Discovery Announcement!
The South Asasif Conservation Project is very grateful to the Ministry of Antiquities and Dr. Mohamed Ismail Khaled, Secretary-General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities for their support of the work of the Project and their announcement of our recent discovery.
Middle Kingdom Burials of the South Asasif Necropolis
Dr. Elena Pischikova, Director, South Asasif Conservation Project
The Egyptian-American mission South Asasif Conservation Project, working under the auspices of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, has discovered a Middle Kingdom tomb with several intact burials while clearing the south side of the superstructure of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty tomb of Karabasken (TT 391) in 2023-24. This is the first Middle Kingdom tomb found in the area. It was cleared by the field team of the Project under the supervision of Marion Brew.
Among the finds are beautiful necklaces, bracelets, armlets, scarab rings and girdles made of amethyst, carnelian, garnet, blue-green glazed faience, and feldspar. The amulets incorporated into the jewelry include hippo heads, hawks, ba amulets, wedjat eyes, Taweret amulets, and a snake head, among others.
A necklace of 30 amethyst barrel beads with an amazonite ba amulet in the center, and a girdle of carnelian ball beads connected by double strings of blue faience ring beads are some of the most exquisite pieces among the found jewelry.
The burials were significantly damaged by floods, which destroyed the wood of the coffins and the linen wrappings. Various contents of the burials that were made of less perishable materials are well preserved and were found in situ among the skeletal remains of the bodies. This particular situation allowed the team of Dr. Afaf Wahba, Dr. Katherine Blakeney and conservator Ali Hassan Ibrahim to trace the original positions of strings of beads caked in the dried flood mud around the bones, and reconstruct the closest possible arrangement to the authentic stringing.
Two burials also contained copper or copper alloy mirrors with elegantly carved ivory handles. One of the mirrors was found with a lotiform handle, while the second displays the rather rare design of a four-faced Hathor presenting her as a woman with austere features.
Another important find is a green-blue glazed faience fertility figurine with truncated legs. It is well-modelled and decorated with a variety of jewelry and lozenge markings on the legs and torso. Her cropped hair is painted black. The head is pierced with holes arranged in three sections. The holes were intended for the attachment of "hair". Almost 4000 mud beads found next to the figurine constituted her original hair.
An offering tray associated with the burials is of a square shape with a low border and a water channel in the middle surrounded with relief representations of a bull's head, ribs, leg, loaf of bread and other offerings.
In total, eleven burials were discovered in SACP 40. Most of the bodies were placed side-by-side in wooden coffins oriented north to south with their heads facing in either direction. Dr. Afaf Wahba identified the skeletons of five women, two men and three children. Burial assemblages were found in burials 2, 4, 6, 8, 9 and 10. Most of the jewelry was found in female burials. The children and one of the men did not have any burial goods. Therefore, an imposing necklace found on the man from Burial 9 is of special interest. It consists of 40 faience ball beads separated by single faience cylinder beads with two cylinder carnelian beads flanking a hippo head amulet on the back.
The typology of some of the found objects allows to date the original burials to the early 12th Dynasty. This family tomb must have been used for several generations through the 12th and beginning of the 13th Dynasties.
The unearthing of the first Middle Kingdom tomb in the South Asasif necropolis alters its history, placing South Asasif within the sprawling Theban Middle Kingdom necropolis.
This significant discovery contributes to our understanding of the burial practices and rituals of the Theban necropolis in the Middle Kingdom as well as presenting a beautiful collection of exquisitely crafted jewelry well preserved in situ.
Further exploration of the Middle Kingdom burials in the South Asasif necropolis will significantly advance our ongoing research on Middle Kingdom influences on the art and funerary rituals of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty.
Fertility Figurine
-- Sent from my Linux system.
