TheEgyptian Opening of the Mouth Ceremony

I recently found a printed copy of a paper I wrote in college (on a typewriter if you can believe it!) about the ancient Egyptian “Opening of the Mouth Ceremony”. I have re-typed it into my laptop and updated it. I will be uploading it in pieces to this blog over the course of the next couple of weeks.

For those who are not familiar with the Opening of the Mouth, it was a major part of an ancient Egyptian’s funeral services. It was designed to re-unite the soul of the deceased with his body (or a statue that could be used to take the place of the body). The Opening of the Mouth also gave the deceased the ability to breathe, eat and speak in the afterlife.

There's an App for Everything

I decided to see what (free) apps existed for iPhones (or iPads) for those of us interested in archaeology. There are not many, but there are a few:

1) British Museum - The Book of the Dead: this app was created to promote a special exhibit the British Museum had on the Egyptian Book of the Dead in 2011. There is a short video that can be viewed on the topic. You can also answer a few reasonably easy questions to unlock a copy of the papyrus of Hunefer for viewing. Some of the vignettes (such as the weighing of the heart) in the papyrus are explained when you click on them. Overall, an app that is interesting but could have been so much more.

2) Louvre Top 100 - this app has some stunning photos of the major works of art housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Ninety-Six of the objects have nothing to do with the ancient Middle East. The four items that do are:

• The Law Code of Hammurabi
• The Mesha Stela (9th Century B. C., from Jordan)
• The Dendera Zodiac - Egypt (about 50 B. C.)
• The Seated Scribe - Egypt (Old Kingdom)

Each object has a photo and a short description. Hopefully someone will use this same format for an app that covers a major collection of Egyptian or Mesopotamian art.

3) The Brooklyn Museum - the app itself has nothing on it really. There is, however, a link to the museum's full website. The website has some good photos and descriptions of:

• Egyptian Mummies
• Assyrian Reliefs
• Egyptian Sculptures

Overall, these apps have their moments, but could be better. Hopefully someone will fill this gap in the near future (do I smell a business opportunity here?).

When Politics and Archaeology Meet

The most recent issue of Archaeology has an interesting article in it regarding a large number of cunieform tablets from the Persian Empire.

These tablets are being researched and published by archaeologists. The tablets are in the United States until they are published. Then they are supposed to be returned to Iran.

Attorneys for the victims of terrorist acts that the Iranian government allegedly is involved in, have sued to seize and sell the tablets to help compensate the victims and their families. This has led to the government of Iran demanding the tablets return.

I have no idea how all this will (or even should) work out. All I can say is that when politics get involved with archaeology (or pretty much anything else) a complete mess is sure to follow.

The (Fake?) Statue of Tetisheri (cont.)

There are some troubling aspects about the statue itself (in addition to the almost certainly forged inscription). Dr Davies points out in particular the style of the Queen's headdress. Notice how the lower portion of the headdress is carved with a gap between the shoulder and the bottom of the headdress (see the topmost picture in this post). This is not a normal style of carving in Egyptian art at all. Additionally, Dr. Davies had concerns about the Queen's hairstyle in the back (notice how the hair seems to "bulge out" in the back).

Another problem with the carving of the statue are the shoulder straps on her dress. Look at the second photo in this post and you can see that the straps are very narrow and would not have properly covered the Queen's breasts. This is also not normal in Egyptian art.

So is the statue a fake? Dr. Davies hesitated in his paper to call the statue a modern forgery, but he did admit to having some real reservations about the carving of the statue. As far as the inscription is concerned, Dr. Davies felt that it was likely a forgey, a conclusion that I must agree with. Sadly, I think the entire statue is a fake, not just the inscription.

The Finding of Tetisheri's Statue

It is believed that two statues of Tetisheri were "found". We are not sure about the finding of these statues since they were not found in a properly conducted archaqeological excavation. Instead they simply "appeared" on the antiquities market.

One of the statues was a fragment which consisted of little more than the throne upon which the Queen sat. This fragment is now lost, but a copy of the inscription was made and is preserved to this day. The second of this pair of statues is the one in the British Museum.

Dr. Davies noticed that some of the characters in the inscription were badly formed, a frequent clue that an inscription was carved in modern times (by someone who actually could not read hieroglyphs). When he compared the inscription on the statue in the British Museum to the copy of the inscription on the "lost" statue, he noticed another problem.

On the lost statue, the inscription on the Queen's throne is broken off in the lower left corner. If you look at the photo in this article, you will see that the statue in the British Museum is also damaged in the same spot on the Queen's throne. But on the British Museum's statue, the damage is not caused by a break in the stone; instead, it looks like a chisel was used to remove a portion of the inscription.

It seems odd that two statues would have a damaged inscription in the same place and that the damage on one of the statues would look to have been deliberately done. Dr. Davies theory is that the broken statue had an inscription that was real, and that a forger copied the inscription onto the (previously uninscribed) statue that is now in the British Museum. Since the forger did not know hieroglyphs, he damaged the inscription in the lower left corner to hide the fact that he did not know what characters the original inscription contained there.

So, if the inscription is a fake (and I think that it is), does that mean that the statue is a fake as well? Or is the statue a real antiquity and only the inscription is forged?

The Famous (Fake?) Statue of Tetisheri

One of the most famous objects in the Egyptian collection of the British Museum is the famous statue of the Seventeenth Dynasty Queen Tetisheri.

Tetisheri was, according to The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt (by Aiden Dodson and Dyan Hilton), the commoner wife of Senakhtenre Tao, who was one of the last Kings of Egypt's Second Intermediate Period. Tetisheri may have been the mother of King Sekenenre, who seems to have died in battle against the hated Hyksos Kings who were ruling northern Egypt at the time.

The statue itself is pictured in many books devoted to Egyptian art and is familiar to scholars all over the world. It may not deserve its fame however, as there is some reason to believe that it is a fake.

A number of years ago Dr. W. V. Davies published a paper in which he questioned the inscription, the style of clothes the Queen is wearing and the carving of the wig adorning her head. We will take a look at some of this in the next post.

Ramessid Theban Tomb Decoration

Clare Fitzgerald was the guest speaker at the October meeting of the Egyptological Seminar of New York last night. She is working toward her doctorate degree and is preparing a thesis on Ramessid tomb decoration at Thebes.

The speaker drew a number of comparisons between the Theban tombs of the 18th Dynasty and the 19th Dynasty.


18th Dynasty:

• Mostly “T” shaped, but there are numerous variations Oriented East (entrance) to West (rear of the tomb)
• A Traverse Hall is followed by a long passageway that leads back to a shrine for the deceased, the shrine often has a false door and / or a stela
• The facade of the tomb consists of a small court with a frieze of funerary cones above the entrance
• The thickness of the entrance door has a representation of the tomb owner and (sometimes) his wife
• Scenes on the wall rarely “turn a corner” to appear partially on one wall and partially on an adjoining wall
• The traverse hall has daily life scenes (usually)
• The passage to the rear of the tomb often has funerary scenes (“Opening of the Mouth”, a funeral procession, etc.)
• A shaft leads to the actual burial chamber
• The deceased is sometimes shown interacting with the King, rarely is he shown interacting with a god

19th Dynasty:

• Funerary Cones are gone
• Stelae often flank the tombs entrance
• The court often has a Pylon at the entrance A pyramid is sometimes built over the entrance (more common at Dier el-Medina then elsewhere)
• Scenes sometimes “turn the corner” to be shown on two different walls
• The deceased is often shown interacting with dieties, rarely shown interacting with the King
• A sloping passageway leads to the burial chamber, rather than a shaft
• Daily life scenes lose their prominence and are replaced by funerary scenes and pictures of the gods
• The funeral scenes show a procession, then the deceased passing the various gates to the underworld, followed by the judgment of the dead

The next meeting of the Egyptological Seminar of New York is on December 9, 2011 at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.