Mr. Don and I have fond memories of attending a lecture at the Milwaukee Public Museum by Dr. Emily Teeter in connection with the block-buster exhibit "The Search for Immortality." Was that 2004? Egoddess, do not remember the exact date but I do remember that in 2007 we trekked to Chicago to the Field Museum's special Tut exhibit, and I thought it inferior to the Milwaukee exhibit!
Teeter's presentation was a one-night deal very well-attended - a packed house, in fact. Fortunately, Mr. Don and I had advance tickets. It was then that I realized that there is a true hunger out there (even in such supposed backwaters like Milwaukee, WI) for information on such fascinating subjects out of ancient Egypt. At the end of her talk during a question/answer period, Teeter was peppered with questions from a very active audience!
Tomb of the Chantress
Volume 65 Number 4, July/August 2012 by Julian Smith
A newly discovered burial chamber in the Valley of the Kings provides a rare glimpse into the life of an ancient Egyptian singer
On January 25, 2011, tens of thousands of protestors flooded Cairo’s Tahrir
Square, demanding the end of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime. As the “day of
revolt” filled the streets of Cairo and other cities with tear gas and flying
stones, a team of archaeologists led by Susanne Bickel of the University of
Basel in Switzerland was about to make one of the most significant discoveries
in the Valley of the Kings in almost a century.
The valley lies on the west bank of the Nile, opposite what was once Egypt’s
spiritual center—the city of Thebes, now known as Luxor. The valley was the
final resting place of the pharaohs and aristocracy beginning in the New Kingdom
period (1539–1069 B.C.), when Egyptian wealth and power were at a high point.
Dozens of tombs were cut into the valley’s walls, but most of them were
eventually looted. It was in this place that the Basel team came across what
they initially believed to be an unremarkable find.
At the southeastern end of the valley they discovered three sides of a
man-made stone rim surrounding an area of about three-and-a-half by five feet.
The archaeologists suspected that it was just the top of an abandoned shaft.
But, because of the uncertainty created by Egypt’s political revolution, they
covered the stone rim with an iron door while they informed the authorities and
applied for an official permit to excavate.
A year later, just before the first anniversary of the revolution, Bickel
returned with a team of two dozen people, including field director Elina
Paulin-Grothe of the University of Basel, Egyptian inspector Ali Reda, and local
workmen. They started clearing the sand and gravel out of the shaft. Eight feet
down, they came upon the upper edge of a door blocked by large stones. At the
bottom of the shaft they found fragments of pottery made from Nile silt and
pieces of plaster, a material commonly used to seal tomb entrances. Those
plaster pieces, together with the age of other nearby sites, were the first sign
that the shaft might actually be a tomb dating to between 1539 and 1292 B.C.,
Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty. The large stones appeared to have been added later.
Although stones blocked the entrance, there was a hole just large enough to
admit a small digital camera. Bickel, Paulin- Grothe, and the chief of the
Egyptian workmen each took turns lying on the ground, head pressed against the
shaft wall, one arm through the hole, snapping pictures. The surprising images
revealed a small rock-cut chamber measuring 13 by 8.5 feet, filled to within
three feet of the ceiling with debris, leaving little doubt they had found a
tomb. On top of the debris rested a dusty black coffin carved from sycamore wood
and decorated with large yellow hieroglyphs on its sides and top. “I’ve never
found a coffin in as good condition before,” Bickel says.
The hieroglyphs describe the tomb’s occupant, named Nehemes-Bastet, as a
“lady” of the upper class and “chantress [shemayet] of Amun,” whose father was a
priest in the temple complex of Karnak in Thebes. The coffin’s color and
hieroglyphs match a style that dates to between 945 and 715 B.C., at least 350
years after the tomb was built. The coffin shows that the burial chamber had
been reused, a common practice at the time.
The only other artifact dating to the same period as the coffin was a wooden
stele, slightly smaller than an iPad, painted with a prayer to provide for her
in the afterlife, and an image that is believed to be of Nehemes-Bastet in front
of the seated sun god Amun. The white, green, yellow, and red paints hadn’t
faded a bit. Bickel says, “It could have been taken from a storeroom yesterday.”
The rubble that filled the chamber held the remnants of the original Eighteenth
Dynasty burial, she adds, including pottery, wood fragments, and parts of the
unwrapped and dismembered mummy who first occupied the tomb. It also must be
noted that before the discovery of Nehemes-Bastet’s, the last unlooted tomb
found in the valley was the famous burial of Tutankhamun, discovered in 1922 by
Howard Carter.
People have been claiming there was nothing new left to find in the Valley of
the Kings for almost as long as they have been digging there. The Venetian
antiquarian Giovanni Belzoni believed he had emptied the last of the valley’s
tombs during his 1817 expedition. Theodore Davis, who excavated there a century
later, came to a similar conclusion—right before Tutankhamun’s burial was found.
Of course, other discoveries have been made in the valley. In 1995, a team led
by Kent Weeks, now retired from the American University in Cairo, was
investigating a tomb used by the family of Pharaoh Rameses II.* They found
previously unknown corridors, leading to the resting place of Rameses II’s sons,
which extended to more than 121 rooms. Unfortunately, the rooms had been looted
in antiquity and damaged by flash floods. In 2005, a team led by Otto Schaden of
the Amenmesse Project discovered an unlooted chamber, which held seven coffins
and 28 jars containing mummification materials. The chamber, however, contained
no bodies, so it is unlikely that it was a tomb.
Before Bickel’s team could take Nehemes-Bastet’s coffin out of the burial
chamber for further study, they had to open it to make sure that nothing inside
would be damaged when it was moved. It took a professional restorer a day to
remove the nails that held the lid closed. Inspector Ali Reda and Mohammed
el-Bialy, chief inspector of antiquities of Upper Egypt, joined Bickel and
Paulin-Grothe for the opening. Inside they found a carefully wrapped female
mummy, about five feet tall. It was blackened all over—and stuck to the bottom
of the coffin—by a sticky fruit-based syrup used in the mummification process.
Even in the short time since its discovery, the tomb is already providing
intriguing insights into the life of the woman who was buried there. The time of
Nehemes-Bastet’s burial (sometime between 945 and 715 B.C.) was long after Egypt
had reached the peak of its power and influence. The Great Pyramid was more than
1,500 years old, and the prosperous days of the New Kingdom were gone. Nehemes-
Bastet lived during the Third Intermediate Period, a time when Egypt was split
by intermittent wars between the pharaohs in Tanis and the high priests of Amun
in Thebes, who rivaled the traditional rulers in wealth and power. “It must have
been a pretty unsettling period,” says Emily Teeter, an Egyptologist and
research assistant at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.
“There was fighting among these factions around her time.”
“It’s interesting that in this period even a wealthy girl was buried with
quite simple things,” Bickel says, comparing Nehemes-Bastet’s coffin and stele
with the elaborate pottery, furniture, and food found in earlier tombs. “Her
wooden coffin was certainly quite expensive,” she says, but nonetheless, it
lacked the elaborate inner coffins found in similar burials. More details on
Nehemes-Bastet’s daily life can be drawn from a wealth of paintings, texts, and
reliefs carved on statues and stelae of the time, says Teeter. As a chantress,
or singer, in the temple of Amun, she probably lived in the 250-acre Karnak
temple complex located in Thebes. Her name, translated as “may Bastet save her,”
indicates that she was under the protection of the feline goddess and “divine
mother” Bastet, the protector of Lower Egypt. Nehemes-Bastet’s occupation,
however, was to worship Amun, the king of ancient Egyptian gods.
Music was a key ingredient in Egyptian religion. Teeter explains that it was
believed to soothe the gods and encourage them to provide for their worshippers.
Nehemes-Bastet was one of many priestess-musicians who performed inside the
sanctuaries and in the courts of the temples. “The hypothesis is that these
women would sing, act, and take part in festivities and big ritual processions
that were held several times a year,” Bickel says. The musical instruments that
chantresses typically used were the menat, a multi-strand beaded necklace they
would shake, and the sistrum, a handheld rattle whose sound was said to evoke
wind rustling through papyrus reeds. Other musicians would have played drums,
harps, and lutes during religious processions.
“For years people have debated what kind of music it was,” says Teeter. “But
there’s no musical notation left, and we’re not sure how they tuned the
instruments or whether they sang or chanted.” Some scholars have suggested it
may have sounded like an ancient ancestor of rap, she adds. The emphasis was
definitely on percussion. Images often show people stamping their feet and
clapping. Examples of song lyrics are recorded on temple walls. This one from
Luxor refers to the Festival of Opet, when the cult images of the gods Amun,
Mut, and Khonsu were brought by boat down the Nile to renew the pharoah’s divine
essence.
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