This artwork is a wooden box, only partially preserved, with representations of Egyptian deities associated with death and the afterlife, as well as inscriptions also related to one of those gods, Osiris. This box or shrine might have contained canopic jars, funerary vessels that served to preserve the viscera of the deceased person and that would be later buried with his or her mummified body, or a set of small ushabti figurines, which would be also buried with the deceased person. This delicate box is, therefore, a reflection of the importance of organ preservation in Egyptian culture, since it was made and carefully decorated specifically to preserve delicate internal parts of the body, with the exception of the heart, which was not removed from the body. Egyptians preserved the organs in this meticulous way because the body was the home of the soul or the spirit, and the spirit was an essential in Egyptian religion, so they needed to preserve it even after death.
Pharaohs and other important Egyptians were to be buried with the ushabtis, "helpers" or "answerers" that resembled them, so they could carry out the domestic tasks that the gods would request them to undertake in the afterlife.