Museum Pieces - Belt buckle inscribed for Nefertari

Belt buckle inscribed for Nefertari

Egyptian
1295–1186 B.C.

Findspot, Thebes, Egypt

DIMENSIONS
Height x width: 4.7 x 11.5 cm (1 7/8 x 4 1/2 in.)

ACCESSION NUMBER
04.1955

MEDIUM OR TECHNIQUE
Silver, gold, feldspar, carnelian, blue frit, glass

Inscribed for “the Osiris, great royal wife, his beloved, mistress of Lower Egypt.”

Provenance
Said to be from the Valley of the Queens (Thebes), Tomb of Queen Nefertari (QV 66). 1904: purchased for the MFA from Mohamed Mohassib, Luxor, Egypt by Albert M. Lythgoe as part of a group (04.1953-04.1956, 04.1766-04.1769) for £40. (Accession Date: January 1, 1904)

Credit Line
Emily Esther Sears Fund

Luxor celebrates 110th anniversary of Queen Nefertari Tomb discovery

By Rany Mostafa

CAIRO: In commemoration of the 110th anniversary of the discovery of Queen Nefertari’s Tomb, the Tourism Ministry has organized a 10-day celebration starting Oct. 15 at the Valley of the Queens west of Luxor, Ahmed Shoukry, the International Tourism Sector Chairman at the General Authority for Tourism, told The Cairo Post Saturday.

Photocredit: Wikimedia Commons

Queen Nefertari (1295 B.C.-1255 B.C.) was the wife of Pharaoh Ramses II (1279 B.C.-1223 B.C.), and one of the most famous Egyptian queens. Her tomb was discovered in 1904 by Italian archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli (1856-1928), who was the director of the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Sheref el-Sabban, dean of the Tourism and Hotels Faculty at Minya University, told The Cairo Post Saturday.

The celebrations are organized by the Tourism Ministry in collaboration with the Italian Embassy in Egypt, Civil Aviation Ministry and the Tourism Promotion Authority, according to Shoukry.

“Media figures from both Egypt and Italy, Italian archaeologists and tour operators will be attending the celebrations, which are expected to pull in more tourists to Luxor and Upper Egypt,” said Shoukry.

For two decades, the tomb has been under restoration and access was restricted to VIPs, archaeological missions and private visits, Sabban said.

“In 1998, an international team of archaeologists and restoration workers undertook the restoration of the tomb, which has been suffering from rainwater that has leaked into the tomb over thousands of years. Salt deposits also ruined most of the plaster layers on its walls,” Sabban added.

In July, the Supreme Council of Antiquities announced it would launch a project to build an exact, full-size replica of Queen Nefertari’s tomb to divert tourists away from the badly damaged original tomb while still providing them the chance to experience what the original looks like.

“The facsimile production of the tomb will record every tiny detail and dozens of square yards of inscriptions and depictions of scenes found in the original tomb,” Shoukry previously told The Cairo Post.

However, Magdy Mohsen, a local tour guide working in Luxor, also previously told The Cairo Post that the tomb is the best preserved and the most spectacular in Egypt.

“During my few visits to the tomb, I was always just like my guests—excited! At the end of the 10- minute-visit, my guests, fascinated with its bright colors, all say it must have been finished and painted yesterday,” Mohsen said.

Sources:

http://thecairopost.com/news/126818/travel-antiquities/luxor-celebrates-110th-anniversary-of-queen-nefertari-tomb-discovery

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maler_der_Grabkammer_der_Nefertari_002.jpg?uselang=nl

What happened to the missing mummies of Egypt's lost queens?

Joann Fletcher ventures through the temples of Egypt to uncover the 'lost queens' of ancient times

By Joann Fletcher7:00AM BST 04 Sep 2014

On 2nd February 1925, the photographer from the Harvard-Boston archaeological expedition was setting up his camera tripod on the rocky plateau of Giza close to the base of the Great Pyramid. Having some degree of difficulty in his attempt to get the legs on an equal footing, he dislodged what he assumed was a small piece of limestone, but which closer inspection revealed to be a fragment of plaster, the kind of plaster traditionally used in ancient times to seal up the entrance of a tomb.

With the same archaeological team having already made a series of spectacular discoveries at Giza over the previous 20 years, most notably a large group of superb statues of King Menkaure, builder of Giza’s third pyramid, this new discovery was so unexpected the excavation’s director George Reisner was still in the US. So the task of opening the tomb fell to his British assistant Alan Rowe and his Egyptian head foreman Said Ahmed Said, whose removal of the plaster covering revealed a 100 foot vertical shaft cut down into the limestone bedrock, filled solid with limestone masonry and yet more plaster. Only after a month when this had all been removed was it then possible for the archaeologists to descend to the very bottom of the shaft to reach the doorway, marked with the official seal of King Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid.

Although the rock-cut rectangular chamber which lay beyond was only 15 by 8 feet, the archaeologists could see ‘the dazzle of gold’ through a small gap at the top of the doorway. They could also see the chamber was crammed full with all manner of wonderful things whose inscriptions, initially read with the aid of binoculars and later at close quarters, revealed the contents had belonged to Khufu’s mother, Queen Hetepheres (c.2600 BC). With her status as queen mother making her ‘first lady’, at that time of greater importance than the king’s wife, she was certainly the most important woman to her son Khufu since the first tomb he built at Giza was for her, located “in the most important point in his own royal cemetery” noted Reisner’s colleague Noel Wheeler.