EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
Preliminary copy of the painted decoration on the south wall of M08-09/T1, showing a man piloting a vessel
Preliminary copy of the painted decoration on the south wall of M08-09/ T1, showing the tomb owner and his wife, with a smaller figure (facing left) presenting offerings
decoration (M08-09/T1 and M08-09/T2). Except for the tombs near those of Ankhtifi and Sobekhotep, these are the only known decorated tombs at the site and are so far unpublished. Although most of the painted plaster within the tombs is no longer extant, enough paint survives to reconstruct some of the scenes within the tombs and to date the decoration to the First Intermediate Period. In tomb M08-09/T1 the tomb owner and his wife (traces remain of her white dress and decorated collar) receive an offering proffered by a ‘hovering’ servant figure, a hallmark of First Intermediate Period funerary art. In addition to the Egyptian graves within the Moalla necropolis, our survey also revealed a Nubian Pan Grave cemetery on a small north-south spur jutting out from Area H2. Clearance of sand debris from five of the burials has revealed characteristic round, shallow Pan-Grave tombs dug into the wadi deposit. Although the graves at Moalla were robbed in antiquity, surface collection was productive, providing us with a small yet varied corpus of decorated and polished sherds typical of the Pan Grave culture, associated with storage jars from
Initial plan of the northern extension of the Moalla necropolis
View of the slope of Area B of the Moalla necropolis, a concentration of Old Kingdom to Middle Kingdom tombs north of the tomb of Ankhtifi
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