Two new tombs in the forecourt of M.I.D.A.N.05 at Dra Abu el-Naga : preliminary report of the 2018 season

Abstract

This paper presents the preliminary report of the 2018 season of the expedition of the University of Pisa in the area of tomb M.I.D.A.N.05, at Dra Abu el-Naga (Theban Necropolis). The work focused on the archaeological investigation of two small tombs, T1 and T2, previously discovered during the 2010 season on the northern side of the forecourt of M.I.D.A.N.05 and probably contemporary or slightly later than the latter. During the 2018 campaign, the chapel of T1 and most of the first room of T2 were excavated, revealing two different life-stories, which depend on the events and transformations which affected M.I.D.A.N.05 and its forecourt through the centuries. T1, soon sealed by debris and flashfloods, proved to have been solely used in the New Kingdom. Between the end of the Eighteenth and the early Nineteenth Dynasty, the tomb was occupied by the “Chief of the mrw-servants of Amun”, Nany, whose name appears on some sandstone fragments of a lintel and on a beautiful but regrettably fragmentary pair statue, found in pieces. T2 is larger and probably composed of two rooms. It remained accessible for many centuries, until the flood deposits filled it, covering a layer containing at least ten burials, partly cut by robbers’ pits. Only scanty elements of the funerary assemblages were found with the bodies, but various painted plaster fragments, pertaining to anthropoid coffins, date the re-use of the tomb to the Third Intermediate Period.