EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
Middle Kingdom tombs beneath the Temple of Millions of Years During the last campaigns on the west bank of Luxor, the Spanish-Egyptian team working in the Temple of Millions of Years of Thutmosis III discovered tombs belonging to a Middle Kingdom necropolis. Even though robbed in antiquity, some have yielded interesting surprises, as Myriam Seco Álvarez and Javier Martínez Babón write. The temple, somewhat to the north-east of the Ramesseum, was built by the Eighteenth-Dynasty pharaohThutmosis III. It has attracted relatively little archaeological attention, until the Thutmosis III Temple Project began work here in 2008. Since then it has already become clear that the structure was erected over an earlier necropolis, of which several tombs have since been identified (see EA 44). In 2013, tomb number XI was discovered outside the northern enclosure wall of the temple. The area had been previously surveyed with geo-radar and in the sector Radar 4/5 an anomaly was discovered. While working here we found a pottery dump adjacent to the exterior of the above-mentioned wall. This find shows the intensive activity at this spot in ancient times in that precinct. Underneath, there was a rectangular funerary shaft, measuring 5.5 m in depth, which was cut into the bedrock. At the bottom of it we found two large chambers: chamber 1, the main one, was oriented towards the north and had at the centre a space for the deposition of the coffin, while the second one, chamber 3, was oriented towards the south and had a column in the middle. The chambers were larger than in any of the other tombs discovered by Thutmosis III Temple Project so far. Chamber 1 had a secondary smaller chamber (which we numbered ‘2’), probably a post-burial enlargement. The preliminary skeletal analysis of the human remains in Tomb XI, performed by Linda Chapon, resulted in the identification of 20 youths and 21 adults. A total of 41 individuals were buried inside Tomb XI, during different periods of reoccupation. In general, the individuals show a low level of pathologies and traumas in comparison with the average health of ancient Egyptians. The height of the individuals was also above average (1.50-1.55 m for women and 1.60-1.65 m for men). The average age was also quite high, as most of the individuals lived into
Aerial view of the Temple of Millions of Years of Thutmosis III, 2014. 27