The implements are the part of the rite that has been argued over most. The kit included a small adze of the kind used by carpenters and sculptors, several kinds of chisel and rod, and a forked flint blade, the psh-kf, whose shape has no obvious woodworking use. The adze is easy to read: a sculptor's tool used on a statue, finishing the work of making. The flint fork is not.
In 1992 Ann Macy Roth proposed that the psh-kf came from childbirth rather than from the workshop, and that the rite as a whole was modelled on the care of a newborn. On this reading the fork is the implement that cut or held the umbilical cord, the little vessels that accompany it hold the first feeding, and the finger-shaped rods stand for the adult finger that clears a newborn's mouth. The Opening of the Mouth would then be a birth rite reused, which fits the way Egyptian funerary language treats death as a second nativity.
The reading has been influential and it is not settled. Others hold the implements to be straightforwardly craft tools, the ritual straightforwardly a consecration of an image, and the birth parallels to be read back into it. The atlas records the argument rather than picking the winner, because the evidence, a set of objects and a set of scenes with captions, genuinely underdetermines the answer.