dead Osiris. The anthropoid form itself made the coffin an image of the deceased as Osiris, the god who first conquered death.

Royal sarcophagi were among the most ambitious objects Egyptian craftsmen produced. The granite sarcophagus in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid, the carved-and-painted stone sarcophagi of the New Kingdom Valley of the Kings, and the translucent alabaster sarcophagus of Seti I (now in Sir John Soane's Museum, London, covered with the text of the Book of Gates) represent the highest achievement of the tradition. Tutankhamun's burial (KV62, c. 1325 BCE) preserves the fullest surviving royal assemblage: a quartzite sarcophagus containing three nested anthropoid coffins, the innermost of solid gold weighing over 110 kilograms. John H. Taylor's Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt (2001) is the standard overview of the development and meaning of Egyptian coffins.

The Story

The coffin's story is the story of how Egyptians enclosed the dead to make rebirth possible, and that story is told through the developing form of the container itself and through the myth it was designed to enact. From the earliest dynasties the central problem of Egyptian burial was the preservation and protection of the body, on which the survival of the soul-components depended. The coffin was the innermost line of that protection, and over three thousand years it grew from a simple box into an elaborate theological statement.

In the Old Kingdom the dead were laid on their left side in rectangular wooden coffins, facing the pair of wedjat-eyes painted on the eastern long side, through which the deceased could watch the rising sun and receive offerings at the tomb's false door. The coffin was conceived as the 'house' of the dead, sometimes given a palace-façade exterior, a dwelling for the body within the larger house of the tomb. The Pyramid Texts, carved on the burial-chamber walls of royal pyramids, served the king's coffin-house with the spells of ascension, the earliest sustained mortuary literature.

The Middle Kingdom transformed the coffin into a written and pictured cosmos. The interior surfaces of the rectangular wooden coffin were covered with columns of Coffin Texts — over a thousand spells, descended from the Pyramid Texts but extended to non-royal owners — and with the 'object frieze,' painted rows of the equipment the deceased would need: crowns, sceptres, jewelry, vessels, weapons, and amulets, depicted so that their magical reality would be available in the afterlife. On the floor of some coffins was painted the Book of Two Ways, a map of the routes through the underworld, making the coffin a guidebook as well as a container. The deceased lay within a painted universe, surrounded by the spells and equipment of rebirth.

The rise of the anthropoid coffin marked a theological shift. Molded to the shape of a wrapped, mummiform body with a sculpted face, crossed arms, and a tripartite wig, the human-shaped coffin made the container an image of the deceased identified with Osiris, the god whose body was reassembled and who rose to rule the dead. To lie in an anthropoid coffin was to be figured as Osiris triumphant over death. The face on the lid gave the deceased a permanent countenance, much as the separate mummy-mask did, ensuring that the soul could recognize and reinhabit its body.

By the New Kingdom the developed royal burial nested several anthropoid coffins inside one another and set them within a great stone sarcophagus. The arrangement multiplied the layers of protection and the surfaces available for protective imagery. On the stone sarcophagi of the Valley of the Kings the long compositions of the afterlife — the Amduat, the Book of Gates, the Book of the Earth — were carved across the walls, so that the king's container reproduced the nocturnal journey of the sun through the underworld and the king's place within it. The sky-goddess Nut spread across the lid's interior, the deceased enclosed within her body as the sun is each night, awaiting the dawn of rebirth.

The protective program of the coffin drew the major funerary deities into a fixed scheme. The four sons of Horus — Imsety, Hapy, Duamutef, and Qebehsenuef — guarded the four sides and the embalmed organs; Isis and Nephthys knelt at foot and head, the mourning sisters who had watched over Osiris; Anubis, the embalmer, presided over the body's preservation; the goddess Nut received the dead into her body. The texts inscribed on the coffin spoke in the voices of these gods, promising protection and rebirth. The container thus reenacted, around every individual dead person, the mythological events by which Osiris had been mourned, protected, reassembled, and raised.

Tutankhamun's burial preserves the fullest realization of the developed royal scheme: a yellow quartzite sarcophagus, its corners guarded by the carved, winged figures of four goddesses, enclosing three nested anthropoid coffins — two of gilded wood and the innermost of solid gold — the king's mummy within them wearing the famous gold mask. The nested assemblage made the king's body the still center of concentric shells of protection and divinity, each surface inscribed and figured to secure his passage into the company of the gods. The coffin and sarcophagus together were the architecture of resurrection, the innermost stage on which the myth of Osiris was performed for the benefit of the dead.

The coffin also had an economic and practical history that the developing form records. In periods of prosperity, coffins were newly made of fine imported cedar and richly painted; in times of scarcity, old coffins were reused, their inscriptions altered to carry a new owner's name, a practice well attested in the Third Intermediate Period when timber was costly and the great Theban workshops recycled materials. The 'yellow coffins' of that period, covered inside and out with dense protective scenes against a varnished yellow ground, show the coffin at its most elaborately decorated, every surface pressed into service as a field for imagery when the tomb itself was often modest. Across all periods the coffin's quality indexed its owner's wealth and status, from the painted box of a humble household to the nested gold of a king, so that the container was at once a theological instrument and a precise marker of social position, the most informative single object in many burials.

Symbolism

The coffin's deepest symbolism is identification with Osiris. The anthropoid form, molded to a mummiform body with crossed arms and a sculpted face, makes the container an image of the deceased as the resurrected god, the figure who conquered death and rose to rule the dead. To be placed in such a coffin was to be cast in the role of Osiris, and the spells inscribed on it spoke of the deceased as 'the Osiris [Name],' so that the container both depicted and effected the assimilation of the dead person to the god of resurrection.

The coffin as 'house' carried a complementary symbolism. The Egyptian term per-djet, 'house of eternity,' applied to the tomb, and the rectangular coffin with its palace-façade exterior figured the container as a dwelling for the dead, a permanent home for the body. The painted eyes on Old Kingdom coffins gave this house a window: through them the deceased, lying on his side facing east, could look out toward the rising sun and the place of offerings, the eyes asserting that the dead within was not blind or sealed off but able to see and to receive.

The image of Nut on the coffin lid encodes the cosmic dimension of rebirth. The sky-goddess, painted arching over the interior of the lid, enclosed the deceased within her body just as she encloses the cosmos and swallows the sun each evening to give birth to it at dawn. To lie beneath Nut was to be positioned for the same daily resurrection the sun undergoes, the coffin becoming a model of the night sky from which the dead would rise renewed. This placed the individual death within the largest cosmic cycle, the nightly journey and rebirth of the sun.

The protective deities figured on the coffin reenact the mythology of Osiris's death and restoration around every dead person. Isis and Nephthys at head and foot repeat their mourning watch over the murdered Osiris; the four sons of Horus guard the body and its organs; Anubis presides over preservation. The coffin thus dramatizes the central Egyptian myth in miniature, casting the deceased as Osiris and surrounding him with the divine protectors who secured the god's resurrection.

The nesting of coffins within a stone sarcophagus symbolized concentric protection and the layering of divinity around the body. Each shell — gold innermost, then gilded wood, then stone — was both a barrier against destruction and a surface for protective imagery, so that the dead lay at the heart of a structure that was simultaneously a fortress and a theological diagram. Gold, the innermost material in royal burials, symbolized the imperishable flesh of the gods, whose bodies were said to be of gold; to be enclosed in gold was to share in the incorruptible divine substance, the body made eternal.

Cultural Context

The coffin and sarcophagus were the central objects of an Egyptian mortuary culture that absorbed an enormous share of the society's wealth and labor. Belief in the survival of the person depended on the preservation of the body, and the coffin was the innermost protection of that body, so its production engaged embalmers, carpenters, painters, scribes, and, for stone sarcophagi, quarrymen and sculptors. The investment ran from the modest — a plain wooden box for a person of small means — to the staggering, in the nested gold coffins and carved granite sarcophagi of kings. The coffin's quality was a direct index of status and wealth, and its inscriptions a record of the owner's name, titles, and hoped-for afterlife.

The development of the coffin tracks the broader history of Egyptian funerary belief. The Old Kingdom rectangular box served a religion in which the elaborate afterlife was largely a royal concern; the spread of Coffin Texts to private coffins in the Middle Kingdom reflects the 'democratization of the afterlife,' the extension of mortuary privileges from the king to officials and commoners. The rise of the anthropoid coffin, identifying every owner with Osiris, marks the centrality of the Osirian resurrection-myth to private religion. The coffin is therefore a primary document for the changing relationship between the individual and the afterlife across Egyptian history.

The terminology and the cross-cultural irony of the word 'sarcophagus' reflect later Greek contact with Egypt. The Greek term sarkophagos, 'flesh-eater,' originally described a limestone thought to consume corpses, and was transferred to stone coffins generally; applied to Egyptian containers it inverts their actual purpose, for the Egyptian sarcophagus was designed to preserve the body, not to destroy it. The mismatch records the Greek attempt to make sense of an Egyptian practice through their own categories, a recurring feature of the classical reception of Egypt.

The production of royal stone sarcophagi was a major undertaking of state. Granite was quarried at Aswan and floated downriver; the hollowing and carving of a single sarcophagus could occupy a team of skilled workers for a long period; and the finest examples, such as the translucent alabaster sarcophagus of Seti I carved with the Book of Gates, represent the limit of what Egyptian craft could achieve. These objects expressed royal power as much as religious hope, monumental assertions of the king's claim to eternal life inscribed with the secret knowledge of the underworld. The coffin and sarcophagus thus stood at the intersection of religion, economy, craft, and royal ideology, among the most informative objects the civilization produced. The coffin's centrality is reflected in the survival of the Coffin Texts themselves, an entire corpus of religious literature preserved only because the Egyptians chose the coffin as a surface on which to write the cosmos, so that the container is at once the most personal of funerary objects and the bearer of some of the most important religious writing the civilization produced.

Cross-Tradition Parallels

Every culture that believes the dead persist must answer a material question: what do you do with the body? That question is not merely practical — the answer reveals what the tradition believes the body is for, and what the relationship between the body and whatever survives it might be. The Egyptian answer is among the most elaborate and most theologically explicit in the ancient world, and what makes it distinctive becomes clear through comparison.

Norse — Ship Burial and the Body as Provision (Gokstad c. 900 CE; Oseberg c. 834 CE)

Norse ship burials sent the dead to sea — or buried them in a ship — with weapons, tools, animals, and sometimes companions. The body was equipped for a journey but was not the object of elaborate preservation. Where the Egyptian coffin was a machine designed to protect the body so the soul could return to it, the Norse burial equipped the person for an ongoing active existence beyond death. Egypt produces a maintained address; Norse burial produces a stocked ship. The conceptual difference is precise: Egypt treats the body as the anchor of the self, which must be kept in place; Norse tradition treats the dead as travelers who need supplies. The same premise — the dead continue — leads to opposite material strategies: preservation versus provision.

Chinese Han — The Jade Suit and the Incorruptible Body (Liu Sheng burial, Mancheng, c. 113 BCE)

Han-dynasty members of the imperial family and high nobility were buried in suits of thousands of jade plaques sewn with gold, silver, or bronze wire depending on rank. Jade was believed to prevent the decay of the body, keeping it incorrupt so the hun and po souls could maintain their connection. The jade suits are structurally analogous to Egyptian mummification and the anthropoid coffin: both are technologies directed at preserving the body against decay on the premise that the soul needs a body. The material difference is the theology. Egypt used wrapping, natron, and linen within a gold shell representing the divine, imperishable flesh of the gods; China used jade — the stone of immortality — to encase the body in the substance of heaven. Both treat preservation as theology; each names a different material as eternity's vehicle.

Tibetan Buddhist — Sky Burial and the Body Relinquished (c. 7th century CE onward)

Tibetan sky burial (jhator) cuts directly against the Egyptian premise. The body is carried to a mountaintop, cut up by a rogyapa, and fed to vultures. The soul has already departed for the bardo; the body is inert matter to be returned to the cycle of nature. The inversion with the Egyptian coffin is structural: Egypt built ever-more-elaborate architecture around the body because the body mattered cosmologically. Sky burial dismisses the body once the consciousness has left it. Both traditions are equally committed to the soul's welfare — the divergence is in whether the body participates in that welfare after death. Egypt says yes; Buddhism says no, it is an empty house.

Roman — The Sarcophagus as Narrative Container (c. 2nd-4th century CE)

Roman sarcophagi of the imperial period were carved with elaborate mythological scenes — the labors of Hercules, the myth of Endymion, the seasons — not as magical operators but as narrative art for funeral viewers. The very word sarcophagus, 'flesh-eater,' encodes an entirely different theory: the stone was thought to consume the body. Roman sarcophagi are containers for display and commemoration, not protective shells for a soul-bearing body. Both are stone containers for the dead, but the Egyptian sarcophagus is a working ritual instrument, every carved surface a functional text. The Roman sarcophagus is a monument to the living's grief and the dead's cultural identity. The object looks the same; its theory of what the dead need is opposite.

Modern Influence

Egyptian coffins and sarcophagi are among the most recognizable objects of the ancient world and have shaped the modern image of Egypt more than almost any other artifact. The gilded anthropoid coffin, with its sculpted golden face and crossed arms, is the visual shorthand for 'mummy' in popular culture, reproduced on book covers, in films, in museum branding, and in countless cartoons. The discovery of Tutankhamun's intact burial by Howard Carter in 1922, with its nested coffins and solid-gold innermost coffin, produced a worldwide sensation that fixed the image of the Egyptian royal coffin in the global imagination and fueled the 'Egyptomania' of the 1920s in design, fashion, and architecture.

The word 'sarcophagus' itself entered general use through Egyptian and classical archaeology and now denotes any stone coffin, while in popular speech it evokes Egypt specifically. The Greek etymology, 'flesh-eater,' is frequently noted as a curiosity that inverts the Egyptian intention, and the term has been borrowed metaphorically for any large protective enclosure, most strikingly in the 'sarcophagus' built to contain the destroyed Chernobyl reactor, a usage that preserves the sense of a container sealing something dangerous within.

Museums have made the coffin central to the public understanding of Egypt. The painted Middle Kingdom coffins, the nested New Kingdom anthropoid sets, and the royal stone sarcophagi are among the most visited objects in collections from Cairo to London to New York, and the study of their inscriptions has driven major scholarship. The Coffin Texts, named for the Middle Kingdom practice of inscribing spells on coffins, were edited by Adriaan de Buck in seven volumes (1935-1961) and translated by Raymond Faulkner (1973-1978), foundational works of Egyptology that exist only because the coffin served as a writing surface.

The horror genre has drawn heavily on the coffin. The opening of the sarcophagus, the rising of the mummy from its painted case, and the curse attached to the disturbed coffin are staples of films from the 1932 Mummy onward, debased reflections of the genuine Egyptian belief that the dead within the coffin retained agency and that violating the burial had consequences. The image of the slowly opening anthropoid coffin lid has become a fixture of popular dread.

In conservation science and Egyptology, coffins remain an active field. CT-scanning of sealed coffins and their mummies, pigment analysis of painted surfaces, and the study of coffin reuse and recycling in periods of economic stress have made the humble container a rich source of evidence about ancient craft, economy, and belief. The 2016-2020 discoveries of large caches of intact coffins at Saqqara renewed public and scholarly attention, demonstrating that the Egyptian coffin, three thousand years after its makers laid down their brushes, continues to yield new knowledge.

Primary Sources

The Pyramid Texts (Old Kingdom, c. 2400-2300 BCE; ed. R.O. Faulkner, Oxford University Press, 1969; James P. Allen, SBL Writings from the Ancient World 23, 2005) are the earliest texts directly associated with a funerary container — the burial chambers of the royal pyramids at Saqqara, where the spells were carved on the walls surrounding the sarcophagus. Utterance 600, which invokes Atum rising on the primordial mound and the creator's self-generation through spitting out Shu and Tefnut, was inscribed on these walls, while other utterance sequences (e.g., 213-216, 364-374) address the dead king's identification with Osiris and ascent to the stars — together making the container and the texts a single instrument. The granite sarcophagus of Khufu, still in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid (c. 2550 BCE), is the oldest royal stone container in situ and the earliest surviving Egyptian royal sarcophagus.

The Coffin Texts (Middle Kingdom, c. 2100-1700 BCE; ed. Adriaan de Buck, The Egyptian Coffin Texts, 7 vols, Oriental Institute Publications 34-67, University of Chicago Press, 1935-61; trans. R.O. Faulkner, 3 vols, Aris & Phillips, 1973-78) take their modern name from the wooden coffins of private individuals on which they were inscribed. The interior surfaces of rectangular Middle Kingdom coffins carried columns of funerary spells, the object frieze of depicted equipment, and sometimes the Book of Two Ways on the coffin floor — making the coffin a painted cosmos and the earliest map of the underworld routes. The de Buck edition remains the hieroglyphic standard; Faulkner's translation the principal English version.

The Book of the Dead (New Kingdom onward; ed. R.O. Faulkner, British Museum Press, 1985; Thomas George Allen, Oriental Institute Publications 37, 1974) generated many of the spells inscribed on New Kingdom anthropoid coffins, including Spell 125 (the judgment), Spell 30B (the heart scarab inscribed on the breast within the coffin), Spell 151 (associated with the funerary mask within the coffin), and the amulet-spells (155-160) tied to objects placed on or within the wrapped body. The papyrus roll was frequently placed in a hollow statuette of Ptah-Sokar-Osiris set inside the coffin, making coffin and text a single assemblage.

For the New Kingdom royal tradition, the Amduat and Book of Gates are carved on the walls and, in some cases, the sarcophagi of the Valley of the Kings tombs, notably the translucent alabaster sarcophagus of Seti I (c. 1290 BCE, Sir John Soane's Museum, London), which carries the full text of the Book of Gates on its exterior and interior surfaces — the most extensively inscribed royal container to survive. Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (Cornell University Press, 1999), publishes and discusses both compositions.

The classical sources describe Egyptian burial containers in several passages. Herodotus, Histories 2.86-88 (Loeb Classical Library, A.D. Godley trans., 1920) provides the most detailed Greek account of Egyptian mummification and the placement of the body, describing the various grades of preparation and the wooden anthropoid figures. Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca Historica 1.91-92 (Loeb, C.H. Oldfather trans., 1933), supplements this with descriptions of Egyptian burial practices. John H. Taylor, Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt (British Museum Press, 2001), is the standard modern overview of the full history of Egyptian coffins and sarcophagi, from the Old Kingdom through the Roman period.

Significance

The coffin and sarcophagus were the architecture of Egyptian resurrection, the innermost stage on which the myth of Osiris was performed for every dead person. Their significance lies first in their theological function: by enclosing the deceased in an Osiris-shaped container covered with protective spells and divine images, the Egyptians made the coffin a machine for transforming a corpse into an effective spirit. No other object so directly embodied the Egyptian conviction that death could be defeated by ritual technology, and the developing form of the coffin records the development of that conviction across three thousand years.

The coffin is a primary source for the history of Egyptian funerary belief. The shift from the rectangular Old Kingdom box to the spell-covered Middle Kingdom coffin to the Osiris-shaped anthropoid form tracks the spread of afterlife privileges from king to commoner and the rising centrality of the Osirian resurrection-myth to private religion. The Coffin Texts, named for the surfaces that carried them, are among the most important bodies of religious literature to survive, and they exist because the Egyptians treated the coffin as a place to write the cosmos.

The objects matter equally for the history of craft and economy. The production of coffins engaged a wide range of specialists and consumed a significant share of Egyptian wealth, and the quality of a coffin was a direct index of its owner's status. The royal stone sarcophagi — the granite, alabaster, and quartzite containers of the Valley of the Kings — represent the limit of Egyptian craftsmanship and the fusion of religious hope with royal ideology, monumental assertions of the king's claim to eternity inscribed with the secret knowledge of the underworld.

Finally, the coffin and sarcophagus are central to the modern reception of Egypt. The golden anthropoid coffin is the global icon of ancient Egyptian death, and the discovery of Tutankhamun's nested coffins shaped twentieth-century popular culture as few archaeological finds have. As objects of continuing scientific study, subjected to imaging and analysis that reveal the bodies and the craft within, they remain among the most productive sources of knowledge about the civilization that made them, the durable shells in which Egypt sealed its hope of defeating death. The coffin's history also records the changing economy of Egyptian burial, from the fine new cedar coffins of prosperous reigns to the reused and re-inscribed coffins of leaner periods, making the container a source for the material as well as the religious history of the civilization, and a precise index of the wealth and status of the dead it enclosed. As objects subjected to modern imaging and analysis, coffins and sarcophagi continue to yield evidence about ancient craft, materials, and belief, and the recent discoveries of large caches of intact coffins at Saqqara have renewed both public and scholarly attention to the container in which Egypt sealed its hope of defeating death.

Connections

Osiris — The resurrected god with whom the anthropoid coffin identifies its owner, cast as 'the Osiris [Name]' to share in his triumph over death.

Anubis — Embalmer-god who prepares the body the coffin encloses and appears among its protective figures.

Isis — Mourning and protecting sister of Osiris, figured at the foot of the coffin to guard the dead as she guarded the god.

Nephthys — Sister-protector figured at the head of the coffin, completing the pair of mourning goddesses.

Nut — Sky-goddess painted on the lid's interior, enclosing the deceased within her regenerating body.

Horus — Father of the four sons who guard the coffin's sides and the embalmed organs.

Mummification — The preservation of the body that the coffin was built to protect, the process that prepared the dead for their container.

Canopic Jars — The vessels holding the internal organs removed in embalming, guarded by the same four sons of Horus who protect the coffin.

Akh — The transfigured spirit the coffin's spells and images are designed to produce from the enclosed body's owner.

Book of the Dead (object) — The papyrus of spells often placed within the coffin alongside the body, sharing its purpose of securing the afterlife journey.

Duat — The underworld whose maps and journey-texts, such as the Book of Two Ways, were painted inside Middle Kingdom coffins and carved on royal sarcophagi.

Valley of the Kings — The royal necropolis where the great carved stone sarcophagi of the New Kingdom were installed, their walls inscribed with the books of the afterlife.

Coffin Texts — The Middle Kingdom corpus of mortuary spells named for and inscribed upon the coffins that carried them.

Opening of the Mouth — The rite restoring the senses of the dead within the coffin, enabling the deceased to use the spells inscribed upon it.

Weighing of the Heart — The judgment the coffin's spells and images prepare the deceased to pass.

Ba — The mobile soul that returns to the body in the coffin, for which the container and its imagery secure a safe anchor.

Ka — The life-force sustained by the offerings the coffin's owner receives, one of the soul-components the burial maintains.

Heart Scarab Amulet — The amulet placed over the breast within the coffin, inscribed with the spell commanding the heart at the judgment.

Sons of Horus — The four protective deities who guard the sides of the coffin and the embalmed organs in the canopic jars.

Further Reading