Cheikh abd el-Gourna

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The Theban Tombs of Sennefer TT 96 and Amenemope TT 29

On the west of the Nile, facing the modern city of Luxor and bordering the cultivated alluvial plain, spreads the necropolis of the ancient city of Thebes, the religious capital of Egypt for two millennia. The pharaohs of the New Kingdom (ca. 1550-1050 BC) were buried in a dry valley deep in the moutain, thereby associating the deceased kings with the nocturnal course of the sun toward divine rebirth. Dominated by the natural pyramid of the Qurn, the Theban mountain also sheltered the cemeteries of the high dignitaries of the army, the clergy, the members of the royal court. Scattered over two kilometers, between the modern villages of Qurnet Marei and Dra Abu el-Naga, more than four hundred private tombs have been dug in the limestone hills and decorated, forming what can be considered as the largest « museum » of paintings surviving from Antiquity and included by the Unesco on the World Heritage list. The Université libre de Bruxelles undertook the conservation, study and publication of two tombs located on the southern reach of the Sheikh abd el-Qurna hill. The first belonged to the Prince of the City (of Thebes) Sennefer, and carries the number 96 (or TT 96, for Theban Tomb 96). The second, situated about thirty meters southwards, belonged to his cousin, the vizier and mayor of the city (of Thebes) Amenemope (Imen-em-ipet) and bears the number 29. These two important persons served under the reign of Amenhotep II (ca. 1427-1401 BC) and belonged to the inner circle of the king’s entourage. Sennefer’s wife, Senetnay, even carried the title of Great Nurse of the King The oldest modern mention of the tombs of Sennefer and Amenemope appears in the manuscript of Robert Hay, a British traveller who stayed several months in Qurna in 1826. The exact conditions of their discovery unfortunately remains unknown to us. The tomb of Sennefer received the visit of Jean-François Champollion during his stay in Egypt. However, it was only in 1903 that the tomb was cleared entirely by Robert Mond, who left only a short report of his work in the Annales du Service des Antiquités. The same year, the Egyptologist Howard Carter, then Chief Inspector for Upper Egypt of the Antiquities Service, transformed the chapel into a storeroom to receive antiquities discovered in this sector of the necropolis, by endowing it with a safe door. It retained this status until the mid-1990’s, when the most important pieces were transported to new official storerooms. As for the decorated funerary chamber of Sennefer, it was opened to the public soon after its discovery and still receives several thousand visitors annually. The status of the tomb of Amemenope was quite different. Rediscovered in 1895 by the British Egyptologist Percy Newberry, the tomb was the subject of only a very limited investigation. This was mostly directed towards the copy of a text preserved in the chapel. No archaeological clearing had been undertaken since. The courtyard still presented an important filling when the University of Brussels mission, under the aegis of the Seminar of art and archaeology of ancient Egypt of the ULB and, later, the CReA, was granted the concession of the two tombs in June 1999. The first season of excavation and conservation was organised the same year, and the work continues with the financial support of the ULB, a grant of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research and, since 2000, a grant of the Ministry for the Higher Education, the Scientific Research and International Relations of the French Community, first granted by Minister Mrs Françoise Dupuis and renewed by Mrs Marie-Dominique Simonet. The conservation and restoration of the wall paintings is carried out in collaboration with the « Centre de recherches et d’étude technologique des arts plastiques » of the ULB under the direction of Prof. Dr Catheline Périer D’Ieteren, whereas the archaeological study brings in various scientific collaborations : the University of Liège with Prof. Dr Dimitri Laboury (epipraphy) ; the « Centre de recherche sur l’histoire des textes » of the French CNRS with Prof. Dr. Anne Boud’hors and Dr Chantal Heurtel (Coptic ostraca and papyri) ; the Paris-IV Sorbonne University with Prof. Dr Pierre Tallet (hieratic documents) ; the Institut français d’archéologie orientale in Cairo with Dr Claire Nexton (botanical remains). The work of the mission is carried out in close collaboration with the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Theban tomb nr 29 was dug for the mayor of the city and vizier Amenemope, under the reign of Amenhotep II. A hieratic inscription discovered on the south wall of the courtyard mentioning the construction or an embellishment of the tomb is dated to the fourth month of the peret season, year 11, which thus places the monument in the first half of the reign. However, the vizier never occupied the tomb. As some others close to the king, Amenemope received the distinguished privilege to be buried in the Valley of the Kings, in the immediate vicinity of his sovereign’s tomb. The small chamber of KV 48, discovered in 1906 by Edward Ayrton, yielded fragments of a wooden coffin and several funerary statuettes bearing the name of the vizier Amenemope. The excavation of TT 29 nevertheless revealed the existence of several shafts and sloping passages leading to underground burial chambers. These chambers had probably been occupied by relatives of the owner or his descendants. Several objects, among which two limestone lids of canopic jars decorated with a human head can be assigned on stylistic grounds to the reign of Tuthmosis IV or Amenhotep III and indicate the presence of burials soon after the vizier’s death. Among these characters appears a Menkheper, first prophet of the god Montu-Lord-of-Thebes. All these funerary chambers were unfortunately disturbed by various plunderings – probably already in Antiquity – too much to allow to assign the remains of these funerary equipments to any definite person. The reoccupation of the tomb probably continued during the Late Period in the first millennium BC, as evidenced by the material datable to the Third Intermediate Period (coffins, ushebtis) and from the 26th Dynasty (ceramics containing remnants of embalming, coffins etc.). The Ptolemaic and Early Roman periods are however absent, as is also the case in most of the tombs of this area of the hill of Sheikh abd el-Qurna. The tomb then remained abandoned, the courtyard and the chapel strewn with the remains left by the looters, scattered over the courtyard, the funerary shafts left open. The entire courtyard was then covered by a thick layer of limestone rubble, about 80 cm in thickness, nearly without intersticial earth. The Late Roman – Byzantine sherds contained in this rubble indicate a late date, probably towards the VIth or VIIth century AD. This important accumulation must be placed in connection with an earthquake of great amplitude, which opened a broad fault crossing right through the chapel. At the beginning of the VIIIth cent. AD, a Coptic anchorite found shelter in the abandoned tomb, as did many of his co-religionists in the necropolis. In the courtyard, he installed directly on the level of the limestone rubble various small constructions of mudbricks and dug an elongated pit destined to receive the wooden frame of a vertical loom. The archives of the anchorite, named Frange, contained more than a thousand ostraca, letters and other documents written on pottery sherds or limestone flakes, providing a very complete and vivid image of the life of the first Christians in the Theban hills at the beginning of the Arabic occupation. The (late) medieval presence is attested by some fragments of glazed ceramics and the local hand-made productions decorated with painted geometric motifs. The present village of Qurna already existed in the XIXth century. It is probably towards the year 1905 that a village house settled in the southern part of the courtyard of TT 29, transforming the south wing of the transverse room of the chapel into a cattle shed. One of the last owners of the house worked with the French excavations of Deir el-Medina, thus marking 3500 years continuing occupation of the Theban necropolis. The Theban tombs of the 18th Dynasty are composed of three main architectural elements : a courtyard, a rock-cut chapel intended for the funerary cult, and one or several underground chambers where the coffin and the funerary equipment were deposited. These chambers, usually undecorated, are most often accessed by a deep shaft or a sloping passage dug into the hill. TT 96, the tomb of Sennefer, constitutes an exception for its time. A long curving sloping passage, opening in the southern part of the courtyard, gives access to an antechamber and a room with four pillars (bearing the number TT 96B), decorated entirely in painting ; the ceiling, deliberately left irregular, undulating, is painted with the imitation of a vine, which is the origin of its modern designation of « tomb of the vines ». The upper chapel (TT 96A), of imposing size and oriented east-west, is composed of a transverse narrow hall, followed by a longitudinal hall giving access to a large square room with four pillars and a small annexe with a single central pillar. Every wall is decorated with paintings, although today partially destroyed. Whereas the burial chamber presented large quickly drawn figures, the proportions of which are sometimes poorly defined and which are reminiscent of the decoration of the pillars of the royal tomb, the paintings in the chapel belong to the best style of this time of transition, characteristic of the reign of Amenhotep II, between the style marked by tradition under Tuthmosis III and the masterpieces of the reign of Tuthmosis IV. The transverse room presents scenes evoking the official functions of Sennefer, among which the main ones, Director of the Garden of Amun (south-west wall) and Director of the Double Granary (north-west wall). A harvest scene in the longitudinal hall is again a reminder of the owner’s titles (south wall). The classic scene of hunting and fishing in the marshes (north wall) is the essential demonstration of the domination of order on the chaos. At the rear of the hall are represented the family members, among which is the cousin of Sennefer, Amenemope and his wife (south wall). The large pillared room, more damaged, preserves various scenes of a religious character, such as the pilgrimage to Abydos. Entirely cleared by the work carried out by the mission, the chapel of Amenemope TT 29 presents a similar plan, composed of a transverse hall and a longitudinal hall (however without the pillared room), following the classic T-scheme of the Theban tombs of the mid-18th Dynasty. With a width of 18 metres, the transverse hall is divided by a row of square pillars. A sloping passage, carefully built, opens between pillars II and III (Sloping passage II) and leads down towards the west, while giving access to two underground rooms (Chambers II and III) ; these funerary appartments probably belong to the original plan of the chapel. Another sloping passage (Sloping passage I), cut in a northerly direction under the north wall of the transverse hall, remained unfinished. Finally, a third sloping passage (Sloping passage III) opens between pillars VI and VII, toward the west, giving access to two underground rooms (Chambers IV and V). At the rear of the last is the beginning of a cutting corresponding probably to a fourth sloping passage, left unfinished. Three shafts have also been cut in the open courtyard of the tomb. In the south-west corner, a vertical shaft 5.5 metres in depth (Shaft I) gives access to a roughly cut chamber (Chamber I). In the opposite corner, a shaft 3.3 metres deep remained uncompleted (Shaft II). Finally, a last shaft, on the axis of the chapel but oriented obliquely with regard to the courtyard (Shaft IV), probably belongs to a late phase of reoccupation. Against the façade of the chapel, north of the door, a small platform preserved in the limestone probably served, during funeral ceremony, to raise the mummy for the ritual of the « opening of the mouth », a scene frequently represented on the vignettes illustrating the Book of the Dead. Cut into the limestone bedrock in its western part, the courtyard has been enlarged eastward by an artificial terrace, built of limestone blocks and rubble, probably coming from the construction of the monument.

The paintings of the chapel of Amenemope are less well preserved than those in the tomb of Sennefer. In the transverse hall, only the north-eastern wall still presents remainders of the decoration, made very difficult to read because of the soot and especially the cleaning attempts using water to copy the inscriptions by the first Egyptologists. The wall preserves one of the four known versions of a very important text for the study of the administration under the New Kingdom, the « Duties of the Vizier ». During the excavations carried out at the outskirts of the courtyard, the mission recovered two ostraca preserving a written copy in cursive hieroglyphs of passages of this text, corresponding to the drafts having served for the scribe to implement the columns of inscriptions on the wall. The paintings of the longitudinal hall are better preserved and less soiled. The south wall shows a particular banqueting scene where, among the guests, Sennefer and his wife appear together with their daughter, who invites her parents to « make a happy day » in the tomb of Amenemope. Situated in the same place in the two chapels (the west part of the south wall in the longitudinal hall), the representations of the two cousins reply, thus forming a chiasmus (Sennefer in the tomb of Amenemope and vice versa) which unites the two monuments in a common decorative structure. The north wall of this room, left unfinished, shows the deceased attending an unusual ritual, implying the cremation of offerings in reddened hearths. The inscriptions make reference to the oasis of Kharga, but don’t illuminate the exact nature of this ritual, of which one knows of only one other occurrence, in TT 20 of Montuherkhepshef in Dra Abu el-Naga. The work undertaken by the University of Brussels since 1999 includes two axis. The first concerns the conservation, the restoration and recording of the wall paintings which decorate the two chapels. This important work is inseparable from the scientific and archaeological study of the monuments, every mission working in Egypt committing to undertake the conservation and the enhancement of the heritage which is entrusted to them by the Supreme Council of Antiquities. Although the protective measures organised by the Egyptian authorities have put an end to the plundering which have, at one time or another, strongly affected the Theban necropolis, other dangers seriously threaten this unique world heritage : changes of the humidity of the region, damages bound to the mass tourism etc. The paintings of the chapel of Sennefer present in addition numerous deteriorations due so much to structural shortcomings of the rock (loss of adhesion of the gypsum plaster, gaps in the pictorial layer) as to the history of the monument (blackening by soot caused by fires, damage to the paintings, figures partly covered by mud, washing of the paintings by early Egyptologists etc.) or to the environment (fly dropings, micro-organisms, beesnests). After the phase of systematic documentation of the state of the gypsum plasters and paintings prior to any intervention, the priority was given to the consolidation of the plasters and the fixing of the pictorial layer, in particular on the ceilings, which were much weakened. This work, lead by an international team of professional conservators is now completed in the transverse and longitudinal hall of the chapel. The cleaning of the paintings has been undertaken, and, in spite of the difficulties relating to the accumulation of different types of deteriorations on a same wall, the results are already spectacular.
The objective is not to return the paintings to their original freshness, a state forever lost, but to give back to the images a legibility, at the same time as to assure their conservation and their protection. At the end of the conservation process, a facsimile copy and photographic survey of the paintings will serve as a base to an iconographic and stylistic study of the representations. It will allow, for the first time, the study of the funerary monument of Sennefer in its entirety and all its complexity. Questions to be addressed will be the marked differences in style between the burial chamber and the chapel, but also the relations between the tombs of Sennefer and his cousin Amenemope. In a broader way, the aim will be to place the paintings in the context of the production of the Theban artists in the middle of the 18th Dynasty. In this respect, an ambitious comparative investigation has been undertaken in the tombs painted during the reigns of Tuthmosis III, Amenhotep II and Tuthmosis IV, in order to attempt to highlight personalities of Theban artists by means of systematic digital photographs of a catalogue of motifs considered as representative of « ways of doing » (details of profiles, certain hieroglyphic signs etc.).

The second aspect of the project concerns the archaeological study of the tomb of Amenemope. Two directions of research guided this work. The first, in a synchronic perspective, aims to better understand the structure and the functioning of a Theban tomb of the 18th Dynasty. The examples of large tombs for which one has complete archaeological data are rare indeed, most having been summarily cleared in the first decades of the twentieth century (as e.g. the tomb of Sennefer). The excavation also extends into the immediate vicinity of the tomb, in order to highlight the relationship between this and the neighbouring monuments. Indeed, the archaeological study of Theban tombs usually stops at the limit of their courtyard, leaving almost completely unknown the surrounding which existed in the necropolis, such as tracks employed during the processions and especially the amenities allowing one to reach the different levels of the hill. The second direction of research, in a diachronic perspective, tries to reconstitute the history of this area of the necropolis, since the construction of the tomb under the reign of Amenhotep II until the intervention by the mission. There again, and although the situation evolves today in a better way, it is necessary to note that very often, the excavations hardly paid any interest to the vestiges of the periods later than the main occupation of the tomb, and in particular the post-Pharaonic times. One cannot deny however that the modern village installed on the hill of Qurna is part of the history of the necropolis, just as well as the important Coptic occupation of the VIIth and VIIIth centuries AD. These modern remains probably deserve an especially greater interest as the Egyptian government currently increases its efforts to relocate the villagers and to erase the traces of this ultimate pre-tourist occupation.

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• lbavay@ulb.ac.be

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Liste des collaborateurs 1999-2006 (au format pdf)