On the last day of week 2 of the 2023 season of the Ankh-Hor Project, there was much excitement! Inspired by my colleagues from the South Asasif Conservation Project, I played a bit with my newly installed app Scaniverse – a wonderful tool to capture objects in 3D. With all my experience using photogrammetry in the past years in Sudan (and some earlier trials for material from TT 414), this was a stunning exercise – Scaniverse is ultrafast, highly accurate and very easy to use. It offers new perspectives of how we document our objects from TT 414 – in addition to ordinary 2D images, now capturing the objects with metrically accurate 3D models becomes feasible with little time expenditure. Simply fantastic!

My trial piece is also a scientifically important object. This week, Mohammed and Karima cleaned and consolidated two parts of the fragmentarily preserved tomb group of an important family member of Ankh-Hor, the lady Her-Aset. We do not know the name of her husband, but his title – based on the known facts, it is very likely that she married one of Ankh-Hor brothers and was thus closely related to the original owner of TT 414. This of course explains why she was buried in TT 414 as well.

Her-Aset had a nice wooden stela as part of her funerary equipment. The larger part of this stela is now in the British Museum – see my earlier post on the conservation of this piece back in 2018.

Now in 2023, we are back working on Her-Aset’s tomb group. The first piece our conservators consolidated from this group is a fragment of the inner anthropoid coffin of Her-Aset, Reg. 536.

The other object is the nicely coloured and inscribed pedestal of a Ptah-Sokar-Osiris statue of Her-Aset. Reg. 539 gives her name and title within the framework of an offering formula. Karima and Mohammed finished its consolidation (it was in a very fragile state) just today and after I took the standard 2D photos, I thought that this would be the perfect trial piece for the app mentioned above.

The result is great (see also the video of Reg. 539 captured with Scaniverse on an iPhone 11 and processed with Detail Mode) – and please keep in mind that it was the first time ever I used the app and that it only took a few seconds to take the photos for this model. In addition to the ordinary photos, the shape and especially the cavities on the top side of the pedestal are now captured in a detail way and in 3D. One cavity is of course the tenon hole for the now lost funerary figure of the god Ptah-Sokar-Osiris – should we ever be able to relocate this statue in one of the museums around the world, we could join it with our 3D model 😉. The larger cavity is mummy-shaped and nicely shows that Ptah-Sokar-Osiris statuettes in the Late Period sometimes contained a package of viscera/mummification material and are closely related to corn mummies.

We will explore the application of Scaniverse to document our finds from TT 414 further and will keep you of course posted!