News

King Tutankhamun Family Project  

On 17 February 2010, Dr. Zahi Hawass held a press-conference about the results of the "King Tutankhamun Family Project". Carolien van Zoest was so kind to make a review about this research. Go read it here!

Next Saqqara day

The next Saqqara day will be held on Saturday June the 12th in Leiden (Lipsius Building). The lectures will be in Dutch except for the lecture of Harold Hays which will be held in English. The following persons will talk: Filip Coppens, Jacques van der Vliet, Robert Lunsingh Scheurleer, Maarten Raven and Harold Hays. More information will come.

New entries in the Glossary Five new entries are added in the Glossary. Go to Context > Glossary and read more about the following topics:
-Cenotaph
-Pyramidion
-Saqqara Kinglist
-Serapeum
-Syncretism

 

 

 

 

First Digging Diaries and Extra Photographs

The first digging diaries are online. Our Friends also have access to digging diaries by our studentassistants and extra photographs.

2010 Excavations

Yesterday, on the 5th of january, the Dutch teammembers arrived in Saqqara. There is a lot of work planned to do this year. To start with the hill south of the tomb of Ptahemwia will be cleared. Two shafts will be cleared which were found during the 2009 season. The first, shaft 2009/17, was found partly under the forecourt of the tomb of Horemheb and was re-used by Khay II for his tomb. The second, shaft 2009/23, is located south of the forecourt of the tomb of Meryneith. This shaft most likely belongs to Tatia. Furthermore the team will try to locate the Archaic Period entrances to the subterranean complexes below the tombs of Meryneith and Maya, by means of ground-penetrating radar. Further documentation of the reliefs and objects found in previous seasons will be done and the study of pottery and bones found in previous seasons will be continued. Also archaeobotanical analysis of a small sample of mudbricks found in the previous season will be performed. To help our egyptian colleagues the team will try to re-locate the bones of Queen Mutnodjmet for the project of Dr Zahi Hawass. As always a digging diary will inform us week by week about the work of the team.

Clickable plan of the tombs

The plan of the tombs which are found by our mission is now clickable! Go to Excavations > Tombs and scroll down. (Flash plugin required)

New items on the website

We have written an article about the joining of the hands with the statue of Horemheb and his wife in the British Museum. You can read it here .

Here you can find a report of the Saqqara Study Day which was held on 20 June this year.

And we also added a new plan of the tombs excavated by our mission in Saqqara.

Queens Mutnodjmet

Zahi Hawass hopes to locate the bones of queen Mutnodjmet, Horemheb's wife, in the tomb in Saqqara. He want to include her remains in the DNA rearch on the family of Tutankhamun. You can read about it in Al-Ahram.

Scene from the tomb of Horemheb The Luxor tomb of Horemheb re-opens

The tomb of Horemheb in Luxor is has been re-opened. A very modern equipment has been installed to control the rate of huminity within the tomb. Read more about it on the website of Zahi Hawass .

The trumpet of Tutankhamun

Friend who visited the Saqqara-day two years ago, will remember the lecture of Hans van den Berg about the trumpet of Tutankhamun. Now you can download a program with the recording of the original trumpet from the tomb of this king, some introducing notes and pictures. You can find the program here .

Newly identified statue of Horemheb in London

Statue of Horemheb and his wife (without the joined hands)With the acquisition of the Anastasi collection in 1839, the British Museum acquired a beautiful double statue of a seated couple (no. EA 36). Unfortunately, the statue was unfinished and did not carry any inscriptions, so that both the identity of the owners and the provenance of the statue remained a mystery. Stylistic analysis had already argued for a dating at the end of the 18th Dynasty, and even the name of Horemheb had already been suggested in some publications.

Now we have absolute proof of this because of a find made in 1976 by the Anglo-Dutch expedition, then working in the tomb of General Horemheb at Saqqara. This was a small limestone statue fragment depicting three hands holding each other, a very puzzling representation. Though the couples shown in Egyptian group statues often hold hands, this results in a depiction of just two clasped hands, not three. However, the British Museum statue indeed shows the wife with both hands clasped together in her lap, and the husband extending his arm to hold her ... except that the hands are now missing.

It was René van Walsem who suggested a couple of years ago that the Saqqara hands might join the BM statue. Accordingly, a BM restorer joined the Leiden team during the season 2009 in order to make a cast of the hand fragment. Back in London, he has now confirmed that the hands make a perfect fit to the statue. This means we finally have proof that EA 36 is in fact yet another funerary statue of Horemheb and his first wife and that it comes from the Saqqara tomb. The find will be published in The Memphite Tomb of Horemheb V, a volume which is now in preparation and will come out before the end of 2009.

 

2009 Excavations

The 2009 season ran from January 18 until March 4, 2009. It was devoted to completing our knowledge of the New Kingdom necropolis thus far excavated by the Dutch mission. Excavations were conducted in the area between the tomb of Pay and the forecourt of the tomb of Horemhab and in a limited area to the south of Meryneith, the latter to finish investigation of a Late Period burial complex discovered during the 2002 season. Ceramic and skeletal material from the previous seasons has been studied, and documentation of the inscriptions of the tomb of Ptahemwia has been brought close to completion. The Dutch team was augmented by a team of archaeologists from the Dutch-Flemish Institute at Cairo, who continued excavation of the Archaic Period burial complexes under the tomb of Maya and further investigated the Archaic complex under Meryneith. You can read the prelimenary report of this excavation here.


 

 

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