The Theban Necropolis

"The majority of the papers in this volume were originally presented at an international conference held at the British Museum in July 2000, and reflect the current state of research on many aspects of the site. Subjects covered include the history of the necropolis at different periods, the value of archives and the history of conservation, tomb decoration, the use of specific areas of the necropolis, and certain types of material which are ubiquitous in excavations." "Not forgotten are the important issues of site management and striking a balance between caring for the monuments and responding to the needs of the modern inhabitants of the area. This book also indicates the direction that research might take in the future."--BOOK JACKET.

Part of the "Carsten Niebuhr Institute Publications" series, this volume is a study of tombs of officials in the Theban necropolis, now lost, but recorded in the manuscripts of travellers to Egypt in the early and mid 19th century. It also includes the fragments of relevant wall-decoration in museums and other collections.

The tombs and mortuary temples of Thebes have proved an enduring topic of interest thanks to a quickly expanding corpus of field materials and a series of conferences devoted to the subject. This volume, the fourth in a series of occasional proceedings from the ongoing Theban Workshop, presents new research on wall decoration in the Theban necropolis. Its thirteen essays, by an international array of leading scholars, attest to the wide and varied scope of the theme.

The Theban necropolis lies in strange contrast to the bustle of Luxor on the opposite bank of the Nile. Over 450 tombs spanning more than a thousand years, some fully excavated and recorded, others tantalisingly described by travellers but now lost, form a maze-like network of passages and caves. The decoration of many of the tombs, particularly those of the Eighteenth dynasty, provides some outstanding examples of ancient Egyptian painting and relief work and reveals fascinating details about the lives and beliefs of their owners. Some of the tombs were re-used and display contrasting styles of workmanship, while many were colonised in more recent centuries by peoples with scant respect for the tombs of their ancestors: many well-paintings are blackened and burnt beyond redemption. The author traces the history of the site discussing the more important tombs in some detail, and sheds new light on the symbolism used in painting to help the deceased in the Afterlife. She also surveys the role of the treasure hunters and travellers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries and the pioneer epigraphers who followed them and paved the way for the archeological investigation and research that continues today.

First published in 1988. The Theban private tombs form a major source for our knowledge of Egyptian society. Ostensibly a great amount of work has been done in the necropolis over the past one hundred and sixty years of its modern history, and the bibliography for this area is among the most extensive in Egyptology. Many of the 415 or so decorated tombs have received a full publication, but for a great number only selected scenes have been made available, and a surprising amount remains to all intents and purposes unpublished. The present study is concerned with a number of painted tombs of the Eighteenth dynasty which were visited by the early travellers, but the exact location of which is now unknown. The careful drawings and tracings made by these pioneers are apparently all that remains to show the appearance of these tombs. Some of the scenes represented are not found elsewhere in the necropolis, and others have special points of interest or unique details, linguistic, iconographic and religious, to offer. This very important material has not previously been used by scholars, and it has not been recognized that fragments of some of these vanished tombs can actually be traced to collections in museums and elsewhere.

Thebes (Egypt : Extinct city); history.

In The Sacred Landscape of Dra Abu el-Naga during the New Kingdom, Ángeles Jiménez-Higueras offers the reconstruction of the physical, religious and cultural landscape of Dra Abu el-Naga south and its conceptual development from the 18th to the 20th Dynasties.