Coffin
A man touches the coffin of Argentine musician Gustavo Cerati, who died today at the age of 55, in Buenos Aires September 4, 2014, in this handout provided by Leonardo Idoria. Cerati was a flamboyant showman who brought stadium rock to Latin America with his band Soda Stereo. Grammy-winning Cerati had been in a coma since suffering a stroke in May 2010, after a show in Venezuela. REUTERS/Leonardo Idoria/Handout via Reuters (ARGENTINA - Tags: ENTERTAINMENT SOCIETY OBITUARY TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY)

An expert has said that the decline of ancient Egypt could be revealed with the help of a 2,400-year-old coffin. The coffin has decorations on it which are unusual as well as amateurish.

According to the Daily Mail, the coffin had strange features, which include "goofy jars" as well as an unusual funeral bed that had been painted by it. The belief of an egyptologist was that the marks were made by junior artists during the control of the Persians in the region as the best painters from Egypt had been deported because of which the decorations were "amateurish."

Egyptologist Gayle Gibson from the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto told Live Science that the drain of talent in Egypt could be the reason behind the badly-painted coffins. She explained that a lot of the best artists from Egypt had been taken to Persepolis and Susa by the Persians as prisoners of war. She added that for a period of time, there seemed to have been a dearth of masters because of which fewer artists had gotten proper training.

Ancient texts written by Diodorus Siculus suggested that the Empire that had occupied the region had deported the best craftsmen form Egypt so that the artists could work on grand projects in Persia. It is said that the coffin could help understand the tumultuous time in Egyptian History.

Based on the inscriptions, the coffin is said to have belonged to a woman whose name was Denit-ast or Dent-ast. According to suggestions based on radiocarbon dating, she was alive during the period when Egypt was under the control of the Persians.

The funeral bed had strange features which included the head of a human-headed bird that was called Ba. Ba was depicted as a human-headed falcon and was said to have been seen entering and leaving a tomb which signified the soul or spirit of the individual.

Dr Gibson told at a colloquium for the Society of the Study of Egyptian Antiquities Scholars that the coffin as the only one that she came across which had a bed with Ba's head on it. She continued that another feature, a winged snake wearing a crown, was usually associated with Hathor, the goddess of joy and motherhood and was odd as well as the four jars in the scene.