The inscription on the foot of Ta-Kheru’s coffin reads: ‘Words spoken by Osiris, the Mistress of the House Ta-Kheru, justified, daughter of Tja-en-Waset, justified, Lord of Provision’.

‘Words spoken by Osiris’ and ‘justified’ mean that Ta-Kheru has successfully passed through the judgement of the soul after death, entered the realm of the gods, and become a version of the god Osiris in her own right. As Osiris, she speaks the words on her coffin, recounting her name and titles and the name of her father. The inscriptions encourage others to recite her name and perform the ritual of the dead for her.

The hieroglyphs which show Ta-Kheru’s name and titles run from top to bottom on the coffin, but could be written in any direction. The birds’ heads point away from the direction in which the text should be read. The coffin inscription shows the hieroglyphs for ‘ta’ (bread and vulture), ‘kh’ (leaf and stem of a lotus) and ‘ru’ (mouth and piece of flesh), making the name ‘Ta-Kheru’. The hieroglyph seated wife could be added to show that it is a woman’s name. It is pronounced with a hard ‘kh’ and has also been transcribed as ‘Ta-Cheru’ or ‘Ta-Khar’.

The meaning of Ta-Kheru’s name, ‘The Syrian’, is intriguing. Her father’s name, referring to Thebes, suggests that he was of an Egyptian family. The child Ta-Kheru could have been given her name because her mother’s relatives came from Syria, then part of the Assyrian Empire which was at war with Egypt in the generations preceding her birth. Was Ta-Kheru’s mother or grandmother brought to Egypt as a prisoner of war?

A future DNA study could reveal more about the mystery of Ta-Kheru’s name and heritage.

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