Tag Archives: Asasif

Official start of the 2019 season

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After some very nice days in Cairo, we managed to finish all the paperwork and officially started our 2019 season in Asasif today! The team is not yet complete, but Mona and Hassan will join us soon.

Our magazine in the Asasif, an original Middle Kingdom Saff tomb, was opened today and we had a quick first check. Thankfully everything is exactly as we left it in 2018, just dusted.

All is now set and documentation and conservation work of funerary objects and primarily wooden coffins will start on Saturday – very grateful to the great support of everybody involved, especially the authorities in Cairo and here in Luxor, especially the local inspectorate.

Can’t wait to get fully occupied with our complex jigsaw puzzle, tracing the numerous people buried in the tomb of Ankh-Hor, TT 414, over several centuries!

All set for the 2019 season

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Teaching term in Munich just ended, MUAFS project just successfully post-processed – and now off to Cairo! All is set for the 2019 season of the Ankh-Hor project which will start in the upcoming week.

Conservation work will be the main focus of the 2019 season, again in cooperation with the Austrian Archaeological Institute (Daniel Oberndorfer) and also with a group of newcomers from the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

My team will of course also comprise archaeologists/Egyptologists – I am particularly happy that Cajetan Geiger and Mona Dietrich (both LMU) will be joining me again and this season we will be also strengthened by Hassan Ramadan, who just recently passed his PhD defensio at Humboldt University in Berlin.

The reunion with Hassan is something very special for me – we first met in 2007 in the Asasif when Hassan was appointed as my inspector. He helped us a lot this season and it was the start of a friendship. Since then, we have both got our first grey hairs, but also made big steps in our individual careers – and we stayed friends and became close colleagues exchanging ideas about the fascinating and complex use-life of the Theban necropolis – of which so many questions still need to be answered!

Hassan and me back in 2007 – much younger, but already intrigued by Theban funerary archaeology.

Very much looking forward to the 2019 season of the Ankh-Hor project and of course we’ll keep you posted about our findings!

Getting ready for the 2019 season

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The end of 2018 is approaching; the next season in Asasif, Egypt is getting closer! We will be working in February and March and there are still lots of things to prepare.

On Friday this week, I managed to meet a large proportion of the team members for 2019 in Vienna. Since conservation work will be the main focus of the upcoming season, all of them are conservators or students of conservation.

In 2018, the conservation work of the Ankh-Hor Project was successfully started thanks to cooperation with the Austrian Archaeological Institute. Daniel Oberndorfer got a first general overview of the material and collected a lot of data for a future conservation programme considering the state of the objects from TT 414 and also their large number. I am really happy that Daniel managed to bring together a group of very enthusiastic conservators/students from the University of Applied Arts Vienna who will all work on the wooden objects, especially coffins from the tomb of Ankh-Hor.

I am already very much looking forward to the 2019 season! For now, Season’s Greetings to all involved or interested in the Ankh-Hor Project, we will be back with information on our current and upcoming work in the New Year.

 

End of 2018 season: summary and outlook

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Our first, quite short season just ended yesterday – the magazine in the Asasif is sealed and closed again, some of the team members are already back in Vienna and Munich, three of us arrived this afternoon in Cairo and will leave in the next days.

Altogether, the first season was very successful and all goals were achieved. The focus was on documenting coffins and other objects from the long use-life of TT 414. More than 80 drawings were produced by Patrizia and Mona, comprising small finds (mostly Ptolemaic faience shabtis with texts bearing the names of their owners), wooden objects including a beautiful Ptolemaic Ptah-Sokar-Osiris statue and pottery (complete pottery vessels and fragments, mostly Ptolemaic from the re-use of TT414, but also some Saite vessels from the original phase of use).

In addition to these drawing, 360 objects were photographed in very high resolution with a full-frame camera by Cajetan. These objects were primarily coffin fragments, fragments of wooden shrines and boxes and again shabtis. With these new photos suitable for publication, most of the objects are now fully documented.

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The conservation work was successfully started thanks to cooperation with the Austrian Archaeological Institute.  Daniel Oberndorfer joined the project in the field and managed to get a first general overview of the material, its needs and specifications to develop a program for cleaning and consolidation. Conservation work focused during the 2018 season on wooden objects, especially on coffins and fragments of shrines and wooden statuettes (Ptah-Sokar-Osiris figures). It mainly comprised of consolidation and mechanical cleaning.

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A total of 23 wooden and painted objects were successfully cleaned, consolidated and photographed. Drawings of some selected pieces are planned for the next season. With the data and experience from the 2018, a larger-scale conservation programme can be designed for the next years, considering the individual properties of the material from TT 414. Conservation work will be the main focus of the upcoming seasons.

Related to this, I managed to reorganize the magazine according to priorities. The majority of the material still to be studied is the large amount of coffins – more than 180 coffins within the magazine are currently entered in our database, several dozen are still missing.

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Besides sorting the material regarding their state of preservation and thus the need of consolidation as well as of scientific importance (datable pieces, pieces of well-known persons buried in TT 414 etc.), the focus of this working tasks of the 2018 season was to find matches between the fragments preliminary registered under “K-numbers”. This proved very time consuming, but also quite successful – 16 new matches to registered coffins from the “K-numbers” were achieved. Furthermore, four newly identified registered coffin fragments can be noted and five additional parts to fragmented coffins were documented.

The importance of this search for joints, which will continue in the next season, can be illustrated by the examples of a new fragment of coffin of the daughter of Ankh-Hor and a newly identified black-and-yellow style Ptolemaic coffin as the outer coffin of a singer with the name Ta-net-Geb. More new names were noted on various fragments and still have to be added to our genealogical data and processed in detail.

The rich prospective of the detailed work on the complete set of finds from TT 414 became very clear during the 2018 season. But, in order to achieve major results and to support preliminary ideas with further evidence, work must continue in the near future and is planned for a next season in spring 2019. Large amounts of coffins, fragments of coffins and cartonage from the Late Period to Ptolemaic and Roman times still remain to be cleaned, consolidated and restored – and will for sure bring to light more new information about the use of the tomb of Ankh-Hor throughout the ages.

Group picture 2018

My deep thanks go to all team members for their enthusiasm for the project and making 2018 a great season! The photo gallery gives some impressions of all the various tasks achieved and also of how much fun we had working on this really interesting set of diverse objects. Of course, work would not have been possible without the support of the Egyptian authorities and especially of the local inspectorate on the West Bank; I am very grateful to a number of people, first of all to our inspector Zeinab Mohammed Elsayed for enabling us to work according to the working programme.

Looking already much forward to come back to Asasif next year! Updates about our processing of the data collected in 2018 will of course follow.

More shabtis & more coffin matches

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Week 3 started not at all perfect – yesterday was a very sandy & windy day, work outside was almost impossible, so we had to concentrate on tasks within the magazine, especially the cleaning and consolidation of coffins and other wooden objects.

Today was much better regarding the weather and all were back at their tasks: drawing, photographing and studying objects from TT 414. There are still more faience shabtis which need drawings – and strangely they are now met with just a little less enthusiasm than last week ;).

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Matching coffin fragments was again very successful – the jigsaw puzzle is getting more and more advanced. My personal highlight of today was the identification of a black-and-yellow style Ptolemaic coffin as the outer coffin of a singer with the name Ta-net-Geb. Until today, she was only known from the inner coffin of her son from TT 414 – now we can confirm that she was also buried in the tomb of Ankh-Hor, presumably with her husband Hor-Khonsu!

K07_219 Ta-nt-Geb

This enlarges not only our prosopographical data of people buried in TT 414, but is also relevant for questions of typologies and dating of Ptolemaic coffins. The next goal is now trying to find more matches to Ta-net-Geb’s coffin – the piece identified today is just a very small fragment from the lid of a once substantial anthropoid coffin. So much more to do with this simply amazing material from the tomb of Ankh-Hor!

Conservation work started on objects from TT 414

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Thanks to the support of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, the institute’s conservator Daniel Oberndorfer joined us and started his work on the wooden objects from TT 414 today.

Large amounts of coffin fragments and other wooden objects are in urgent need of cleaning and also consolidation – for now, I have made a list of priorities for Daniel according to both significance of the object and its state of preservation. In focus are some 26th Dynasty coffin remains which have not yet been studied in detail, but foremost several Ptolemaic fragments because of their significance for reconstructing genealogies and family trees.

Some pieces are also highly significant of the history of exploration of TT 414: Daniel started working on the small fragment of the stela of Her-Aset (Reg. 508). Bietak and Reiser-Haslauer noted already that it belongs to the larger part of stela BM EA 8457 which came via Henry Salt to London (Bietak/Reiser-Haslauer 1982, pl. 155; Budka 2010, 56).

Stele heraset

Like for so many other objects from TT 414, this example illustrates how much information can be gained from a joint puzzle of data deriving from both, material excavated by the Austrian Mission in TT 414 and objects currently kept in European museums originating from non-scientific work in the tomb during the 19th century (see Budka/Mekis 2017). For the identification of further objects in museums and collections as coming originally from TT 414, conservation work of the still unpublished material stored here in the Asasif is of prime importance in order to document all relevant pieces in full detail for future comparison.

References

Bietak/Reiser-Haslauer 1982 = M. Bietak/E. Reiser-Haslauer, Das Grab des Anch-Hor, vol. II, Vienna 1982.

Budka 2010 = J. Budka, Varianz im Regelwerk. Bestattungsabläufe im Monumentalgrab von Anch-Hor, Obersthofmeister der Gottesgemahlin Nitokris (TT 414), Egypt & the Levant 20, 2010, 49-66.

Budka/Mekis 2017 = J. Budka and T. Mekis, The Family of Wah-ib-Re I (TT 414) from Thebes, Egypt & the Levant 27, 219‒240.

Too many Pa-di-Amun-neb-nesut-tawys…

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Yesterday and today, the focus of our current big jigsaw puzzle from TT 414 was not only on coffins, but also on shabtis. A small amount of shabtis from Ankh-Hor himself were found by Bietak and his team and is already published (Bietak and Reiser Haslauer 1982, pl. 97). Elfriede Reiser-Haslauer managed to locate many more Ankh-Hor shabtis throughout various collections and museums (Bietak and Reiser Haslauer 1982, pls. 98-116), attesting to the early phase of collecting objects from the tomb in the 19th century prior to its scientific excavation.

Equally well-known are the shabtis from the undisturbed burial of Wah-ib-Ra, datable to the 30th Dynasty and also already published (Bietak and Reiser Haslauer 1982, pl. 128).

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But still unpublished until today is a very large number – several dozens – of faience shabtis with the name of Pa-di-Amun-neb-nesut-tawy. There are various sizes and different types of these blue- or green-glazed shabtis, but most are fragmented and only give part of the name. These shabtis were primarily found in the debris within the burial chamber of Ankh-Hor – which was reused by the Amun priest Pa-di-Amun-neb-nesut-tawy I in the 30th Dynasty. Followed by several generations of his family, and a good number of individuals with the same name (and titles)!

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Eleven Pa-di-Amun-neb-nesut-tawys were listed by Elfriede Reiser-Haslauer in her genealogical register of people buried in TT 414. Two types of shabtis fortunately have a specific addition to the common title “divine father and prophet of Amun” – they mention the temple of Khonsw and can therefore be attributed to Pa-di-Amun-neb-nesut-tawy II.  For the other shabtis, though, it is almost impossible to reconstruct to which specific individual they once belonged. But work is still in progress: although there are far too many same-named persons who were all buried in TT 414, there is some hope that we will also attribute some of these numerous Ptolemaic faience shabtis in the near future by means of a typology and stylistic and palaeographic attributes.

Reference

Bietak and Reiser Haslauer 1982 = M. Bietak and E. Reiser-Haslauer, Das Grab des ‘Anch-Hor, Obersthofmeister der Gottesgemahlin Nitokris II, UZK 5, Vienna 1982.

Starting week 2 with new matches

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We just started week 2 of our 2018 season – drawing, photographing and studying the finds from TT 414 continued.

For time reasons, I do a lot of work of puzzling with the coffin fragments in the afternoon on the laptop, using photos, the original registration book of the Austrian mission and my notes from the tomb/magazine. Today was a very successful day for new matches! Not only did I manage to relocate some coffins in the magazine, but a new match worked virtually on the computer!

Reg. 682 new joint

The object in question is a beautiful, multi-coloured painted Ptolemaic coffin. The picture shows the successful match: at the top, there is a photo from 1974 of a piece which is currently still missing and which I only know by this photograph; the fragment below is actually a new joint – in 1974, it was not noted as belonging to the coffin, again stressing the rich potential of our current re-investigation of all finds from TT 414!

Reg. 682 is the board from the foot part of an outer anthropoid coffin; its decoration shows a figure of a winged goddess with a sun-disc on her head, standing on the “gold”-hieroglyph. The texts in the upper part give the name and titles as well as the filiation of the owner. And this owner is a well-known person from TT 414: the divine father and prophet of Amun in Karnak Pa-di-Amun-neb-nesut-tawy III, son of Pa-char-Chonsw II and grandson of Pa-di-Amun-neb-nesut-tawy I, the Amun priest who started the re-use of TT 414 in the 30th Dynasty (for the genealogy of this family see Reiser-Hauslauer 1982). Many more fragments of tomb equipment of Pa-di-Amun-neb-nesut-tawy III, his parents, uncles and cousins are still waiting to be studied and will keep us quite busy!

Reference

Reiser-Hauslauer 1982 = E. Reiser-Hauslauer, B. Familien aus der zweiten Belegungszeit des Grabes (ca. Zeit der 30. Dynastie und frühe Ptolemäerzeit), in: M. Bietak and E. Reiser-Haslauer, Das Grab des ‘Anch-Hor, Obersthofmeister der Gottesgemahlin Nitokris II, UZK 5, Vienna 1982, 252–256.

A complex jigsaw puzzle

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We’re making very good progress with documenting the objects from TT 414. After the general cleaning at the beginning, we are now focusing on wooden objects and here in particular on coffin fragments. More than 200 coffins/coffin fragments were registered during work in TT 414. Some of them are in very good state of preservation, but the majority urgently needs consolidation.

Seminal work on the coffins from TT 414 was conducted in the 1970s by Elfriede Reiser-Haslauer who registered all the coffins and documented the texts and decorative programmes (see Reiser-Haslauer 1982). However, it goes without saying how much effort this meant during excavation, with new pieces coming in and various tasks at one time. The Austrian team did a great job back then, but at that moment detailed studies and especially the cleaning and consolidation of the coffins were not possible.

This is where our project steps in – aiming for a reconstruction of the phases of use of TT 414 and its burials, we now focus on details and a revised prosopographical study (cf. Budka/Mekis/Bruwier 2013; Budka/Mekis 2017). At this stage, quite a number of registered coffins are still scattered within the magazine, without indication of find location or find number – the big challenge is therefore reconstructing all joining pieces for one object and identifiying small fragments. Some joints were also not noted back in the 1970s, simply because of the large amounts of finds.

Identification

Today, we can built upon the original documentation and photos by the Austrian mission – also small fragments can be identified, although it is quite a time-consuming task requiring sometimes luck and of course always patience. With two new joints of important pieces today, I am really satisfied!

Our work resembles a big and quite complex jigsaw puzzle – but all efforts are definitely worth it, not only because of the high quality of the pieces and their significance for contextualising funerary customs in Late Period and Ptolemaic Thebes, but also because previous work in the magazine has shown that unexpected finds might show up during consolidation work – Book of the Dead papyri and mummy labels were found in the study seasons 2007-2009 (see Budka 2010). The material from TT 414 definitely still holds much potential for surprises!

References

Budka, Julia and Tamás Mekis 2017. The Family of Wah-ib-Re I (TT 414) from Thebes, Egypt & the Levant 27, 219‒240.

Budka, Julia, Tamás Mekis and Marie-Cécile Bruwier 2013. Re-use of Saite temple tombs in the Asasif during the early Ptolemaic time – the tomb group of Mw.t-Mnw from TT 414, Egypt & the Levant 22/23, 2012/2013, 209–251.

Budka, Julia 2010. Ankh-Hor Revisited: Study, Documentation and Publication of Forgotten Finds from the Asasif/Thebes, in: Fifth Central European Conference of Egyptologists. Egypt 2009: Perspectives of Research, Pułtusk 2009, ed. by J. Popielska and J. Iwaszczuk, Acta Archaeologica Pułtuskiensia, Pułtusk, 23–31.

Reiser-Haslauer, Elfriede 1982. IX. Genealogisches Register, in: Manfred Bietak und Elfriede Reiser-Haslauer, Das Grab des ‘Anch-Hor, Obersthofmeister der Gottesgemahlin Nitokris II, UZK 5, Vienna, 267–284.

Start of 2018 Season

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Today we reopened the Middle Kingdom saff tomb which serves as magazine for the finds from TT 414, the tomb of Ankh-Hor and started our 2018 season!

The tasks for today were mainly cleaning and dust removal – nine years have passed since the last opening and this clearly left some marks – also on us, I really really needed a shower afterwards…

Thanks to the support of the local authorities and our workmen, we started very well into the new season – the first objects from TT 414 were already drawn by Mona and Patrizia and also photographed by Cajetan!

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The goal for the first week will be re-organizing the magazine into categories of priority – with hundreds of objects waiting for us, we will not be able to study and document all of them. The focus will be on coffins and cartonnage fragments, dating from the Saite Period to Roman times.