It is a great pleasure to have been invited by the Collegium Aegyptium, the friends of the Institute of Egyptology and Coptology at LMU Munich to give a lecture about my Ankh-Hor Project.
My talk later today will be in German and focuses on the questions of Ptolemaic wooden coffins and cartonnage fragments from TT 414.
It is the first time that I present some preliminary remarks on the cartonnage cases from the tomb of Ankh-Hor. There is evidence for various types of cartonnages from the 30th Dynasty well into the Ptolemaic era. I will discuss some of the results from the 2022 season.
One particularly interesting topic, that I will briefly mention today in my lecture is the appearance of zodiac representations on the interior of lids of cartonnage coffins.
The recent publication by Daniela Mendel (2022) is an excellent collection and comparison of representations of astronomical ceilings and zodiacs in Ptolemaic and Roman temples, coffins and sarcophagi as well as tombs. Due to the poor state of publication on Ptolemaic cartonnage coffins from Thebes, there is no reference in the book to cartonnage examples of zodiac representations. It is well known that the wooden coffins of the famous Soter family from Thebes include representations of the sky with zodiac – but as the material from TT 414 shows, there were already examples well before the Roman era.
There is still so much work and research to be done – and hopefully we will be back in Luxor for the 2023 season of the Ankh-Hor Project soon. For now, I am very much looking forward to tonight’s lecture and hope for some constructive feedback and questions.
Reference
Mendel, D. 2022. Die Geographie des Himmels: eine Untersuchung zu den Deckendekorationen in ägyptischen Tempeln der griechisch-römischen Zeit und zeitgleichen Darstellungen auf Särgen und in Gräbern. 3 vols. Studien zur spätägyptischen Religion 37. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz
The Ankh-Hor Project 