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The Theban Tombs of Sennefer TT96 and of Amenemope TT29
Map of Egypt highlighting the Theban Necropolis
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On the western bank of the Nile, facing the modern city of Luxor and bordering with the cultivated alluvial plain, spreads the necropolis of the ancient city of Thebes, religious capital of Egypt during two millennia.
The Pharaohs of the New Kingdom (around 1550-1050 B.C.) buried themselves in a dry valley in the heart of the mountain, thus associating the deceased kings with the nocturnal course of the sun toward the divine rebirth. Dominated by the natural pyramid at the summit in the west, the Theban mountain also sheltered the cemeteries of the high dignitaries of the administration, of the army, of the clergy, of those close to the royal house. Distributed over about two kilometres, between the villages of Qurnet Murai and Dra Abu el-Naga, more than four hundred private tombs have been dug in the limestone and have been decorated, forming the most important "museum" of ancient paintings surviving to us, recorded by Unesco on the list of world Heritage. The university Free of Brussels undertook the conservation, the survey and the publication of two tombs situated on the South flank of the hill of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna. 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, neighbouring about thirty metres southwards, was the one of his cousin, vizier Amenemope (Imen-em-ipet), inventoried under the number 29. These two great characters served under the reign of Amenhotep II (around 1427-1401 B.C.) and belonged to the inner circle of the king's acquaintances; the wife of Sennefer, Senetnay, even occupied the function of "Great Royal Nurse".
The Theban region
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The oldest modern mention of the tombs of Amenemope and Sennefer appears in the manuscript by 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 at the time of his stay in Egyptian. It was nevertheless only in 1903 that it was cleared entirely by Robert Mond, who left of his work only a brief report in the Annals of the Service of the Antiques. The same year, the Egyptologist Howard Carter – then inspector-in-chief of Upper Egypt antiquities – transformed, while endowing it with a secure door, the chapel was a store to receive the antiquities discovered in this sector of the necropolis. It retained this status until the middle of the 1990s, when the most important antiquities were transported to new official depositories. As for the decorated chamber, it was quickly opened to the public and continually received every year several thousand visitors. The status of the tomb of Amenemope was very different.
The hill of Sheik Abd el-Qurna dominated by the Theban Summit
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The tombs of Amenemope TT 29 (left) and of Sennefer TT 96 (right)
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Rediscovered in 1895 by the English Egyptologist Percy Newberry, it was the subject only of a very limited investigation, especially intended to copy one of the texts preserved in the chapel. No archaeological clearing had been undertaken since and the courtyard presented an important replenishment when the "Mission archéologique dans la Nécropole thébaine" (MANT), under the aegis of the Seminary of art and archaeology of Ancient Egypt of the ULB and, later, the CReA it, obtained the concession for the two tombs, in June 1999. The first campaign of excavation and restoration was organised the same year, and continues with the financial support of the ULB, a funding of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research, and, since 2000, of a credit from ministerial initiative of the Ministry the Higher Education, the scientific research and the international relations of the French Community, first granted by Mrs. Françoise Dupuis and renewed by Mrs. Marie-Dominique Simonet.
The conservation-restoration of the wall paintings is maintained by the support of the "Centre of research and technological survey of visual arts" of the ULB directed by Professor Catheline Périer-d'Ieteren, whereas the archaeological study brings in different scientific collaborations: the "Université de l’État à Liège" with Professor Dimitri Laboury (epigraphy); the "Centre of research of historical texts" of the CNRS with Professor Anne Boud'hors and Chantal Heurtel (ostraca and Coptic papyri); the University of Paris IV (Sorbonne) with Professor Pierre Tallet (hieratic documents); the French institute of oriental archaeology of Cairo with the Dr Claire Newton (botanic remains). The work of the mission is led in close collaboration and with the aid of the Supreme Council of the Antiquities of Egypt.
Plan of the two tombs
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Theban tomb n° 29 was dug for the mayor of the city of Thebes and vizier Amenemope, under the reign of Amenhotep II. A hieratic inscription discovered on the South wall of the courtyard mentions a conversion or an embellishment of the tomb starting the fourth month of the peret season of year 11, which thus places the monument in the first half of the reign. It seems therefore that the vizier never occupied this tomb.
Lid of a canopic vase in limestone coming from Chamber IV.
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Mummy of woman lying in Chamber V
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As some others close to the king, as perhaps Sennefer, Amenemope received the distinguished privilege to be buried in the Valley of the Kings, in the immediate vicinity of his sovereign's tomb.
Artificial vase in wood in the name of Menkheper
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The small chamber of KV 48, discovered in 1906 by E. Ayrton, actually provided fragments of a coffin in wood and several funerary statuettes in the name of vizier Amenemope. The excavation of TT 29 nevertheless revealed the presence of several wells and shafts leading to underground funeral chambers. These chambers had probably been occupied by characters related to the owner or his descendants. Several objects, of which two lids of canopic vases in limestone, decorated with a head human with a characteristic style, can be assigned at the reign of Tuthmosis IV or Amenhotep III and indicate the presence of burials a little after the vizier's death. Among these characters appears a Menkheper, First Prophet of the god Montu - Lord Of Thebes, as well as a Iuay, "divine father" and goldsmith of Amon. All of these funerary rooms were unfortunately disturbed too much by various plunderings – probably in antiquity – to permit the assigning to different characters the vestiges of these funerary furnishings. The reoccupation of the tomb probably continued during the late period, during the first millennium B.C., as manifested by the dateable material from the Third Intermediate Period (coffins, ushabti) and from the 26th Dynasty (ceramics containing remnants of embalming, coffins, packings). The Ptolemaic period and the early Roman Empire is however absent, as is also the case in almost all of the tombs of this sector of the hill of Sheikh Abd el-Qurna. The tomb then remained abandoned, the courtyard and the chapel strewn with the remnants left by the plunderers, disparate piles covered by dust, the funeral shafts left open.
Pit for a loom in the courtyard of TT 29 (VIIIth century A.D.)
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The whole of the courtyard was then covered by a thick layer of chalky rubble (about 80 cm), nearly without interstitial ground. The Copto-Byzantine ceramics contained in this rubble indicate a late date, probably towards the VIth or the VIIth century A.D. This important accumulation and apparent movement must undoubtedly 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 century A.D., a Coptic anchorite found shelter in the abandoned tomb, as did many other co-religionists in the necropolis. In the courtyard, he installed, directly on the level of the chalky rubble, various small constructions of raw bricks and arranged an elongated pit destined to receive the setting in wood of a hand loom. The anchorite's archives, named Frangé, containing more than a thousand written ostraca on fragments of pottery or limestone, providing a very complete and unpublished image of the life of the first Christians in the Theban mountain in the beginning of the Arabian occupation. The medieval presence is manifested by some fragments of glazed ceramics and the local productions of geometric decor, but it is generally mixed with more recent vestiges.. The present village of Qurna already existed in the middle of the XIXth century, and developed extensively at the beginning of the last century. It is probably toward the years 1905 that it became settled, in the south part of the courtyard of TT 29, a village house, transforming the wing South of the transverse room of the chapel into a cattle shed. One of its last owners worked with the French excavations of Deir el-Medina, thus marking 3500 years continuity of occupation of the Theban necropolis.
Coptic Ostraca of the hermit Frangé (VIIIth century A.D.)
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The Theban tombs of the 18th Dynasty are composed of three main architectural elements: a courtyard, a chapel carved into the rock and intended for the funerary cult, and one or several underground chambers where the coffin was deposited and the furniture accompanying the deceased. This chamber, usually undecorated, is most often at the base of a deep shaft of several metres, dug into the mountain. The tomb of Sennefer constitutes an exception in this respect for his time. A long angled descent, 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, the origin of its modern name of "chamber of the vines". The chapel (TT 96A), of imposing size and oriented east-west, includes firstly transverse narrow room, then a longitudinal room giving access at a large square room with four pillars and a small annexe with a single pillar. All the walls were decorated with paintings, although today partially destroyed. Whereas the chamber presented large quickly drawn figures, the proportions of which are sometimes badly defined, which are reminiscent of the decoration of the pillars of a royal tomb, the paintings of the chapel belong to the best style of this time of transition, representing that of the reign of Amenhotep II, between the style marked by tradition under Tuthmosis III and the chiefs-of-works of the reign of Tuthmosis IV. The transverse room presents scenes evoking the official functions of Sennefer, of which the main one, of Director of the Garden of Amon (south-westerly wall) and of Director of the Double Granary (north-west wall). A harvest scene in the longitudinal room is again a reminder of the owner's titles (south wall), which also contains the classic scene of hunting and fishing in the marshes, is the essential demonstration of the domination of the order of chaos (North wall). At the rear of the room 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.
Agricultural scene in the chapel of Sennefer, south wall of the longitudinal room
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Entirely cleared by the work carried out by the MANT, the chapel of Amenemope TT29 presents a similar plan, a transverse room and long room (however destitute of room with pillars), following the classic "T" scheme of the Theban tombs of the 18th Dynasty. With a length of 18 metres, the transverse room is divided by a row of square pillars. One descent, carefully built, opens up between pillars II and III (Descent II) and penetrates toward the west, while giving access to two underground chambers (Chambers II and III); these funeral apartments probably belong to the plan of the original tomb. Another descents (Descent I), dug in a northerly direction under the north wall, remained incomplete. Finally, a third descent (Descent III) penetrates between pillars VI and VII, toward the west and two underground chambers (Chamber IV and V). At the bottom of the last, is the beginnings of digging probably corresponding to a fourth descent, also incomplete. Three shafts have also been dug in the courtyard of the tomb. In the south-west corner, a vertical shaft of 5.50 m in depth (Shaft I) gives access to a roughly built chamber (Chamber I). In the opposite corner, a deep shaft of 3.30 m remained incomplete (Shaft II). Finally, a last shaft, on the axis of the chapel but oriented in obliquely in relation to the courtyard (Shaft IV), probably belongs to a late phase of re-occupation. Against the facade of the chapel, to the north of the door, a small platform made of limestone probably served, during funeral ceremony, to stand the mummy for the ceremony of the "opening of the mouth", a scene frequently represented on the vignettes illustrating the Book of the Dead. Built into the rock in its western part, the courtyard has been enlarged eastward by an artificial terrace, composed of blocks and chalky rubbles probably coming from the digging of the monument.
South-easterly bay of the transverse room of TT 29, cleared
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The paintings of the chapel are less well preserved that those of the tomb of Sennefer. In the transverse, only the north-eastern wall still presents remainders of the decoration, made very difficult to read because of soot and especially the cleaning with water carried out by the first Egyptologists to copy the inscriptions. The wall preserves one of the four known versions of a very important text for the study of the administration under the New Empire, the "Duties of the Vizier". At the time of 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, probably of the rough drafts having served as implementation of the columns of inscriptions on the wall. The paintings of the longitudinal room are preserved better and are less soiled. The south wall shows a particular banqueting scene where, among guests, Sennefer, his wife and their daughter Mutnefert appear, who invites her parents "to have a day happy" in the tomb of Amenemope. Arranged in the same place in the two chapels (west part of the south wall in the long room), the representations of the two cousins reply, thus forming a chiasmus (Sennefer to Amenemope, and vice-versa) which unites the two monuments in a common decorative structure. The North wall of this room, incomplete, shows the deceased attending an original 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 proof otherwise, in TT 20 of Montuherkhepchef in Dra Abu el-Naga.
Work undertaken by the MANT since 1999 include two constituents. The first concerns the conservation, the restoration and the survey of the wall paintings which decorate the two chapels. This important work is inseparable from the scientific and archaeological survey of the monuments, every mission working in Egypt committing to undertake the safeguard and the enhancement of the heritage which is entrusted to them.
Support maintained by glass fibre rods during the operations of consolidation of the coatings of the ceiling in Sennefer's chapel
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Move over the image to see the result of treatment in Sennefer's chapel
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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 heritage to the world: modification of the humidity of the region, damages bound etc. to the tourism of mass The paintings of the chapel of Sennefer present in addition to numerous changes due so much to structural shortcomings of the rock (loss of adhesion of the fillers painted on the wall, gaps in the pictorial layer) together with the history of the monument (blackening by the soot of fires, damage to the paintings, walls partially covered by mud, washing of the paintings by the first Egyptologists, etc) or by the environment (fly stains, micro-organisms, nests built by bees). After the phase of meticulous documentation of the state of the fillers and paintings previous to all intervention, the priority was about the consolidation of the fillers and the fixing of the pictorial layer, in particular on the ceilings, which were much weakened.
Chapel of Sennefer, painted wall before (left) and after (right) cleaning
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This work, led by an international team of curators - specialised restorers, is now finished in the transverse and longitudinal rooms 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 changes on a same wall, already provides spectacular results.
The objective is not to return to the paintings 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 safeguard. At the end of the conservation work, a copy in facsimile and in photographs of all of the paintings will act as a base to an iconographic and stylistic survey of the representations. It will permit, for the first time, the study of the funeral monument of Sennefer in its entirety and all its complexity, by notably asking the question of the different styles between the chamber and the chapel, but also of the relations between the tombs of Sennefer and his cousin Amenemope. In a broader way, it will be about placing the paintings in the context of the production by the Theban painters of the middle of the 18th Dynasty. In this sense, an ambitious comparative investigation has been undertaken in the tombs painted dating from the reigns of Tuthmosis III, Amenhotep II and Tuthmosis IV, in order to attempt to highlight with evidence, by means of systematic digital photographs for a catalogue of motifs judged as representative of "methodology, how it was done" (details of profiles, certain hieroglyphic signs, etc.), personalities of the Theban artists.
The second constituent of the project concerns the archaeological survey 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 workings of a Theban tomb of the 18th Dynasty. The examples of tombs for which one has complete archaeological data are rare indeed, most having been summarily cleared in the first decades of the twentieth century. 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 survey of Theban tombs usually stops at the limit of their courtyard, leaving almost completely unknown the surrounding which existed in the necropolis, as the routes taken by the processions and especially the amenities permitting 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 sector of the necropolis, since the digging 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 common sense way, it is necessary to note that very often, the excavations hardly carried an interest to the vestiges of the periods later than the main occupation of the tomb, and in particular at 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, for the same reason as the important Coptic occupation of the VIIth and VIIIth centuries A.D. These modern vestiges probably deserve an especially greater interest than the recent efforts of the Egyptian government's aim to displace the villagers and to erase the traces of this ultimate pre-tourist occupation.
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