Showing posts with label sarcophagus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sarcophagus. Show all posts

Monday, March 3, 2014

Sarcophagus leads Penn Museum team in Egypt to the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh

Discovery provides evidence of a forgotten Egyptian dynasty from 3,600 years ago

Archaeologists working at the southern Egyptian site of Abydos have discovered the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh: Woseribre Senebkay—and the first material proof of a forgotten Abydos Dynasty, ca. 1650-1600 BC. Working in cooperation with Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, a team from the Penn Museum, University of Pennsylvania, discovered king Senebkay's tomb close to a larger royal tomb, recently identified as belonging to a king Sobekhotep (probably Sobekhotep I, ca. 1780 BC) of the 13th Dynasty.

The discovery of pharaoh Senebkay's tomb is the culmination of work that began during the summer of 2013 when the Penn Museum team, led by Dr. Josef Wegner, Egyptian Section Associate Curator of the Penn Museum, discovered a huge 60-ton royal sarcophagus chamber at South Abydos. The sarcophagus chamber, of red quartzite quarried and transported to Abydos from Gebel Ahmar (near modern Cairo), could be dated to the late Middle Kingdom, but its owner remained unidentified. Mysteriously, the sarcophagus had been extracted from its original tomb and reused in a later tomb—but the original royal owner remained unknown when the summer season ended.

In the last few weeks of excavations, fascinating details of a series of kings' tombs and a lost dynasty at Abydos have emerged. Archaeologists now know that the giant quartzite sarcophagus chamber derives from a royal tomb built originally for a pharaoh Sobekhotep—probably Sobekhotep I, the first king of Egypt's 13th Dynasty. Fragments of that king's funerary stela were found just recently in front of his huge, badly robbed tomb. A group of later pharaohs (reigning about a century and a half later during Egypt's Second Intermediate Period) were reusing elements from Sobekhotep's tomb for building and equipping their own tombs. One of these kings (whose name is still unknown) had extracted and reused the quartzite sarcophagus chamber. Another king's tomb found just last week is that of the previously unknown pharaoh: Woseribre-Senebkay.

A Lost Pharaoh and a Forgotten Dynasty

The newly discovered tomb of pharaoh Senebkay dates to ca. 1650 BC during Egypt's Second Intermediate Period. The identification was made by Dr. Wegner and Kevin Cahail, Ph.D. student, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Pennsylvania. The tomb of Senebkay consists of four chambers with a decorated limestone burial chamber. The burial chamber is painted with images of the goddesses Nut, Nephthys, Selket, and Isis flanking the king's canopic shrine. Other texts name the sons of Horus and record the king's titulary and identify him as the "king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Woseribre, the son of Re, Senebkay."

Senebkay's tomb was badly plundered by ancient tomb robbers who had ripped apart the king's mummy as well as stripped the pharaoh's tomb equipment of its gilded surfaces. Nevertheless, the Penn Museum archaeologists recovered the remains of king Senebkay amidst debris of his fragmentary coffin, funerary mask, and canopic chest. Preliminary work on the king's skeleton of Senebkay by Penn graduate students Paul Verhelst and Matthew Olson (of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations) indicates he was a man of moderate height, ca. 1.75 m (5'10), and died in his mid to late 40s.

The discovery provides significant new evidence on the political and social history of Egypt's Second Intermediate Period. The existence of an independent "Abydos Dynasty," contemporary with the 15th (Hyksos) and 16th (Theban) Dynasties, was first hypothesized by Egyptologist K. Ryholt in 1997. The discovery of pharaoh Senebkay now proves the existence of this Abydos dynasty and identifies the location of their royal necropolis at South Abydos in an area anciently called Anubis-Mountain. The kings of the Abydos Dynasty placed their burial ground adjacent to the tombs of earlier Middle Kingdom pharaohs including Senwosret III (Dynasty 12, ca. 1880-1840 BC), and Sobekhotep I (ca. 1780 BC). There is evidence for about 16 royal tombs spanning the period ca. 1650-1600 BC. Senebkay appears to be one of the earliest kings of the "Abydos Dynasty." His name may have appeared in a broken section of the famous Turin King List (a papyrus document dating to the reign of Ramses II,ca. 1200 BC) where two kings with the throne name "Woser...re" are recorded at the head of a group of more than a dozen kings, most of whose names are entirely lost.

The tomb of pharaoh Senebkay is modest in scale. An important discovery was the badly decayed remains of Senebkay's canopic chest. This chest was made of cedar wood that had been reused from the nearby tomb of Sobekhotep I and still bore the name of that earlier king, covered over by gilding. Such reuse of objects from the nearby Sobekhotep tomb by Senebkay, like the reused sarcophagus chamber found during the summer, provides evidence that suggests the limited resources and isolated economic situation of the Abydos Kingdom which lay in the southern part of Middle Egypt between the larger kingdoms of Thebes (Dynasties 16-17) and the Hyksos (Dynasty 15) in northern Egypt. Unlike these numbered dynasties, the pharaohs of the Abydos Dynasty were forgotten to history and their royal necropolis unknown until this discovery of Senebkay's tomb.

"It's exciting to find not just the tomb of one previously unknown pharaoh, but the necropolis of an entire forgotten dynasty," noted Dr. Wegner. "Continued work in the royal tombs of the Abydos Dynasty promises to shed new light on the political history and society of an important but poorly understood era of Ancient Egypt."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2014. “Sarcophagus leads Penn Museum team in Egypt to the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh”. EurekAlert. Posted: January 16, 2014. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-01/uop-slp011614.php

Friday, May 25, 2012

A Mummy Switcheroo

Min, the ancient Egyptian god of phallus and fertility, might have brought some worldy advantages to his male worshippers, but offered little protection when it came to spiritual life.

Researchers at the Mummy Project-Fatebenefratelli hospital in Milan, Italy, established that one of Min's priests at Akhmim, Ankhpakhered, was not resting peacefully in his finely painted sarcophagus.

"We discovered that the sarcophagus does not contain the mummy of the priest, but the remains of another man dating between 400 and 100 BC," Egyptologist Sabina Malgora said.

According to the researchers, the finding could point to a theft more than 2000 years ago. The relatives of the mysterious man may have stolen the beautiful sarcophagus, which dates to a period between the 22nd 23rd Dynasty (about 945-715 BC), to assure their loved one a proper burial and afterlife.

"It's just an hypothesis. However, this was a rather common practice, especially during periods of economical and political crisis, when the necropolis were left without much surveillance," Malgora, co-director of the Mummy Project with Luca Bernardo, director of Maternal and Child Unit Operations at the Fatebenefratelli hospital, told Discovery News.

Indeed, by the end of the 20th Dynasty, tomb robbery was such a serious problem at Thebes (the modern Luxor) that royal mummies and their relatives were secretly moved to a secure hidden tomb in Deir el-Bahri, now known as Theban Tomb (TT) 320.

Discovered near the end of the 19th century, the Deir el-Bahri cache revealed an extraordinary array of mummified remains belonging to more than 50 kings, queens and nobility.

Kept at the Archaeological Museum in Asti, where it arrived in 1903 from a private collection, the sarcophagus boasted a mysterious history -- it is not known how it arrived to Italy -- and a puzzling mummy.

"It had a simple bendage with no amulets at all. We know that a high priest would have been buried differently," Malgora said.

Finally, CTscan images revealed that inside the wrappings rested a skeleton placed on a reed support. This suggests that the body was recovered some time after the death, placed on a kind of stretcher and then wrapped.

While the fate of Ankhpakhered's mummy remains unknown, Malgora and colleagues have managed to shed new light on the man that for more than two millennia usurped the priest's coffin.

He did not use drugs, did not suffer from any particular disease, and did not die from any violent or traumatic event.

Some 2950 images from the CT scan made it possible to reconstruct a 3D life size image of his skull. Carried by Jonathan Elias, director of the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium, the subsequent face reconstruction revealed a man with a prominent nose, a slightly asymmetric eye and eyebrow and a slightly hollow left cheek, caused by the lack of some teeth.

"He had nothing to do with a high priest. He was a hard worker. His knees show signs of wear and tear, as if he was carrying weight or stones," Malgora said.
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References:

Lorenzi, Rossella. 2012. "A Mummy Switcheroo". Discovery News. Posted: May 15, 2012. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/history/ankhpakhered-tomb-120515.html