ASP '23 Week 4: A corn mummy, a stela, and stairs?!
Happy Friday! It's actually quite surreal to be writing up a summary for the fourth week of excavation already. Don't get me wrong, I currently have a countdown prominently displayed on my phone which tells me when Matt gets here [12 days, 1 hour, 25 minutes, and 45 seconds...44 seconds...43...], but excavation-wise, this has been such a great example of how much you can get done in 6 weeks, and how little ground that actually covers. Also, a quick note: as always, this information and these photos are locked down and not to be shared. That being said, I did want to give credit for most of this week's photos to Ayman Damarany, our photographer (who is also an archaeologist and Inspector of Antiquities).
An overview of my Ops end of day on Monday.
Starting the week after a quick break in Luxor was invigorating, mainly because we had some pits to work on, and some new ops to open up. We were sure we would be moving South - we had surface architecture along that wall and wanted to see how far it extended. We were waiting on an opening photo though, and with a "why not" attitude, I decided we should work on the 5x10 Op to the West, as we had already started and could move whenever the need arose.
Don't worry, said photo was eventually taken...
While we started work there, we also began on two of the larger pits (both of which we had assumed were small shafts). These progressed more slowly than usual, as they had been disturbed in a way that resulted in several layers of goods, coffin pieces, and skeletal remains.
Yours truly recording the coffin pieces in one of the pits.
This pit also had a strange red stain in one corner, likely from a painted coffin hitting up against it.
My view while recording.
Both pits ended up having intact partial coffin bottoms, and while there was no overall preservation of decoration, we did get a number of painted wood pieces and even painted plaster pieces! They also contained botanical remains (like intact dom palm nuts!), linen pieces, and some human hair.
The bottom of an in situ coffin.
Part of one of the coffins - can you imagine how colorful it was in its heyday?!
A little braid.
"Emily! You said you wouldn't share human remains and now you're posting hair!" I promise I haven't broken my vow. It's pretty likely that this was a human hair braid that was part of a wig. Braided wigs were all the rage for both men and women in this period, and would have been very common in wealthy burials. Okay, now back to business.
A weird little pit, discussed below.
I then moved along to work on two additional pits, both of which appeared under the pottery deposit I introduced you all to last week. These were weird, while also being a great reminder of how much burial practices can differ. The first ended up being a pit with a beautiful cut, until it reached a wonky bottom with, what appears to be, an extension carved into the gebel for the feet of the deceased. This is common, we saw this the first week in my first pit, but this one was carved in a way that meant the extension was almost completely carved out. They left only a thin, 3cm top over it, almost like a vault. The other pit was equally as weirdly shaped, being lovingly referred to as "the bean pit" due to its bean-like appearance. This one also threw off the yoke of an East-West orientation for a North-South one... Strange, but you do you, I guess.
The bean pit before complete excavation.
Okay, okay, I've held you from the new Op and it's wonderful data long enough. Did I do a good enough job distracting you? So during all of this time, half of the team was working on that 5x10 Op (Op 22). After the first day of work, we had the outline of what appeared to be a massive shaft. Bigger than the last one, and at least twice the size of the one before. I didn't want to get my hopes up, since the last one had to be stopped (and it was only 10m to the North), but I was excited. We also came down on an odd little mud-brick pile made up of two large bricks, and a brick split in two, to create a little tented structure.
The cute, little pile of bricks.
Honestly, we all assumed it was just debris from something nearby or part of a collapsed superstructure. We documented it and left it for the next day.
An auspicious moon the next morning! Okay, it's just the moon, but it was an exciting day, so I'm saying it was auspicious.
I started the next morning by photographing the piece for my own record and then pulling away the two small bricks, and one side brick. It...wasn't empty. I didn't know what I was looking at, but I saw what looked like a folded, white object at the base of the brick.
What I saw, plus a little cleaning around the edges.
Turns out, it was a tiny coffin! On top, in the sand, was a small dish, as well as two mud seals depicting a djed pillar (thought to be a symbolic representation of the backbone of the god Osiris). We ran through every possible explanation - this was a tiny baby that had died and been laid to rest here, maybe it was a baby animal left here as a votive offering, or it could even be an ushabti (a small funerary figurine). Whatever it was, it was intact, and we weren't going to open it until we got to the lab (did I mention, this happened at 7am and we don't have lab until 4pm? TORTURE!). This resulted in me carrying the coffin around the site with me to keep it safe and intact, and it meant I even scored the front seat on the ride home.
The coffin in situ.
The shrouded coffin at breakfast.
The ride home.
We cheated time a bit and got the whole team to convene after lunch to open it. Aza, our conservator, helped out, making sure that the lid stayed intact, and then began slowly removing the sand from inside. So what was it?
The team has titled this "portrait of a worried mother"
It was a "corn" mummy! These are small faux mummies, some in the form of Osiris (which this appears to be), that are made and offered as votives in religious or funerary settings. What is even cooler is that these are usually found dating to the Late Period, with them being exceedingly rare before the Third Intermediate Period. This one seems to be from the New Kingdom, which makes it an exceptional example of an artifact type we have very few of! Ours also had two additional mud seals in situ on the mummy, keeping the wrapping closed. Amazing! We are looking into getting it x-rayed to see what is contained inside the surviving wrapping (but the most likely thing is botanical material).
Cleaning the mummy.
One of the mud seals.
The cleaned mummy.
We were very excited about this new Op now, and refocused all of our attention on it the next day. Being that the large shaft structure was going through the Western wall of the Op, we decided to open the other 5x10 half, making it a full 10x10. Within an hour, we had come down on surface architecture including a small mud-brick chapel with the footprint of a stela in it. The area around it turned out to include a mud floor, additional mud brick remains, a number of in situ pottery deposits, and an area where mud plastering was prepared (with finger marks intact!). This, plus the shaft, provides an amazing snapshot of what the funerary activity and building looked like in this area, and represents some of the first looks at what the surface could have looked like in this period.
The eastern half of Op 22 before we opened the western half. The pipe running through the Op is a modern water pipe that (thankfully) didn't terribly disturb the surface around it.
The chapel outline with stela chips.
Some intact pottery that was deposited under the mud floor.
The mud-surface.
In the process of cleaning this area we also came down on (drumroll please), a piece of stela! A stela was somewhat similar to a gravestone in Egypt, it often contained a depiction of the deceased, an offering formula, and names/titles. This piece does not fit in the chapel, so it seems we had the erection of a number of these in the area. These were very popular with foreign treasure hunters in the 1800s so it is likely that one or two from this cemetery (or possibly even a few hundred), are in private collections somewhere, never to re-united with the person they represent. Here is your yearly reminder to never purchase antiquities! The one thing that Indiana Jones got right, was that the items belong in a museum (in the place they were found). For more info, you can read an interview I did on the topic with the incredible Sam Childress here: https://samanthachildress.substack.com/p/i-talk-to-an-egyptologist-about-antiquities
Ashraf, myself, and our Inspector, Amber, with the stela.
Me and the stela!
Surely, you will notice, you can't really see anything (first of all, rude). It looks like water runoff degraded some of the central hieroglyphs, BUT we do have intact text along the bottom and right side. We also have the leg of a chair that the deceased would be seated on. So cool!
Text along the bottom (this would be read horizontally, right to left).
Additional text on the right side.
This has already been a longer update (and I am only covering my own Ops today...), but I have one more cool thing to share. The shaft (sans pipe, which has been removed), is continuing to surprise us, and we are only about 2m down. The size rapidly shrank after about a meter, creating a strange platform around the cut. Debbie (our director) and I believed it to be intentional, but that is hard to prove, as we don't know if perhaps the gebel was bad quality and the size had to be adjusted. Shortly after we had this conversation though, a set of steps from the platform down along the North wall, appeared. It seems like the pit was cut on a slope, from the NW corner, around, increasing in depth, until it got to the steps, almost like a ramp. Unfortunately, we had to pause there for the week, but none of us know of a comparative example of a tomb constructed like this. Stairways are used in the Early Dynastic Period (~1500+ years before), but we need to figure out what on earth a stairway is doing in a shaft tomb. Overall? Pretty amazing, and potentially history-altering!
The shaft being excavated.
The steps begin right below the mudbricks (pardon my shadow).
So, overall, an amazing week! I can't wait to see where all of this leads...
That's all for now, I hope you all had a wonderful week and are staying safe and warm. Talk soon! Emily
My lab partner this week.