This week just flew by very quickly – we made much progress in many respects.

The consolidation and cleaning of coffins from TT 414 was carried out continuously by our conservators Karima and Mohammed. They managed to clean seven additional coffins this week, comprised of more than 60 individual pieces. Very time consuming was therefore the puzzling with the fragments and gluing them back together after cleaning.

One case study of these working tasks is shown here – Reg. 825 is a nice example of a looted inner anthropoid coffins with clear damages caused by the robbers. Karima and Mohammed managed to fit the fragments back together in a way that also the original shape of the lid becomes visible again.

Another great achievement in terms of consolidation was the work by Mohammed on a very fragile pedestal of a 26th Dynasty Ptah-Sokar-Osiris statue from the tomb of Ankh-Hor. The piece is not inscribed, but covered with linen and painted in yellow, red and blue. Mohammed fixed all of the remaining painted parts. The 3D model I created of the object with Scaniverse shows in great accuracy the “footprint” of the statue – the tenon hole, but also the shape of the lower base of the figure. The almost square cavity in front of the pedestal was closed with a lid on which we traced the negative of a falcon statue.

This week the work on the cartonnage coffins from TT 414 really picked up speed. To begin, Ahmed and Caroline, our student assistants, searched and sorted through several boxes of fragments. We focused on the reconstruction of a wonderful two-part coffin of the Ptolemaic Amun priest Horakhbjt, Reg. 860- its painting is exquisite and large fragments were documented back in the 1970s. However, we realised that most of these fragments are currently missing. The good news is: I have now been able to relocate numerous pieces; they were scattered in dozens of boxes in the magazine.

I show you here a particularly charming fragment from the lid: just check out the details of the figure of Anubis and the way he is here depicted bent over the mummy on the lion bed.

I did anticipate that work on Reg. 860 will be time-consuming – maybe not as much as it turned out to be, but I am still optimistic that we will manage to document much of this important piece during this season. In addition, I managed to find matching pieces to a lot of other cartonnage coffins. The most exciting one is maybe the beautiful lid of the cartonnage of the priest Twt. Just last year, I managed to identify this cartonnage coffin and now we have a full representation of Twt kneeling in front of an offering table in delicate painting.

Last but not least, this week was also very successful in using 3D scanning with Scaniverse to document objects, fragments of cartonnage coffins and wooden coffins from TT 414. More than 50 3D scans now complement our documentation and will allow us to continue the jigsaw puzzle also back home after the season.