• EraOld Kingdom
  • Project DirectorDr. Inês Torres
  • LocationGiza
  • AffiliationCHAM - Centre for the Humanities, NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal
  • Project SponsorAntiquities Endowment Fund
  • Project dates: 2023-2024

Written by: Inês Torres, Luiza Osorio G. Silva, Maarten Praet, Guilherme Borges Pires, M. Youssef Sedek, Mohamed Khalifa, Yasser Kamal Hefni

When thinking about ancient Egypt, one invariably thinks about pyramids. And when thinking about pyramids, one invariably thinks about the Giza Plateau. But the Giza necropolis was much more than a royal cemetery, an impression that likely escapes visitors due to most people’s focus on the royal monuments. The well-known pyramids, in the past, would have been surrounded by hundreds of elite tombs: many of these tombs were free-standing complexes (called mastabas in modern scholarship), while others were carved in the rocky escarpments of the plateau. The Giza Plateau would have been a vibrant landscape, brought to life with people, rituals, and ceremonies extending beyond the pyramids to those surrounding elite tombs.  

Giza’s elite tombs are much lesser-known than the pyramids. However, they are as important as the pyramids for our understanding of ancient Egyptian history. In December 2023, the Mastaba of Akhmerutnisut Documentation Project (MAD-P) had its first season, funded by ARCE’s Antiquities Endowment Fund (AEF), with the kind permission of the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. Named after the tomb under study, MAD-P focuses on mastaba number G 2184, which belonged to the Fifth Dynasty official Akhmerutnisut (Fig. 1). 

MAD-P is the first Luso-Brazilian project in Egypt, directed by Inês Torres and Luiza Osorio G. Silva (as assistant director). The rest of the international team this season consisted of Maarten Praet and Guilherme Borges Pires, Egyptologists; Mohamed Khalifa, topographer; and Youssef Sedek and Yasser Kamal Hefni, conservators (Fig. 2). 

Figure 2. MAD-P 2023 season team: Maarten Praet (front), Inês Torres, Guilherme Borges Pires (second row), Youssef Sedek, Mohamed Khalifa, Nareman Sayed (inspector), Luiza Osorio G. Silva (last row). © MAD-P

Why this mastaba? Is it more interesting, or more significant, than the hundreds of others built right next to it? We were drawn to this monument for a variety of reasons, chief amongst them the fact that G 2184 was known to have been decorated with rare and unique scenes but had never been studied in depth—and never fully published. Moreover, the tomb had been exposed to the elements for over one hundred years, since its first excavation by George Reisner and the Harvard University-MFA expedition in 1912. In that period of time, the monument has deteriorated at a higher speed than it had in the approximately 4,000 years since its construction. Additionally, while not uncommon for archaeological studies of that time period, the excavation of the monument in 1912 lasted a mere four days. Though it was later again briefly worked on in 1975, when William Kelly Simpson and the Pyramids Project of the Pennsylvania-Yale Archaeological Expedition produced several line drawings of the mastaba’s decoration, it seemed to us quite likely that there was still a lot to learn from Akhmerutnisut’s resting place.  

We thus embarked on our first season, with the goal to evaluate the current state of the monument and thoroughly document its architecture and remaining decoration. When we first arrived in Giza in early December, we expected to be able to start work immediately.

We quickly realized, however, that first we needed to open the door of the tomb… which was almost entirely obscured by decades’ worth of sand and trash accumulation. The cleaning of these layers led to the discovery of countless juice boxes from the early 2000s, along with other, perhaps more interesting, finds, such as a list of Egyptian individuals who worked in the Great Pyramid and the Pyramid of Khafre in 1961 (Fig. 3), adding to our understanding of the recent history of the mastaba. 

Fig 3. List of workers of the Great Pyramid and the Khafre Pyramid from 1961. © MAD-P

Once we entered the mastaba’s so-called Room A, we found some bits of decoration—including a painted human figure, and a fragment of an inscription—that we had not expected because they had not been recorded by Reisner’s team, who focused on the better preserved wall of that room, displaying two false doors (Fig. 4).  

Fig 4. Photograph of the west wall of Room A, with two false doors and painted decoration. © MAD-P

Those unexpected fragments of painting and inscription (Fig. 5) have the potential to help us better understand the different construction and decoration phases of the mastaba, leading us to consider whether this tomb may originally have belonged to the father of Akhmerutnisut, Kanefer. 

Fig. 5. Luiza Osorio G. Silva taking measurements of part of the Room A decoration for the purposes of drawing it. © MAD-P

 Besides studying the mastaba’s interior decoration, we also took great care to document the rest of the monument as thoroughly as possible. We started to produce a new plan, which, despite being unfinished, is already more detailed than the one produced by Reisner’s team in 1912. We measured all visible limestone blocks to keep track of differences in block sizes (which might help us to understand distinct construction phases), as well as differences in the state of the blocks (since some are more deteriorated than others) (Fig. 6).  

Fig 6. Guilherme Borges Pires measuring the mastaba’s limestone blocks. © MAD-P

We also recorded both the decoration and the architecture of the mastaba through photographs and photogrammetry (Fig. 7). After the monument’s excavation in 1912, its offering room and the west wall of its forecourt were acquired from the Egyptian government by the Museum of Fine Arts, and subsequently transported to Boston in September 1913. Since they remain at the MFA, photogrammetry and digital reconstruction allow us to better imagine how the tomb could have functioned in the ancient past by putting its parts back together. 

Fig 7. Inês Torres documenting the exterior wall of the mastaba through photogrammetry. © MAD-P

 At the end of the season, we took measures to protect the mastaba, including its remaining decoration and plaster flooring (Fig. 8). These temporary protective measures align with our future goals for MAD-P, which include consolidating and conserving the remaining decoration and architecture. To that end, Youssef and Yasser, the team’s conservators, have identified the structural weak points of the mastaba and drawn up a conservation plan. Ultimately, we hope to reconstruct parts of the tomb and, working alongside the Director of the Giza Archaeological Site and the Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, to increase awareness of the elite tombs of the Giza necropolis by opening the mastaba of Akhmerutnisut to the public. 

Fig 8. Youssef Sedek, Mohamed Khalifa, and Nareman Sayed installing a protective layer over the iron grate leading to Room A. © MAD-P

This first season demonstrated to us the value of returning to previously excavated sites, especially when they were studied so long ago. With updated research questions and methods, the potential of new investigations to shed further light on largely forgotten monuments is considerable. In our case, we expect to not only be able to provide a better understanding of Akhmerutnisut himself and his tomb, but also of broader Giza mastaba architecture and typology. Stay tuned! 

To know more, be sure to watch the video below! 

 

CategoryAntiquities Endowment FundTopicsArchaeology, Architecture, EgyptologyThemePeople & Society, Tombs & TemplesHistoric PeriodOld KingdomLocationCairo, Lower Egypt