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.