Kevin M. Cahail

The site of South Abydos was home to royal mortuary complexes of both the late Middle, and New Kingdoms, belonging to Senwosret III and Ahmose.  Thanks to both recent and past excavations, both of these royal establishments are fairly well understood.  Yet, we lack a clear picture of the mortuary practices of the non-royal individuals living and working in the shadow of these institutions.  For both periods, the main question is where the tombs of the non-royal citizens might exist.  Additionally for the Middle Kingdom is the related issue of how these people commemorated their dead ancestors.  Divided into two parts, this dissertation looks at the ways in which non-royal individuals living at South Abydos during these two periods dealt with burial and funerary commemoration.  Three seasons of field work  in and around the Senwosret III mortuary complex, and the associated town of Wah-sut, uncovered a previously unexplored New Kingdom cemetery.  We excavated and analyzed the contents of six tombs belonging to this burial ground, which we dubbed the Temple Cemetery due to its proximity to the earlier mortuary temple of Senwosret III.  Further exploration of the site revealed numerous Middle Kingdom objects related to both tomb assemblages and funerary commemoration.  The discovery of the tomb of  Useribre Senebkay in January 2014 revealed numerous inscribed late Middle Kingdom chapel blocks, which had been reused to construct the Abydene Dynast’s burial chamber.  While we did not discover any tombs of the late Middle Kingdom, the results of these excavations demonstrate that tombs of this period almost certainly exist in the area.  Commemorative objects from within Wah-sut evince a complex system of domestic funerary rituals meant to commemorate the recently-deceased, which link this site with contemporary settlements at Lahun and Kom el-Fakhry.  New Kingdom vaulted tombs such as that belonging to the scribe Horemheb and the Stable master Rameses testify that South Abydos was still a highly significant burial ground during the late Eighteenth Dynasty, including the burials of individuals with significant wealth.  In short, this dissertation presents the previously unpublished results of ongoing archaeological excavation at the site of South Abydos.

The Second Intermediate Period is traditionally defined as the era between about the middle of the Thirteenth Dynasty to the Expulsion of the Hyksos and ascendancy of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Of all the phases of ancient Egyptian history, its internal chronology has been the most difficult to recover, and there are countless different theories and schema. Ambiguous, damaged or incomplete data represent the major hurdles scholars have attempted to overcome. The following paper presents one possible understanding of much of the information in the form of a summary of the current state of the field. The paper also attempts to incorporate the recently identified tomb of Seneb-Kay and other kings at Abydos who, as part of the Abydos Dynasty, add a new dimension to our understanding of the political history and chronology of the Second Intermediate Period.

In the winter of 2013-2014, excavations at South Abydos under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology unearthed the small tomb of a previously unknown king, named Woseribre Seneb-Kay.  The burial chamber of this building was constructed from reused limestone blocks, themselves deriving from a mid-Thirteenth Dynasty decorated tomb chapel belonging to the Master of the Offering Tables of Amun, Ibiau.  On one of these blocks, an epigraph appears above a ploughing scene which includes two instances of the Late Egyptian First Present grammatical construction: tw=j Hr sDm.  This paper analyzes these two attestations, which are now the earliest known First Present constructions with the preposition Hr, predating the Kamose texts by about 150 years.  The concluding sections of this paper contextualize the First Present into a larger theory of a Lower Egyptian, royal residence sociolect.  This sociolect – the spoken dialect of the royal house during the Late Middle Kingdom and later – appears in a handful of royal texts of the late Second Intermediate Period, designed to promote Theban hegemony by harkening back to the speech patterns of the strong kings of the Late Middle Kingdom.  Belonging as he did to the elite of the mid-Thirteenth Dynasty, Ibiau used this same sociolect in his tomb chapel at Abydos to proclaim his upper-class status.

During excavations at Abydos between 2009 and 2011, a fragment of a red granite sarcophagus inscribed with the Book of Gates was discovered within a Coptic Monastery just to the south of the New Kingdom temple of Seti I.  Archaeological and textual evidence potentially identify the monastery as that of Apa Moses.  Reused as a door threshold, the sarcophagus fragment bears the cartouche of the High Priest of Amun, Menkheperre, reinscribed over the name of the object’s original owner.  Stylistic and textual features date the original creation of this sarcophagus to the Nineteenth Dynasty.  This paper examines the sarcophagus fragment, its archaeological context, and the texts carved upon it, in order to offer one interpretation of its complicated history, and the ways in which it might fit into our understanding of Third Intermediate Period history.

Since Erman's first edition of the Zaubersprüche für Mutter und Kind, translators have never adequately explained the meaning behind the phrase pds.t-n.t-nbw, appearing in Spell P. Understanding the form of this amulet, meant to protect a child from sickness brought about by poison, is integral to a new interpretation of the Zaubersprüche für Mutter und Kind Spell P. This paper begins with an analysis of the various attestations of the term pds.t, and then offers a new translation of Spell P. The main focus then shifts to a detailed examination of the archaeological and textual sources connected with the Spell P ritual, in order to understand the form of the pds.t-n.t-nbw amulet, and how it, and the other amulets mentioned in Spell P, all served to remove poison from the body.

JARCE 51 (2015), 93-122

During recent University of Pennsylvania excavations in the tomb of Woseribre Senebkay at South Abydos, we discovered that the burial chamber incorporated a number of limestone blocks deriving from earlier monuments. Three of these inscribed blocks in particular still retain the images and offering texts belonging to a small group of high officials, including the Overseer of Fields, Dedtu. Analysis of the texts upon the blocks demonstrates that the named individuals probably all belonged to the same family, and that their careers spanned the mid-Thirteenth Dynasty. This paper examines the texts and images upon the reused blocks from the tomb of Senebkay in detail, along with other contemporary evidence, in order to ascertain the identities of the people pictured upon them, where the reused blocks originally came from, and of what types of buildings they may once have been part.

Recent excavations at South Abydos have produced evidence for the date and ownership of a group of royal tombs adjacent to the tomb enclosure of Senwosret III.  Tombs S9 and S10, two structures investigated initially by Arthur Weigall, are late Middle Kingdom royal tombs constructed using the distinctive format of late Middle Kingdom royal pyramid interiors known primarily from the Memphite region.  Excavations during 2013-2015 in and around tomb S10 now permit its attribution to one of the Thirteenth Dynasty Sobekhotep kings.  Evidence includes a monumental funerary stela bearing the nomen Sobekhotep that appears to derive from a now-destroyed chapel associated with S10.  The stela was likely reused in an adjacent intrusive tomb: that of the Second Intermediate Period king, Woseribre-Senebkay.  In Senebkay’s tomb, excavation revealed that king’s canopic chest, constructed from reused planks that had originally belonged to the coffin of a king Sobekhotep.  The original painted texts includes a distinctive set of Coffin Texts (Spells 777-785), examples of which date to the middle-late Thirteenth Dynasty.  The probable chronological range of these spells, paired with additional lines of evidence suggest that S10 is the burial place of one of the longer-reigning Sobekhotep kings of the middle Thirteenth Dynasty, likely Sobekhotep IV.  The proximity of S10 to the similarly designed tomb S9 implies royal burials at South Abydos of two closely connected kings, the brother kings Neferhotep I and Sobekhotep IV, who were unusually active at Abydos and may have chosen to associate their tombs with the mortuary complex of Senwosret III.  During the later Second Intermediate Period, Senebkay (ca. 1650-1600 BCE) and associated kings reused both funerary equipment and materials from these late Middle Kingdom tombs.

The Egyptian Section of the Penn Museum is in the process of reinstalling its galleries.  As part of this process, architectural elements from the Palace of Merenptah at Memphis are being studied anew, in order to reconstruct them and present them to the public as they were originally intended.  In this lecture, I present an overview of the excavations carried out by Clarence Fisher for the Penn Museum between 1915-1920, and take the viewer on a tour through my work-in-progress reconstruction of the palace.

Recent Penn Museum excavations in the New Kingdom Temple Cemetery at South Abydos have uncovered a previously unexcavated tomb.  The modest, single chambered mud-brick tomb (TC.14) lies at the southeast end of the currently known expanse of the Temple Cemetery.  Brick stamps with the throne name of Seti I indicate that the tomb probably dates to the early Nineteenth Dynasty – a conclusion which is corroborated by the pottery and coffin fragments we recovered.  Though robbed in antiquity, TC.14 produced a number of interesting, and at times, puzzling objects.  The most notable of which was a group of gypsum plaster fragments which originally surrounded and encased a linen-wrapped mummy.  The technique of encasing a mummy in wet plaster is rare, if not wholly unknown during the Nineteenth Dynasty, making this discovery both puzzling and potentially significant.  No other burial in the Temple Cemetery exhibits this unique funerary treatment of the body.
The fragments of gypsum plaster also preserved the impressions of a shabti and artist’s palette, though the original objects had long since rotted away.  Pigmented texts from the shabti were transferred to the wet plaster, allowing us to ascertain that the tomb belonged to an Outline Draftsman, perhaps one who was employed in decorating the temples of Seti I and Ramesses II at Abydos.  In this lecture, we will discuss this tomb, and contextualize it with other recent discoveries in the non-royal burial practices at South Abydos during the New Kingdom.

Excavations at South Abydos under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania have uncovered a new tomb in the New Kingdom Temple Cemetery. Lying midway between the Middle Kingdom Senwosret III temple, and the town of Wah-sut, this tomb (TC.17) is a two-chamber mud-brick structure belonging to the so-called Temple Cemetery. Though robbed in antiquity, pottery and coffin fragments recovered during excavation place the tomb in the early 18 th Dynasty, and preliminary results show that about 30 people, including children, were once buried within this structure. In addition, the tomb included a group of about 60 rough clay vessels, many of which contained human hair. Why did this tomb contain so many individuals, and from what ailments might they have suffered? What is the significance of the clay vessels?

This paper will examine TC.17’s architecture, pottery assemblage, coffin fragments, and human remains, in order to answer these and other questions.

During January 2014, the University of Pennsylvania expedition to South Abydos uncovered a tomb belonging to the previously unknown Pharaoh, Senebkay.  Cut-off from access to raw materials during the politically fragmented Second Intermediate Period, Senebkay usurped and reused elements deriving from earlier structures to fabricate his modest mud-brick and stone tomb.  Most notable among these reused materials is a group of nine, pure white limestone blocks which bore the remains of carved figural decoration and inscriptions, naming the original owners of the stones. 
Three individuals depicted upon these blocks appear to belong to the same family of high officials.  One of these men, the Field Overseer Dedtu, is known to have lived during the Thirteenth Dynasty from at least two other stelae now in the Louvre and the Odessa Archaeological Museum.  For the first time, the information on the reused blocks from the Senebkay burial chamber allows us to reconstruct an extensive genealogy for this family.  Additionally, these blocks pose a number of important questions.  During which reign did Dedtu hold his office?  From what kind of building or buildings do the reused blocks derive, and where were they located?  What new information do these sources lend to our understanding of the history of Abydos during the Second Intermediate Period?  This paper will analyze the texts on these blocks, reconstruct Dedtu’s extended genealogy, and explore a number of these key questions.

The site of South Abydos was a bustling hub of activity from the late Middle Kingdom, through the New Kingdom.  Housing the mortuary complex of Senwosret III, two tombs possibly belonging to the mid-Thirteenth Dynasty kings Neferhotep I and Sobekhotep IV, the necropolis of the so-called Abydos Dynasty, and the sprawling funerary establishment of Ahmose, South Abydos represents an important nexus of Royal activity.  Yet a number of questions still remain.  How did non-royal citizens interact with the royal monuments at South Abydos?  How and where did these people bury their dead?  How did the non-royal citizens of South Abydos memorialize their loved-ones after they were gone? 
As part of ongoing excavations at South Abydos, we have begun to examine these and other questions.  Recent fieldwork and study have uncovered indications of domestic funerary cult practices of the late Middle Kingdom within the town of Wah-sut, yet the tombs of these individuals still remain unidentified.  What connections are there, if any, between South and North Abydos during the late Middle Kingdom? 
For the New Kingdom, we have uncovered a previously-unexplored cemetery, dating to the early to mid-Nineteenth Dynasty.  Though most of the tombs have been heavily robbed in antiquity, there is an amazing wealth of evidence for a thriving population centered at South Abydos during the New Kingdom.  One of the tombs in this cemetery, TC20, may belong to relatives of the High Priest of Osiris, Wenennefer, who was also active in the continuing mortuary cult of Ahmose. 
This paper will outline the problems and questions surrounding non-royal mortuary and commemorative practices at South Abydos during the late Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom.  It will examine new discoveries in greater detail, and attempt to view the landscape of South Abydos from the point of view of its non-royal inhabitants.

Since the excavations of Amélineau, Mariette, and Petrie, scholarship has been aware of great variability in the non-royal mortuary archaeology of Abydos.  Yet most of the information pertinent to understanding the private Abydene cemeteries derives from the so-called North and Middle Cemeteries near the Temple of Osiris at North Abydos.  Given the existence of sizable populations at South Abydos, both at the Middle Kingdom town of Wah-sut as well as the New Kingdom Ahmose Pyramid Town, the existence of contemporary cemeteries in close proximity to these population centers is almost certain.  South Abydos therefore represents an untapped snapshot of private domestic and funerary interaction in ancient Egypt. 
As part of Dr. Josef Wegner’s ongoing examination of the Middle Kingdom Senwosret III complex at South Abydos, new excavations are seeking to identify and explore the private cemeteries of the area.  One such site investigated this past winter is a New Kingdom cemetery situated near the remains of the much earlier Senwosret III Mortuary Temple.  The tomb architecture here is similar to that at North Abydos, and although plundered in antiquity, enough of the burial goods remained in the tombs to begin understanding the overall context of the cemetery and the people who were buried there.  This presentation will therefore introduce the unexplored private mortuary landscapes of South Abydos, define issues and questions specific to the site, and describe the preliminary results of recent excavation.

Since the Winter of 2012-2013, University of Pennsylvania excavations have uncovered a number of tombs belonging to a small, hitherto unknown New Kingdom non-royal necropolis called the Temple Cemetery.  Ongoing excavations have examined eleven mud-brick, subterranean vaulted tomb structures thus far.  Objects and coffin fragments evince a chronological range for the Temple Cemetery extending from the reign of Tutankhamun into that of Ramesses II.  These tombs thus straddle the horizon between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties. 
One tomb in this group, excavated during the Summer and Winter seasons of 2013, was far larger, and better equipped than any other in the Temple Cemetery.  The multi-room structure, which we have called Tomb TC.20, belonged to a man named Horemheb, who held the title of Scribe, and lived at the very end of the Eighteenth Dynasty.  Though we have discovered objects belonging to other individuals buried in the tomb, the centerpiece of the assemblage is a beautifully carved sandstone sarcophagus, inscribed for Horemheb with spells from the Book of the Dead.  Despite being robbed in antiquity, luxury items inside the tomb such as glass beads, and a hard-stone heart amulet demonstrate the richness and status of the tomb owners.  This lecture will look at the architecture, pottery, and object assemblage recovered from TC.20 at South Abydos in greater detail.