EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
Wall-paintings from the tomb of Kynebu at Luxor Three wall paintings from the tomb of Kynebu (TT 113) on the west bank at Luxor have been in the collection of the British Museum since the mid nineteenth century. In 2007 the Hungarian mission studying tomb TT 65 found fragments from the same wall scene, as Tamás Bács and Richard Parkinson report. In 1868 the British Museum bought three small wall paintings from Robert James Hay, which show Queen Ahmose Nefertari, King Amenhotep I and Osiris (EA 37993–5). These had been removed from the painted tomb-chapel (TT 113) of the priest Kynebu of the reign of Ramesses VIII. The seller’s father was the well-known traveller Robert Hay (1799-1863) who had made copies of many scenes in the tomb while in Luxor in the 1830s and these are now in the British Library. His short written description of the tomb-chapel notes that:
The tomb, just north of the tombs of Menna and Nakht, is now inaccessible, having been destroyed in part by the fall of a large boulder, but Hay’s superb drawings remain a major source for its original decoration. In 2007 Tamás Bács was working on the clearance of the so-called ‘sloping passage’ of TT 65 and excavated a number of decorated mud-plaster fragments from the debris that partially filled it. The passage had been cut but never fully completed by the tomb-chapel’s Twentieth Dynasty owner, the priest Imiseba; it contained a scatter of heavily broken up archaeological material of varying dates, including ‘modern’ refuse such as, for example, part of a discarded letter written in 1846. When excavated, the debris proved to consist mostly of backfill, meaning that the bulk of it had been cleared from elsewhere inside the chapel and then dumped here.
‘in this little Tomb, the colours are very fresh …. what remains of it is very perfect and satisfactory - it is one of those examples of early painting from wh[ich] we may … conclude the artist was no inferior draughtsman’. (BL Add MSS 29824, folio 53 v)
The tomb of Kynebu today. Photograph: Tamás Bács
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