An Office Any Son Could Hold

Unlike many specialised Egyptian priestly offices, the sem priesthood was not restricted to career temple staff. Egyptian custom held that a son had a filial responsibility to see his father properly buried and revived into the afterlife, so it was entirely normal, and in elite households expected, for an heir to take on the sem priest's role and perform, or be shown performing, the Opening of the Mouth for his own dead father, wearing the office's distinctive leopard skin for the occasion regardless of whether he held any other priestly title.

The most famous surviving depiction of this practice sits at the very top of Egyptian society: a wall painting in Tutankhamun's tomb shows his successor, Ay, dressed as a sem priest performing the Opening of the Mouth on Tutankhamun's mummy, a scene scholars read as Ay using the ritual role of dutiful heir to help legitimate his own irregular succession to the throne, since he was not Tutankhamun's son by birth. The scene captures precisely why the sem priesthood mattered beyond its ritual mechanics: performing it publicly was itself a claim about the performer's relationship to the deceased and, in a royal succession, about his right to inherit what the deceased had held.