New discovery: Intact tomb uncovered in Aswan

The intact tomb of the brother of a 12th Dynasty Elephantine governor has been uncovered, containing a range of funerary goods

Ahram Online , Wednesday 22 Mar 2017

Photocredit: Ahram Online

The Spanish Archaeological Mission in Qubbet El-Hawa, west Aswan, has discovered an intact structure where the brother of one of the most important governors of the 12th Dynasty, Sarenput II, was buried.

Mahmoud Afifi, head of Ancient Egyptian Antiquities Department, described the discovery as “important” not only for the richness of the burial chamber, but also in shedding light on individuals close to those in power. 

Nasr Salama, director general of Aswan Antiquities, said that the find is unique with funerary goods that consist of pottery, two cedar coffins (outer and inner) and a set of wooden models, which represent funerary boats and scenes of daily life.

Alejandro Jiménez-Serrano, head of the Spanish mission from the University of Jaen, said that a mummy was also discovered but is still under study. It is covered with a polychrome cartonnage with a beautiful mask and collars.

Inscriptions on the coffins bear the name of the deceased, Shemai. followed respectively by his mother and father, Satethotep and Khema. The latter was governor of Elephantine under the reign of Amenemhat II.

He explained that Sarenput II, the eldest brother of Shemai, was one of the most powerful governors of Egypt under the reigns of Senwosret II and Senwosret III. Apart from his duties as governor of Elephantine, he was general of the Egyptian troops and was responsible for the cult of different gods.

With this discovery, Serrano asserted, the University of Jaen mission in Qubbet El-Hawa adds more data to previous discoveries of 14 members of the ruling family of Elephantine during the 12th Dynasty. Such high numbers of individuals provide a unique opportunity to study the living conditions of the upper class in Egypt more than 3,800 years ago.

Source: http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/9/40/261435/Heritage/Ancient-Egypt/New-discovery-Intact-tomb-uncovered-in-Aswan.aspx

Ministry of Antiquities trying to decipher the most controversial mystery coffin in the history of ancient Egypt

The Ministry of Antiquities is trying to decipher the most controversial mystery coffin in the history of ancient Egypt

The Ministry of Antiquities resumes the study of the golden fragments found inside a wooden box inside the store of the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir with a grant of $28,500 provided by the American Research Center (ARCE) Endowment Fund 2016.

Elham Salah, Head of Museums Sector at the Ministry of Antiquities pointed out that the study will be conducted by a team of Egyptian archaeologists and restorers from the Egyptian Museum who would study another group of these fragments, which are likely belong to the sarcophagus of tomb KV 55 on the West Bank of Luxor.

Salah also explained that this study significantly contributes in resolving the controversy over the identity of the sarcophagus found in tomb KV55, considered as one of the most controversial sarcophagus in the ancient Egyptian history. This sarcophagus is currently displayed in the Egyptian museum, she pointing out, and the studies conducted by the working team last year figured out the possibility of subordination of these fragments to the sarcophagus.

Islam Ezzat, member of the scientific office at the ministry of antiquities pointed out that after the completion of this extensive study the identity of the owner of this sarcophagus would be determined as well as the owner of tomb KV55. The researchers team is currently working on the dating of this sarcophagus through figuring out the similarities of these fragments with the sarcophagus and its inscriptions.

It is worth mentioning that the wooden box inside the museum’s store had about 500 golden fragments, a small part of a human skull, a paper written by hand in French dates to the time of the discovery of the tomb indicate that these fragments belong to a royal sarcophagus without specifying its name.

The researched team is working under the supervision of a large collection of Egyptian antiquities and restoration scientists in Egypt and the world including Prof./ Faeza Hekal professor of Egyptology at the American University, Prof./Hassan Selim professor of Egyptology at Ain Shams University, Prof./Mark Gabold professor of ancient Egyptian language at the University of Montpellier in France, Prof./ Arnest Brnikas professor of material science at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, Prof. Suseran Janescy Great Restorer in Boston Museum at the United States of America, and Hala Hassan, head of the first section of the Egyptian Museum.

Source: Ministry of Antiquities

Newly Discovered Fetus Is Youngest Egyptian Mummy on Record

By Laura Geggel, Senior Writer | May 13, 2016

A miniature coffin discovered more than a century ago holds the remains of the youngest Egyptian ever embalmed as a mummy on record, researchers in England said.

A computed tomography (CT) scan of the coffin revealed that the coffin didn't hold mummified internal organs, as researchers had suspected, but instead contains the tiny mummy of a human fetus, according to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. The mummified fetus was likely at only 16 to 18 weeks of gestation when it died, likely from a miscarriage, museum officials said.

"This landmark discovery … is remarkable evidence of the importance that was placed on official burial rituals in ancient Egypt, even for those lives that were lost so early on in their existence," museum researchers said in a statement.

The British School of Archaeology originally uncovered the 17-inch-long (44 centimeters) coffin in Giza in 1907, and the Fitzwilliam Museum added the coffin to the museum collection that same year. The cedarwood coffin is a perfect miniature of a regular-size coffin from Egypt's Late Period, and likely dates to about 644 B.C. to 525 B.C., museum researchers said. It even has "painstakingly small" carvings on it, the researchers added.

For years, museum curators assumed that the coffin held internal organs, which were routinely removed during the Egyptian embalming process. But curators found otherwise when they examined the coffin during preparations for the museum's bicentennial exhibition, "Death on the Nile: Uncovering the Afterlife of Ancient Egypt," which opened in February.

What they discovered in the coffin surprised them.

The importance of death in everyday Egyptian life

By Garry Shaw for Apollo Magazine

Often, exhibitions of ancient Egyptian artefacts divide their galleries into objects of ‘daily life’ and those associated with ‘burial and the afterlife’, despite most of the objects deriving from the excavation of burials, and the majority of these having been used in life. The Egyptians themselves would probably have been bemused by this division; to them, death was a transition to a different state of being, where life continued. True death only occurred following the judgement by Osiris, king of the blessed dead, when a person could be sentenced to obliteration. To some degree then, preparation for death was a bit like considering what to pack for a move abroad; many of the items used in life would be just as useful in the beyond.

Nevertheless, throughout the Pharaonic Period (3030–332 BC) – the timeframe usually covered by ‘ancient Egypt’ – certain objects specifically associated with death and the rituals necessary for continued survival, such as coffins, had to be specially produced. This is why today, thousands of Egyptian coffins can be found in museums across the world – they are a staple of any collection, and along with mummies, are what museum-goers expect to see. Whether box-like or anthropoid, their wooden surfaces painted with images in striking colours of unusual deities and hieroglyphs, coffins represent ancient Egypt, symbolise it, and in turn, reinforce the popular cliché that the ancient Egyptians were a civilisation obsessed with death – a cliché often countered by Egyptologists, who insist that the Egyptians dedicated so much time to preparing for death because they loved life and feared its end.

Museum Pieces - Coffin cover of King Antef Sekhemrê Herouhermaât

Coffin cover of King Antef Sekhemrê Herouhermaât

By Rigault Patricia

The coffin cover of Antef Sekhemrê Herouhermaât represents the king as a mummy wrapped in a shroud decorated with two large winged figures. On his head the dead sovereign is wearing the pleated cloth headdress known as a "nemes," adorned with feathers. A broad necklace with fasteners in the shape of falcon heads covers his chest. The relatively rudimentary depiction of the body and face, as well as the brightly colored design, give this royal coffin a rather crude appearance. 

"Rishi" coffins

These mummy-shaped coffins, entirely decorated with feathers and known as "rishi" ("feathered" in Arabic), appeared primarily in the Theban region from the Seventeenth Dynasty. This highly unusual style continued into the Eighteenth Dynasty. Constructed or carved from wood, they were decorated according to the status of the dead person, whether a member of the royal family or merely a private citizen. In general, the latter made do with a crudely carved coffin decorated with a bright, colorful design. Royal coffins, by contrast, were more sophisticated and were sometimes even richly gilded.

A modest royal coffin

The coffin of King Antef Sekhemrê Herouhermaât is exceptional in that it is more like the coffin of a private individual than that of a sovereign. This may have been due to the brevity of his reign. Royal or not, the head was almost invariably covered with the "nemes," a pleated cloth headdress, while the pharaonic emblem of the cobra was often placed on the forehead. Finally, a large necklace with fasteners in the shape of falcons' heads often adorned the chest.

The Antef kings and the Seventeenth Dynasty

An inscription painted in a vertical column in the center of the coffin indicates the birth name of the king, Antef, while another inscription on the necklace, added in ink probably at a later date, gives his pharaonic name, also inscribed in a cartouche: Sekhemrê Herouhermaât. 
This is therefore one of the Antef kings who reigned in Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period, a troubled time that still has not been fully elucidated. In the Seventeenth Dynasty, for example, the sequence of kings has not been established with certainty, and Sekhemrê Herouhermaât's place in the order of succession is unsure. Was he the direct successor of Antef Oupmaât, whose magnificent gilded coffin, displayed alongside this one in the Louvre, was discovered at the same time? The inscriptions on this second coffin indicate that this was a "gift from his brother, King Antef." Or did he rather accede to the throne after Antef Noubkheperrê, whose beautiful coffin, also gilded, is now in the British Museum? At present, we do not know the answer to these questions.

Technical description
Couvercle du cercueil d'un roi Antef (Sékhemrê Hérouhermaât)
vers 1600 avant J.-C. (17e dynastie)
proviendrait de Dra Abou'l Naga
bois enduit et peint, yeux incrustés de pierre
H. : 1,88 m. ; L. : 0,48 m.
E 3020

Source: http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/coffin-cover-king-antef-sekhemre-herouhermaat

Surprising New Finds from Ancient Egyptian Star Charts

Planetarium software, among other things, shows how ancient Egyptians planned to navigate the sky after death

By Christine Gorman | Sep 15, 2015

Ancient Egyptians expected to be very busy in the afterlife. Thousands of years ago they painted big beautiful eyes on the outside of their coffins so that they could see what was going on in the world. Some of the nobility around the upper Egyptian city of Asyut even had detailed tables of star movements drawn on the inside of their coffins. The depictions look like timetables or spreadsheets of when various stars first appear (or disappear) over the horizon at different times of the year—only a lot more beautiful.

Scholars have long believed that the star charts represented a very early type of clock, for telling time at night, which might be important for certain religious rituals. But Sarah Symons of McMaster University in Ontario thinks it more likely that the tables represent a kind of map for the dead to properly navigate the sky, where they would live forevermore as stars. Her conclusions are based on years of research into ancient Egyptian beliefs, extensive surveys of the 27 known star tables or fragments of tables in the world and, using planetarium software, the ability to easily recreate the nighttime sky as it appeared more than 4000-odd years ago along the Nile. Symons and co-author Elizabeth Tasker of Hokkaido University in Japan describe the work in the October issue of Scientific American.

The basic layout of the star charts has, of course, been known for decades, as Symons and Tasker write in "Stars of the Dead." A complete table "is divided into quarters by a horizontal and a vertical strip. The horizontal strip contains a line from a religious text making an offering to a number of Egyptian gods, and the vertical strip pictures four images of the gods themselves. . ."

9 Pharaonic mummies discovered in southern Egypt

Spanish expedition cooperating with the antiquities ministry to discover new tomb in Aswan

By Menna Zaki

A new tomb that contains nine mummies was discovered in southern Aswan by Spanish archaeologists.

The tomb is said to belong to the  Late Period (664 BCE-332 BCE) in Ancient Egyptian history, according to an official statement released by the Ministry of Antiquities on Sunday.

(Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Antiquities )

The tomb is believed to belong to two ruling families that lived in Aswan during the Middle Kingdom of Pharaonic Egypt, according to the research conducted by the Spanish expedition.

A wooden coffin was also discovered. The preserved mummy inside is believed to be a person who lived during the Late Period.

Minister of Antiquities Mohamed Ibrahim announced that the discovery was made by Spanish archaeologists in cooperation with the Ministry of Antiquities in the area of Koba El-Hawa in Aswan. Several tombs of the rulers of Aswan during the period between 2000-1700 B.C. were discovered in this area.

Ibrahim said the area includes other tombs belonging to Upper Egyptian rulers during the Middle and Old Kingdom. One of the famous tombs belongs to “Hor Khof”, who is known as the only ruler whose autobiography was documented on the walls of his tomb.  A tomb for King “Hakanab I”, whose temple was discovered behind the Museum of Aswan in the beginning of the 20th century, was also found there.

Alejandro Jimmenz, head of the Spanish expedition, said that the archaeologists have performed full documentation on the mummy of King “Haka Abe III”, which they have discovered previously during earlier visits to Egypt. Mummies for the members of the king’s family were also discovered, including that of woman named “Ja Ot Anktot”, and another mummy, the king’s brother, “Sarnbut”.

Source: http://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2014/06/04/9-pharaonic-mummies-discovered-southern-egypt/

3,300-year-old coffin from time of pharaohs found in northern Israel

Researchers find coffin with image of a person and rare gold signet ring bearing name of Egyptian pharoah Seti I, father of Ramses II.

By Nir Hasson | Apr. 9, 2014

A 3,300-year-old Egyptian coffin from the time of the pharaohs has been discovered in the Jezreel Valley in northern Israel, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday.

The cylindrical clay coffin from the Late Bronze Age, which was discovered with the skeleton of an adult inside, has a cover fashioned in the image of a person, called an anthropoidal lid. It is the first anthropoidal coffin found in the country in 50 years.

A rare gold signet ring was discovered near the coffin, with the gold-encased scarab seal bearing the name of the Egyptian pharaoh Seti I. That Egyptian ruler is the father of Ramses II, identified by some scholars as the pharaoh mentioned in the biblical story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, which Jews around the world will be celebrating on Passover next week.

Photo by Clara Amit, courtesy of the Israel Antiquities Authority

The coffin, dating to the 13th century B.C.E., was discovered near Tel Shadud amid the skeleton of an adult and objects that appear to have been meant as religious offerings, including food storage vessels, tableware, cultic vessels and animal bones.

"As was the custom, it seems these were used as offerings for the gods, and were also meant to provide the dead with sustenance in the afterlife," excavation directors Edwin van den Brink, Dan Kirzner and the Israel Antiquities Authority's Ron Be'eri said in a statement.

The skeleton of an adult was found inside the clay coffin, and the researchers said the corpse appears to have belonged to an official of Canaanite origin who was engaged in the service of the Egyptian government, or to a wealthy person who imitated Egyptian funeral customs.

"An ordinary person could not afford the purchase of such a coffin," the researchers said. "It is obvious the deceased was a member of the local elite."

The discovery of the coffin at Tel Shadud is evidence of Egyptian control of the Jezreel Valley in the Late Bronze Age, the Israel Antiquities Authority said. During the period when the pharaohs governed the country, Egyptian culture greatly influenced the local Canaanite upper class.

The antiquities authority is looking into the possibility of sampling the DNA from inside the coffin to see if the deceased was originally a Canaanite or an Egyptian who was buried in Canaan.

The graves of two men and two women who may have been members of his family were also located near the coffin.

Next to the skeleton were buried pottery, a bronze dagger, bronze bowl and hammered pieces of bronze.

Source: http://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium-1.584757#

Museum Pieces - Coffin of Irthorru

Photocredit: National Museums Scotland

Coffin of Irthorru, son of Abzu and Tahir.

Museum reference: A.1910.97
Age: 2,600 years old/6th century BC
Dynasty/Period: Late Period, 26th or 27th Dynasty or later.
Dimensions: Length 178cm/Width 46.5 cm/Depth (lid) 24.5cm /Depth (trough) 17.5 cm
Material: Wood, plastered and painted.
Place of origin: Possibly Meir, Middle Egypt.

Head, torso and sides: The face is painted yellow, with white eyes and a black and a green-striped beard. The top of the head has a red-outlined winged scarab (beetle) pushing a red sun-disc that lies directly above the brow. The wings of the scarab reach down the wig on either side of the face and the upper row of feathers is red and the lower row is green.   

A painted collar begins at the upper-arm level and is painted in red and green on a cream ground. It has a dominant triangular pattern ending in a row of alternate yellow and red rosettes and then a row of drop-pendants in green and cream. The hands emerge from the collar and painted yellow.

The sides of the coffin base and lid are decorated with a large cobra with its hood painted in green, stretching down the whole side of the coffin to the feet. It is enclosed by white-bordered bands alternating green and red, with a white central dot, and separated by narrow white and red bars.

Underside of base of coffin: The wig on the base is a solid green and is decorated on the underside with a standing winged goddess, with a red sun-disc on her head and a feather in each hand.

The dominant decorative scheme is a red and green criss-cross motif on a white ground decorated by a central column of text, enclosed by red and green bands.

Source: http://www.nms.ac.uk/highlights/egyptian_coffins/irthorru.aspx

For more coffins and mummy masks: http://www.nms.ac.uk/highlights/egyptian_coffins.aspx

Some assembly was required

Ancient Egyptian artifacts come together for institute exhibit

By Amy Biancolli

Albany

Reunions require complicated planning. But the Albany Institute of History & Art has pulled off a doozy by reuniting the far-flung coffin parts of Ankhefenmut, a 3,000-year-old 21st Dynasty Egyptian priest and sculptor in the Temple of Mut, who had long been separated from two important pieces of his funerary box.

The lid came from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The mummy board, or inner lid, vacated its usual public display at the British Museum in London. The coffin bottom — and Ankhefenmut himself — have resided at the institute since their 1909 arrival from Cairo with a second, partially wrapped Ptolemaic-era mummy that dates to around 300 B.C.

Separated for over a century, Ankhefenmut and his sundry coffin parts have been reassembled for "GE Presents: The Mystery of the Albany Mummies," a show seven years in the making that opens Saturday, runs through June 8 and explores the life, afterlife and archeological saga of AIHA's most popular denizens.

"It's putting the mummy and coffin into context and reuniting the parts," said guest curator Peter Lacovara, an Egyptologist who lives in Albany but works for the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta. "It's putting all the pieces back together again. Part of an archeologist's work is to reconstruct the past — so this is a more physical version of what we do."

One Mummy, Many Coffins: Egyptians Intended to Transform Deceased from Human to Deity

Aug. 23, 2013 — The Egyptian elite was buried in a coffin placed inside another coffin -- in ensembles of up to eight coffins. This was intended to ensure the transformation of the deceased from human to deity, according to Anders Bettum, Egyptologist.

"Boxes and other forms of containers are technologies that arise at given points of time in various cultures. Everybody knows the ancient Egyptian practice of mummifying their dead. What is perhaps less known is that they placed the mummies inside layer upon layer of coffins," says Anders Bettum, Egyptologist at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo.

A similar idea can be found with Russian dolls, Chinese boxes and even Norwegian poetry traditions.

"The Egyptian coffin sets are based on the same principle that we can observe with Chinese boxes and Russian nested matryoshka dolls, where objects are nested inside each other to constitute a complete ensemble," he says.

Ancient Egyptian history encompasses a period of nearly three thousand years, up to the Roman conquest in the year 30 BCE. Today, museums all over the world possess mummies or coffins that have contained mummies of more or less prominent men and women.

The child king Tutankhamun (1334-24 BCE) was buried in as many as eight coffins, according to Bettum.

"For men and women who were members of the ancient Egyptian elite at that time, three or four coffins were not unusual," he adds.

Tomb of the Chantress

by Julian Smith


A newly discovered burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings provides a rare glimpse into the life of an ancient Egyptian singer

On January 25, 2011, tens of thousands of protestors flooded Cairo’s Tahrir Square, demanding the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. As the “day of revolt” filled the streets of Cairo and other cities with tear gas and flying stones, a team of archaeologists led by Susanne Bickel of the University of Basel in Switzerland was about to make one of the most significant discoveries in the Valley of the Kings in almost a century.

The valley lies on the west bank of the Nile, opposite what was once Egypt’s spiritual center—the city of Thebes, now known as Luxor. The valley was the final resting place of the pharaohs and aristocracy beginning in the New Kingdom period (1539–1069 B.C.), when Egyptian wealth and power were at a high point. Dozens of tombs were cut into the valley’s walls, but most of them were eventually looted. It was in this place that the Basel team came across what they initially believed to be an unremarkable find.

At the southeastern end of the valley they discovered three sides of a man-made stone rim surrounding an area of about three-and-a-half by five feet. The archaeologists suspected that it was just the top of an abandoned shaft. But, because of the uncertainty created by Egypt’s political revolution, they covered the stone rim with an iron door while they informed the authorities and applied for an official permit to excavate.

A year later, just before the first anniversary of the revolution, Bickel returned with a team of two dozen people, including field director Elina Paulin-Grothe of the University of Basel, Egyptian inspector Ali Reda, and local workmen. They started clearing the sand and gravel out of the shaft. Eight feet down, they came upon the upper edge of a door blocked by large stones. At the bottom of the shaft they found fragments of pottery made from Nile silt and pieces of plaster, a material commonly used to seal tomb entrances. Those plaster pieces, together with the age of other nearby sites, were the first sign that the shaft might actually be a tomb dating to between 1539 and 1292 B.C., Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty. The large stones appeared to have been added later.

The discovery of a new nomarch burial in Dayr al-Barshā

During its 2012 spring campaign, the archaeological mission of Leuven University in Dayr alBarshā, directed by Harco Willems, has discovered an important burial dating back to the beginning of the Middle Kingdom (approx. 2040 B.C.). Although the burial has been robbed at least twice, and has suffered extensive damage, a large amount of objects were still found in their original position, providing unique information on the scenario of the funerary ritual. The tomb must have belonged to a nomarch (i.e. a provincial governor) or to a person belonging to the close family of a nomarch. It is for the first time in over a century that a relatively well preserved burial of this kind has been found. 

The discovery was made in the tomb of the nomarch Ahanakht I, who was the first Middle Kingdom governor of the Hare nome (nome = province). This tomb is well known, as it has been investigated already    in 1891-1892, and was thoroughly excavated by the American archaeologist George Andrew Reisner in 1915. Reisner's work was crowned by the discovery of a nearly intact nomarch burial in a neighbouring tomb. The beautiful remains from this latter tomb are world famous.

However, Reisner did not finish the excavation of the southwestern burial shaft in Ahanakht's tomb. His diary makes clear that the American archaeologist was under the impression that this shaft had been robbed only a short while before he arrived on the scene. For this reason, he stopped the excavation. This has proved to be a rare chance, as Reisner has thoroughly emptied all other tombs in the area. Therefore, the Leuven mission had in the previous ten years only excavated and documented tombs that had already been thoroughly emptied before, and there is no chance that other tombs of this kind may still be discovered elsewhere.

Coffin reveals secret past of mummified 'royal boy'

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

A 2,500-year-old mummified boy, who is a star draw at Devon's oldest museum, has unexpectedly been put in the shade – by the very coffin in which he lies.

Ever since he went on show as part of a major revamp at Torquay Museum in 2007, Psamtek – the only human mummy on public display in the county – has captured the imagination of thousands of curious visitors.

But now his own mummy-shaped coffin has stolen the limelight, after museum officials were told the ornate near-4ft-long object (1.2m) is nearly 1,000 years older than the body it contains.

Further investigation reveals the coffin may have been made for a junior member of royalty more than a century before the time of the famous boy king Tutankhamun.

Museum curator Barry Chandler said: "It's an extraordinary discovery and means that the coffin is now the most spectacular exhibit in our entire collection.

"It's extremely rare – even the British Museum doesn't have one quite like it."