News from the Valley of the Kings

Somehow I missed this - thanks to Andie for spotting it.  I posted a video recently about TT34, the 25th Dynasty tomb of Montuemhat but Heritage Key have now posted five photos by the wonderful Sandro Vannini.

The page is very confusing,  If you click on Play Slides on the big image, it doesn't work. Instead it links to an anchor further down the page.  It's tempting to go back and try again.  There's no need.  Ignore the big picture and go down to any of the thumbnails lower down.  Click on any of these and the photo gallery will open up for you.

I recently reported that Jane Akshar had posted notes from the Mummification Museum lecture on Tomb 28, one of the Tombs of the Nobles on the West Bank near the Valley of the Kings. Andie has found an earlier announcement in Spanish of the expedition:

The Egyptian authorities have granted permission to Spain to work in a major unpublished 23rd Dynasty Theban tomb. A new Spanish archaeological project in Luxor (Egypt), in charge of the Institute of Studies of the Old Egypt of Madrid [will conduct the project].

There’s also a Web site for the project in Spanish but the front page reads like this:

Tomb No. 28 of Asasif (Friederike Kampp - Die Thebanische Nekropole catalog.) Zum Wandel des Grabgedankens von der 18th. bis zur 20th. Dynastie. (Mainz 1996) is located in the Theban necropolis in the area of Asasif South, front and on the tomb of Dyar (TT366), and adjacent to the tomb of Jeruef (TT192).

This tomb belongs to the period of the dynasty XVIII, during the reign of Amenhotep III (towards 1387 - C. 1348), and was excavated for a sombody who was vizier Amenhotep, valled Huy, whose existence is known securely from the monuments for the Jubilee prime of Amenhotep III, held during the 30th year of his reign.


Excavation of this tomb, with discoveries that could bring, requires a multi-disciplinary approach and will include the development of topographic, architectural and archaeological documentation. The excavation will identify the components that make up the tomb and their artistic and archaeological value, and will assure the architectural structures.


All this must be accompanied by consonant epigraphy, as well as the restoration and consolidation of the monument in all its parts work.

(I've had to paraphrasea bit to make sense.)

There’s more on other pages.
It's also reported Egyptologia by Francisco Martin Valentine and Teresa Bedman. They have put a copyright message on the page to prevent the copying of text so they clearly don’t want people to report even snippets to promote their site so I'll respect that and you’ll need to translate it yourself. The gist though is the that Tomb 28 is of the Amenhotep who was initially the Vizier of Amenhotep during the reign of Amenhotep III, but who later succeeded to the vizierate of Upper Egypt. (Confusingly, Wikipedia reports that his tomb was found in Saqqara.) He disappeared around the 35th year of Amenhotep’s reign and his [Theban] tomb and monuments were later defaced, the authors suppose by adherents of Akhenaten.  Their article is mostly biography of Vizier Amenhotep; there is little about the excavation of the tomb.

This video isn't really new - probably about 3 years old - but I have never seen it and it has only recently been posted on YouTube.  Indeed, I hadn't really heard about this tomb, but with The Lost Tombs of Thebes in bookshops, perhaps it's a good time to air this video about the lagest non-royal tomb in the Theban Hills near the Valley of the Kings.  I can't embed so you will need to watch the video over at YouTube but I really recommend this documentary.  (Warning - it's nearly an hour long, so treat youself to a glass of wine!)

If you want a quick into then this article, with a photo a Jane Akshar, dates to the re-opening of the tomb in 2005.

Photo by tschaut

PS If you prefer to buy a DVD, the site of the production company offers one for a rather large €62. There is a free transcript though.

There is a great new article and video on Dr Hawass site.  I won't bother with a write up here as the article itself is so well written.  It is promoting the good doctor's new book which I'll put on my Christmas list!

Tomb TT34 is one of the Tombs of the Nobles in the Theban Hills not far from the Valley of the Kings.



I'd not realised this tomb complex was so big. There is a large sun court above the shaft tombs.  There are some more details and pictures here, including one of the most beautiful reliefs I have ever seen of Montuemhat spearing fish. The video describes the work byDr Farouk Gomaa.  He reports that the shaft tomb of Montuemhat had not been found, but work continues to locate it.  That sounds promising but as the credits for this film show that it was shot in 2006, if they do find anything we may have a very long wait before we hear about it.  (Which makes one wonder how long we will have to wait to see photos / video of a major tomb in the Valley of the Kings.  It also feeds the conspiract theories.  I have just posted on the Old Kingdom blog the latest from Andrew Collins on the now infamous Tomb of Birds.  The time between discoveries and publication makes me much more willing to believe that Andrew Collin has found a cave system beneath the Giza Plateau but which is being witheld from the public by the authorities for now.)

Montuemhat was a Mayor of Thebes during the 25th Dynasty.  There is a small room in the Mut Precinct at Karnak which is called the "Montuemhat Crypt".  The walls have reliefs carrying a biography of Montuemhat.  There are pictures here.  If anybody has any other good resources on Montuemhat, then please add a comment - you can include links in comments if you want.  It goes without saying that any news on the shaft tomb of Montuemhat would be wonderful.

The Griffith Institute have made some tracings of Tombs of the Nobles by the Davies available online. (Thanks to Jane Akshare for the alert.) So far only 5 tombs are online but they plan to add the rest over time.

I'm a big fan of the tombs of the nobles so this new material on tomb TT192 (Kheruef) is very welcome.

Dr Hawass has announced discovery of a new burial chamber by a Spanish team at the bottom of a shaft in the Tomb of Djehuty (TT11) at Dra Abu El-Naga on the West Bank of the Nile near Luxor. There's no permalink yet for the main story so just go to the main site:

• http://www.hawass.com/

There's not a lot of text, but this one is the meat of it:

The discovery is remarkable, as only four other decorated burial chambers dating to this period are known. Although the names of Djehuty, his father, and his mother were intentionally erased in the upper part of the monument, they are intact in the newly discovered lower burial chamber. At the entrance to the lower chamber, the Spanish team found five gold earrings and two gold rings, which date to the early- to mid-18th Dynasty and probably belonged to Djehuty or to a member of his family.

However, there are an extra couple of pages with photos that do have permalinks:

• Paintings (Book of the Dead) on one wall & celining


• Image of Goddess Nut

In 2003 a sarcophagus of a woman was discovered buried in the tombs courtyard. It is not known who she is. Djehhuty was overseer of the treasury and overseer of the works for Hatshepsut. He lived on into Tuthmosis III's reign. Both pharaohs are represented in the tomb.

Reminder that Jane Akshar wrote up a lecture on the work at TT11 given at the Mummification Museum in February. The main website for Proyecto Dehuty gives the history of the Spanish team's work. The most recent news isn't on there yet but no doubt will be when they write up the 2009 season; however, it's best to ignore the English version of the site and jump straight in to the Spanish one which has a day by day dig diary replete with lots of photos. This is an extract from the first entry of the season.

On one hand digging burial chamber of the tomb of Djehuty we discover at the end of the previous season, after digging the pit depth of eight meters leading up to it. The camera has a considerable size and is filled with earth and stone almost to the ceiling. Therefore, we do not know what we are going to find when the excavator. Everything seems to indicate, by a few sherds visible on the surface, which has been re-used around 1000 years before Christ, or nearly 500 years after it was buried Djehuty, but our luck seems to have escaped the action of the looters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which are by far the most devastating and violent.

That makes it clear that the chamber was discovered last year (not early in 2009 as Dr Hawass' press release indicates - we are getting used to that by now) but needed to be dug clear in 2009. It's worth reading through the dig diary from about 21st January as that's the day they got access to the new chamber and is the first report of their findings in the tomb but later days cover finding human bones near the entrance. Warning, though. The photos shown inline are only thumbnails. You need to click on them to see them enlarged. The temptation is to rely on a Google translation to read the text but if you do that the photos don't enlarge when you click on them: if you wish to see the bigger photos you need to click on them from the original Spanish page.

Kate

As an aside, can I also recommend the diary entry from 16th January 2009. This covers their visit to ...

the tomb of the three princesses who were handed over to Syrian king Tutmosis III as a way to seal and ensure good diplomatic relations with Egypt when the Egyptian king established and consolidated the Egyptian authority on Palestine and southern Syria as far as the Euphrates River near the town of Karkemish. The tomb was discovered by Howard Carter in 1916 and the magnificent treasure is now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

It's something that isn't often mentioned online so it may be of interest to some readers. Indeed one of my reasons for blogging it here is so that I can find it again myself!

Thanks to Andie Byrne for linking to the Preliminary Report by the University of Pisa 2008 season in tomb TT14. The photos in that report are stunning, there's a really clear plan of the site and good, informative text. Recommended reading.

It's all happening at present. This is a photo taken by LanyonM on 20th January showing archaeologists working at one of the Tombs of the Nobles.