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Researchers at a British museum found fingerprints on the underside of an ancient Egyptian priest’s coffin, believed to have been left by craftsmen who moved the lid before its varnish dried more than 3,000 years ago.

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“It’s something that’s so human, it immediately takes you to that place,” said Helen Strudwick, a curator and Egyptologist at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. “You imagine in your mind what that moment was like when the person put their hand under there with all their sticky fingers.”

“Would somebody have told them off?”

The intricate wooden coffin was part of a set made for Nespawershefyt, a priest who rose to the high station of supervisor for craftsmen’s workshops and scribes at the great temple of Amun-Re at Karnak — the major temple complex. He died around 1,000 BC.

The Nespawershefyt coffin set was one of the first donations to the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1822 and has routinely been on display, so no one noticed the fingerprints under the coffin lid until 2005, when museum staff started examining the collection. They announced the discovery ahead ofan exhibition that opened this week on Egyptian funerary art and practices.