The Tomb of Queen Sesheshet

[Adsos Letter]

Source: By Stephen Glain
Smithsonian.com, February 03, 2009

"Let's start from the beginning," Abdel Hakim Karar suggests as he scampers up the north side of an archaeological dig of sun-bleached pink stone and gravel.

When you make your living unearthing the royal riches of ancient Egypt, the beginning is a very distant place indeed – more than four millennia away, during the time of the 6th dynasty. We are standing on the rim of the necropolis of King Teti at Saqqara, where Karar and his team of archaeologists are excavating the tomb of Queen Sesheshet, Teti's mother. The tomb, and the once five-story-high pyramid that accommodates it, was until recently a dump for the sand and detritus of surrounding digs. But the intuitive power of Karar and his inimitable boss, Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, rescued it from oblivion last November. It was a once-in-a-lifetime strike – how often does one "discover" a pyramid? – and it may shed light on a particularly notorious episode in a pharaonic tradition of court intrigue and murder most foul.

"We suspected this was the mother's pyramid," says Karar, as he gestures to a horizon line interrupted only by the iconic step pyramid of Saqqara, the Eiffel Tower of its time, built by the legendary 3rd dynasty ruler Imhotep. "Then we came across stones carved with the characters for 'Seshi' and we knew what it was."

The surrounding complex was discovered and unearthed by a fraternity of French and British archaeologists in the mid-19th century. Its centerpiece is the pyramid of Teti, the first ruler of the 6th dynasty, and the subsidiary pyramids of his two principal wives, queens Iput I and Khuit. Like many such digs in Egypt -- a country that, because of its strategically vital location, has played host to several great civilizations -- Saqqara offers a bounty of archaeological wealth beyond what was once the property of pharaohs. Enveloping the site is a containing wall of dung-colored mud bricks built in 330 B.C. by Ptolemy I, the Macedonian general who campaigned with Alexander the Great and who may have been mentored by Aristotle. The U-shaped wall contained a drawing of the funeral procession that followed the death of a sacred bull as ordained under Serapis, the Greek deity promoted by Ptolemy as a way to fuse Hellenist and Greek religions.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Tomb-of-Queen-Sesheshet.html

[emilyg]

1. Thanks for my nightly fix.