One week has already passed since we opened our season for the LMU Ankh-Hor project.

Our beautiful large tent is the centre of our conservation programme, which will focus on Ptolemaic wooden coffins and cartonnages, but will also include other painted objects from the tomb of Ankh-Hor, TT 414. One of our conservators, Mohamed Mahmoud , has already successfully cleaned and stabilised the very fragile foot part of Ankh-Hor’s outer coffin.

This piece has already been published in the Anch-Hor II Volume, but is nevertheless one of the historically very important pieces, as it is direct evidence for the tomb owner of TT 414 and thus one of the well-dated wooden coffins of the 26th Dynasty in Thebes. I am very pleased that this very delicate and important piece has finally been consolidated.

In addition to conservation, we are mainly working on finding joining pieces for objects, which I have already done very well this week with cartonnages. We produce full-format photos, infrared photos and 3D scans for documentation purposes. Ladina Soubeyrand and Hassan Aglan also make publishable drawings of important pieces. This week they have been working mainly on Ptah-Sokar-Osiris statuettes and qrsw coffins. And they do a really good job!

All in all, it was a very successful start to the 2024 season – we still have a lot to do in the next four weeks, but some of the really nice objects with high information content about the Late Egyptian funerary culture in Thebes make the whole thing a great pleasure.