After a long break because of the pandemic, it is finally happening again: we are preparing our next season for the Ankh-Hor project in Luxor, Asasif. Because of the covid-19 crisis, the season will be a bit shorter and the team smaller than originally envisaged – nevertheless I am very excited and happy to soon be back in Egypt! We will start by mid-September for four weeks. I also plan to join the South Asasif conservation project and document the new ceramics the team found this year and in 2020.
For the Ankh-Hor project, the goals of the 2021 season are to continue what was sucessfully started in the 2019 season: the large-scale conservation programme and our detailed documentation of finds from the tomb of Ankh-Hor (TT 414). A fresh team of young conservators, both students and graduates from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, will join us for the consolidation work. This season, we will focus besides the wooden coffin fragments also on a large number of cartonnage pieces of which many are still unregistered.
These fragments, covering a large time span and showing various styles and colouring schemes, will potentially reveal important prosopographic information on the persons buried in TT 414 starting from the 4th century BCE. My hope is that we can find new evidence on such cartonnage cases for the names of fathers or mothers of persons holding the same name (and sometimes the same titles) to identify specific individuals. There is no doubt that this will be again a challenging jigsaw puzzle and of course we will keep you updated about the process and the results.
The Ankh-Hor Project 