DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.55202#0160
140 THE MIDDLE KINGDOM IN THEBES
1827, and was sold to Piccinini and J. d’Anastasy, and passed from
the latter to Leiden. It is characteristic of the objects from the
burials of the kings of this period that it should bear no prenomen,
and that its original owner should be termed simply “The King of
Upper Egypt Sobk-em-saf.” It is remarkably like the canopic box
in the Louvre which, as we have seen, probably came from the tomb
of King Sekhem-Rec Wep-mafet In-yotef and, except for its lighter
color, it is very much like the one made for King Thuti, to be noted
on a later page.
Nothing else could have survived the robbery of the tomb, but
from the account of this last in the papyri it is possible to get some
idea of the tomb and its furnishings. The thieves were taken to
identify “the pyramid of this god in which they located the burial-
chambers” and the burial-chamber is elsewhere called the “lower
chamber of the pyramid,” into which the thieves tunneled from a
nearby tomb. In the confession there are stated to have been two
separate burial-chambers, one for the king and one for the queen,
and this latter was broken into at the “outer wall,” known already
in the case of the pyramid of Nub-kheper-Ref, through what would
appear to have been a masonry lining. Evidently these burial-
chambers were not in the superstructures of the tombs but were
below them in the rock.
The king and the queen were each found resting in an outer
sarcophagus and an inner anthropoid coffin, the former probably
something like that described in the case of Nub-kheper-Ref; the
latter of wood—for the thieves burnt them—covered with gold leaf
like others of the period, and described as inlaid with semi-precious
stones. So far as this last statement is concerned, it is true that in
the Twelfth Dynasty and again in the Eighteenth Dynasty gilded
coffins were inlaid, but no coffins of the Sixteenth Dynasty so
wrought, have survived. Is it possible, therefore, that those of Sobk-
em-saf and Nub-khafes were more gorgeous than any others of their
time, or are we not justified in a suspicion that the clerk who tran-
scribed the confession of the thieves was none too interested in
rendering it verbatim, and threw in a stock literary phrase to be in
keeping with his ideas of what a Pharaoh should have had? Few such
gripping tales have survived to our day.
For the location of the tomb we have a suggestion in the Abbott
Papyrus. The inspectors coming south along the plain visited it after
Nub-kheper-Ref and Sekhem-Ref Wep-mafet and before the tombs
1827, and was sold to Piccinini and J. d’Anastasy, and passed from
the latter to Leiden. It is characteristic of the objects from the
burials of the kings of this period that it should bear no prenomen,
and that its original owner should be termed simply “The King of
Upper Egypt Sobk-em-saf.” It is remarkably like the canopic box
in the Louvre which, as we have seen, probably came from the tomb
of King Sekhem-Rec Wep-mafet In-yotef and, except for its lighter
color, it is very much like the one made for King Thuti, to be noted
on a later page.
Nothing else could have survived the robbery of the tomb, but
from the account of this last in the papyri it is possible to get some
idea of the tomb and its furnishings. The thieves were taken to
identify “the pyramid of this god in which they located the burial-
chambers” and the burial-chamber is elsewhere called the “lower
chamber of the pyramid,” into which the thieves tunneled from a
nearby tomb. In the confession there are stated to have been two
separate burial-chambers, one for the king and one for the queen,
and this latter was broken into at the “outer wall,” known already
in the case of the pyramid of Nub-kheper-Ref, through what would
appear to have been a masonry lining. Evidently these burial-
chambers were not in the superstructures of the tombs but were
below them in the rock.
The king and the queen were each found resting in an outer
sarcophagus and an inner anthropoid coffin, the former probably
something like that described in the case of Nub-kheper-Ref; the
latter of wood—for the thieves burnt them—covered with gold leaf
like others of the period, and described as inlaid with semi-precious
stones. So far as this last statement is concerned, it is true that in
the Twelfth Dynasty and again in the Eighteenth Dynasty gilded
coffins were inlaid, but no coffins of the Sixteenth Dynasty so
wrought, have survived. Is it possible, therefore, that those of Sobk-
em-saf and Nub-khafes were more gorgeous than any others of their
time, or are we not justified in a suspicion that the clerk who tran-
scribed the confession of the thieves was none too interested in
rendering it verbatim, and threw in a stock literary phrase to be in
keeping with his ideas of what a Pharaoh should have had? Few such
gripping tales have survived to our day.
For the location of the tomb we have a suggestion in the Abbott
Papyrus. The inspectors coming south along the plain visited it after
Nub-kheper-Ref and Sekhem-Ref Wep-mafet and before the tombs