We proudly present: first tests with infrared photography

Posted on September 27, 2021 by ankhhorproject

Back in 2018, the conservator of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, Daniel Oberndorfer, made some tests with infrared photography with very good results. In the case of painted coffins with stains on the surface or simply darkened surfaces, the original decoration became visible again. Sometimes these stains are also caused by bitumen applied to the surface. And since the pouring of bitumen above the coffin and the mummy was very common in Ptolemaic times, this seemed like a suitable way to deal with our large set of material from TT 414.

For the 2021 season, I therefore purchased a second-hand Sony Cybershot DSC-F828 camera. First tests with a magnet and the use of an IR-filter were extremely successful. The camera kit is also useful for landscape photography, site views turn out really nice – here is just a shot towards the mountain from our place of work.

But most importantly, for the wooden coffins, the photos are like magic and make things visible again! The decoration and the texts of some darkened pieces are much clearer and nicely readable. But also what appears as a “black coffin” because of its current surface, becomes visible as a formerly colourful piece completely covered with resin. The original JPGs and RAWs can be further processed and will assist us to fully document the design of the coffins from the tomb of Ankh-Hor.

I am very grateful to Daniel for introducing this new documentation method back in 2018 and super happy that I invested in my own new camera kit – the results are simply stunning! Especially for large fragments with important pieces of texts (and figurative panels) this will allow a fresh reassessment of the coffins from TT 414 – stay tuned for more very soon!

Summary of week 1 of the 2021 season

Posted on September 24, 2021 by ankhhorproject

We just finished a first, very successful week of our 2021 season. We started off with cleaning, dusting, and sorting things and are now well underway to document small finds, ceramics, shrines as well as wooden and cartonnage coffins.

The painted coffins from TT 414 belong both to primary burials of the family of Ankh-Hor and to secondary burials of Amun priests, mostly dating to the 4^th and 3^rd centuries BCE, which appear as relatively wealthy. Most of the material derives from the secondary use of the tomb. I am still busy collecting fragments which can be dated stylistically and because of the technique to the 26^th Dynasty – these are usually very small pieces, sometimes just small splitters of the painting.

Example of small fragments of 26th Dynasty coffins including a piece from the outer coffin of Ankh-Hor (bottom right).

These are nevertheless important to reconstruct the original burials in TT 414 – yesterday, I found one loose fragment of the foot pedestal of the outer coffin of Ankh-Hor himself. This foot part is in a very fragile condition and will be consolidated later this season, including fixing the loose fragments back in place. Among the most interesting finds is another 26^th Dynasty coffin giving the female name of a Mutirdis – a common name in this era, but I still do not know to which specific person this coffin once belonged. During the Austrian excavations in the 1970s and 1980s, no Mutirdis from the 26^th Dynasty was recognised in the material from TT 414 – another example why our current work is so important to understand the complete phases of use in the monumental tomb of Ankh-Hor!

Jessica working on one of the late Ptolemaic coffin fragments.

The Ptolemaic wooden and cartonnage coffins are much better preserved and are currently treated by our conservation team. Since 2018, our conservation programme is conducted in cooperation with the Austrian Archaeological Institute (OeAI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This year, our team is comprised of four young conservators, all graduates including one current student of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. We are kindly supported by one of the experienced Egyptian conservators from the West Bank. The team finished already a considerable number of pieces in week 1 and these objects are now ready for their final photographic documentation with a full-frame camera with high resolution (Nikon D810 with a 35mm objective lens).

In terms of documentation, the Egyptologists of our team concentrate on ceramics and small finds. This week, Hassan and Patrizia were both busy with funerary cones. Patrizia, who is about to finish her PhD about Late Period statuary, wrote some years ago her BA thesis about funerary cones and thus shares my own enthusiasm for these intriguing objects which still pose some questions in the Late Period. Drawing these cones (among others funerary cones of Monthemhat, Padineith and Pabasa), Patrizia does not only focus on the stamped end but also on technical features, remains of colours and other details.

Although very challenging objects to draw, we love Late Period funerary cones! And Patrizia is doing a perfect job here.

Our youngest Egyptologist is Caroline, a MA student from LMU Munich. She is very talented and enthusiastic and started with drawing Late Period and Ptolemaic vessels. Later this season, she will join me working for the South Asasif Conservation Project.

Caroline very quickly adapted to our “drawing office” at the site and made already a good number of pottery drawings in her first week.

It is wonderful that the two sites, Ankh-Hor and South Asasif, share so many similarities in terms of re-use – Caroline will thus be perfectly prepared, knowing the most common vessel types already from our mission.

Today, the last team members will arrive, and we are all looking much forward to another exciting week starting on Saturday in the gorgeous setting of the Asasif in front of Deir el-Bahari.

Our conservation tent and a view to the Theban mountains.

All set for the 2021 season

Posted on September 17, 2021 by ankhhorproject

Tomorrow will be the day: we will open the 2021 season of the LMU Ankh-Hor project. Not all members of the field season have yet arrived but will do so in the next days.

Thanks to much help by kind colleagues both in Cairo and in Luxor, I was able to get all paperwork done well in time. In addition, I joined the South Asasif Conservation Project directed by Elena Pischikova and started to work on the amazing amounts of pottery they unearthed in newly discovered tombs! I will continue to work in part-time for this mission and I am looking much forward to such an opportunity of a direct comparison between the South and the North Asasif. The parallels are really intriguing!

At our site in northern Asasif, we were already allowed to set up our beautiful conservation tent. Starting from tomorrow, this tent will be the centre of our conservation programme focusing on Ptolemaic wooden coffins and cartonages but including other painted objects as well.

We will keep you updated about our progress in the next four weeks!

New publication on the Ankh-Hor project

Posted on April 5, 2020 by ankhhorproject

While the world and also Luxor with the Asasif necropolis all hold their breath because of the covid-19 crisis, a new issue of the journal Egypt & the Levant has been published in Vienna. I am proud that this volume also includes an update on the Ankh-Hor project (Budka 2019).

There are still plenty of information to unveil from the tomb of Ankh-Hor.

In this article, the most important results from the 2018 and 2019 seasons are summarised and future work is outlined, especially regarding the large corpus of coffins from TT 414. The focus is here on the numerous Ptolemaic coffins and the information they hold for patterns of re-use, but also for religious, cultic and iconographic aspects of Late Egyptian funerary tradition in Thebes.

Our permissions for the next season in the Asasif in fall 2020 were already granted – so let’s hope that we can also actually continue our consolidation and documentation work on the important finds from the tomb of Ankh-Hor. For now, of course the only priority is to stay safe and to stay home – the crisis will be over some day and we all have to stay patient!

Reference:

Budka 2019 = J. Budka, TT 414 revisited: New results about forgotten finds from the Asasif/Thebes based on the 2018 and 2019 seasons of the Ankh-Hor Project, Ägypten und Levante 29, 171‒188.

Summer in Luxor, Munich and Vienna

Posted on September 5, 2019 by ankhhorproject

Time flies by – on such a rainy day like today in Munich, summer really seems to be over… My recent study season in Luxor was very successful and despite of the high temperatures really productive.

The necropolis of Asasif on an early August morning.

The South Asasif Conservation Project directed by Elena Pischikova had made fantastic discoveries this season and the corresponding ceramics were exciting to process. Of course I was especially looking for parallels for TT 414, the tomb of Ankh-Hor. This season, not only nice comparisons from the second heyday of the Asasif during the 4^th and 3^rd centuries BC showed up, but also intriguing pieces from a little understood period, the late 26^th Dynasty and the 27^th Dynasty. Especially the latter are important because, as clearly stated by Wolfram Grajetzki already some years ago: „The period of the first Persian domination remains something of a mystery for archaeology in Egypt. There are very few monuments and even fewer tombs that can be securely dated to this time“ (Grajetzki 2003, 117). Especially within Thebes, burials attributable to the Persian Period (27^th Dynasty) still remain an enigma and are difficult to date (see Aston 1999), but ceramics from both Southern and Northern Asasif clearly attest to the funerary activities during that time. Much more research is required here!

For now, some post-excavation work is necessary for the 2019 South Asasif season and I am busy with entering data into the database. Next week, Vienna is calling and the focus will be more on Sudan and the MUAFS project. All in all, this summer was not only hot in terms of temperatures, but also extremely interesting and inspiring for my projects in Asasif and beyond.

References

Aston, David A. 1999. Dynasty 26, dynasty 30 or dynasty 27? In search of the funerary archaeology of the Persian period, in: Studies in Ancient Egypt in honour of H. S. Smith, ed. by Anthony Leahy & John Tait, London, 17–22.

Grajetzki, Wolfram. 2003. Burial Customs in Ancient Egypt: Life in Death for Rich and Poor, London.

Getting ready for a study season in Luxor

Posted on August 14, 2019 by ankhhorproject

Here in Munich, the summer seems to be coming to an end – at least in terms of weather and temperatures. It has been quite cool during the last days and it’s just about time to go to Egypt for more sun and heat ;-)!

I am therefore delighted that later this week, I will be travelling to Luxor – to join the South Asasif Conservation Project directed by Elena Pischikova for a short 2-weeks-study season of pottery. I’ve been studying the ceramics from the two fantastic, monumental Kushite tombs of Karakhamun and Karabasken, TT 223 and TT 391, in South Asasif since 2011. This season, my focus will be on new material from the tomb of Karabasken and I am very much looking forward to this. Besides the important material dating to the original use of the tomb, the 25^th Dynasty, there is plenty of ceramics from later phases attesting to the re-use of the structure from the 26^th Dynasty up to Coptic, Islamic and even modern times.

A large amount of the pottery from both TT 391 and TT 223 is datable to the 30^th Dynasty and the Ptolemaic Period – and thus of much interest for my study of TT 414, the tomb of Ankh-Hor.

Nicely comparable pottery corpora from the re-use of Theban temple tombs: TT 414 to the left, TT 223 to the right.

The ceramics from South Asasif I am going to be working on in the next weeks provide perfect parallels for our material from the burial monument of Ankh-Hor in northern Asasif and illustrate the heyday of re-using monumental Theban Late Period tombs during the 4^th and 3^rd centuries BC.

Dissemination of the rich potential of the Ankh-Hor Project

Posted on July 31, 2019 by ankhhorproject

Good news within the summer break: Our study of neglected finds from the tomb of Ankh-Hor in Asasif, TT414, in Egypt is highlighted in the latest issue of the The Project Repository Journal (July 2019, pp. 42-43).

Our aimed reconstruction of the complete use life of the tomb from the 6^th century BC until Roman and Coptic times will provide new information about the people buried in TT 414 and also allows high lightening important new aspects of Egyptian funerary customs throughout the ages.

TT 414 has a huge potential to serve as a case study to analyse various attitudes of later generations towards the original owners of monumental Theban burial places – this can be best illustrated by the recycling of coffins. For the understanding of the complete, very complex use life of TT 414 a more in depth study is therefore much needed and will be carried out in the next years. At present, large amounts of coffins, fragments of coffins and cartonnage from TT 414, dating from the Late Period to Ptolemaic and Roman times, still remain to be cleaned, consolidated and fully documented. These tasks require time and financial support, but will definitly contribute to writing a new chapter of Theban funerary archaeology.

TT 414 as monumental jigsaw puzzle with huge potential

Posted on May 30, 2019 by ankhhorproject

The rich potential of the thousands of finds from TT 414, the tomb of Ankh-Hor, for understanding the funerary culture of Late Period and Ptolemaic Thebes as well as family relations and more was recently the focus of an interview I gave to the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Screenshot

The interview was published yesterday in German – more media coverage of the project which makes me very proud. Besides the interesting re-use of coffins I also mentioned the fascination history of the use and re-use of the “Lichthof” in TT 414. A blog post about this aspect of the tomb of Ankh-Hor will follow shortly.

Media coverage for the Ankh-Hor Project

Posted on April 10, 2019 by ankhhorproject

Very proud and honoured: our work in the Asasif on the finds from the TT 414 has made it into an Austrian newspaper – an article in “Die Presse” presented some information about the Ankh-Hor project (print version 06/04/2019, online since 09/04/2019), based on an interview I gave in Vienna two weeks ago.

On this occasion, I stressed the rich potential about the coffins from the tomb of Ankh-Hor – not only for establishing a typology for Ptolemaic coffins and for discussing coffin workshops at Thebes, but especially for discussing the diverse re-use of TT 414, burial chambers and coffins. The best example is of course the 26^th Dynasty coffin Reg. No. 590 of Iret-her-rw, which was re-used by Wah-ib-re in Ptolemaic times.

There are still plenty of information to unveil from the tomb of Ankh-Hor.

Media coverage like this article and also the recent blog post at DerStandard.at are very nice rewards for our busy and successful 2019 season – and it also helps to keep the motivation high. Among others, for writing proposals and applications which will keep me busy in the next months. Money does matter – not only for death and burials as you can read in the “Die Presse” article but also for researching complex burials like the multiple ones in TT 414.

Closing of the 2019 season of the Ankh-Hor project

Posted on March 12, 2019 by ankhhorproject

From Luxor back to Munich – it was not in particular a warm welcome yesterday, arriving at Munich airport with snow showers and much too low temperatures for March! Well, today it is quite sunny and time to resume the last day of work in Asasif.

My last sunrise at TT 414 for 2019…

We successfully closed our tomb magazine and the 2019 season on Sunday – it has been some very intense days full of work and things to organize. Our conservators provided me with a fully illustrated and concise report about the large amount of conservation work conducted in 2019 – in total, 61 objects, in particular coffins, including the five fragmented ones we transported to the magazine, were successfully cleaned and consolidated.

Hassan and Mona were also very productive, resulting in more than 80 drawings of wooden objects, small finds and ceramics. In addition to these drawing, more than 470 objects were photographed by Cajetan with our full-frame camera with very high resolution.

In the final days of work, I took some last photographs of objects, last coffin fragments were cleaned and consolidated. And of course I continued to organize the magazine. Since it always happens on excavations that something new and important turns up at the very last day of work, I was not surprised that I found some new fitting coffin fragments literally in the last minutes of work…. These new fragments are important because they belong to a fascinating, but unfortunately very fragmented coffin we documented earlier this season.

Reg. 661 are fragments of a nicely painted, inner anthropoid wooden coffin which was found as one of the secondary burials within the burial compartment of Ankh-Hor (Room 7.2). For our conservators, these fragments presented one of the biggest challenges this year: The soft wood fragments are partly blackened and burnt due to the looting of TT 414 and the respective damage to the tomb inventories.

Part of Reg. 661 illustrating the bad condition of this coffin.

The owner of Reg. 661 was a female singer of Amun-Re from Karnak with the name Taremetjbastet. Since we know her family relations very well, we can date her death and burial to between 320 and 300 BCE.

The owner of Reg. 661 belongs to a well-attested family of Amun priests from Karnak buried in TT 414.

Of particular interest is the decoration of the foot part of the coffin – I have published first ideas about Reg. 661 already some years ago (Budka 2013). In the center of the foot board there is a sun disc flanked by a snake and a crocodile – this is nothing else than the opening scene of the Litany of Re, attested for the first time in the famous tomb of Sety I in the Valley of the Kings! To be best of my knowledge, there is only one parallel for this motif on foot boards of private coffins – and this is CG 29316, a stone sarcophagus from the 30^th Dynasty (see Budka 2013).

Our wooden coffin Reg. 661 from TT 414 is exemplary for is the complex creation of decorated and inscribed coffins in Thebes during the 4^th century BCE – Amun priests were extremely creative in combining various aspects, especially cosmogonic ones, using older texts and depictions and creating new ones, focusing on the resurrection of the deceased in conjunction with Re and Osiris. Still little is known about this fascinating creative work which is embodied in funerary objects like coffins, but also cartonage and canopic boxes – all of which are so plentiful from TT 414.

The lid fragments of Reg. 661 which I re-located in the last minutes of the 2019 season still need to be consolidated in the next season of the Ankh-Hor Project – like many other pieces, in particular of Ptolemaic and Roman coffins. Thus, Reg. 661 with its intriguing decoration nicely illustrates the already successful outcome and the scientific potential of the Ankh-Hor Project – but also the urgent need to continue our jigsaw puzzle reconstructing the complex burial processes in TT 414 and enlightening the intricate design of 30^th Dynasty and Ptolemaic wooden Theban coffins.

Reference

Budka, Julia. 2013. Krokodil, Schlange und Kuhantilope: Ein frühptolemäischer Holzsarg aus dem Grab des Anchhor (TT 414), in: Florilegium Aegyptiacum ‒ Eine wissenschaftliche Blütenlese von Schülern und Freunden für Helmut Satzinger zum 75. Geburtstag am 21. Jänner 2013, ed. by Julia Budka, Roman Gundacker and Gabriele Pieke, Göttinger Miszellen Beihefte 14, Göttingen, 41–57.

The Ankh-Hor Project

TT 414 in Asasif revisited

Category Archives: Ptolemaic