Sir Alexander Seton's Troublesome Bone... Again

After writing my last blog post, I began wondering about the original owner of that cursed bone. I didn't expect to find anything out about her, but Alexander's various reports of his visit to the tomb included specific information that turned out to be extremely helpful, 

According to his memoir, Alexander and Zeyla Seton stayed at the Mena House Hotel in Cairo, where ‘the great Pyramid towers over the hotel’. The guide, Abdul, told Alexander that new tombs had recently been discovered ‘behind the Pyramid’. They were not of any great importance, Abdul explained, but one of the tombs was going to be examined the following day, and he could arrange for the Setons to see inside it.

The tomb was ‘pre-mummy era’ and ‘had at one time been filled by the mud of the Nile’. The Setons descended about thirty stone steps to reach the burial chamber and there saw the remains of a skeleton lying on a stone slab. The skull and leg bones were clearly visible, and the spine was almost intact, but few of the ribs remained; ‘water and mud had removed most.’ There was no inscription present to identify the tomb’s occupant, but she was described by the guide as ‘a high-class girl’.

After looking at plans of the area around the great pyramid, I concluded that the tombs ‘behind the Pyramid’ (in relation to the position of the Setons' hotel) and ‘not of any great historical value’ must be the mastabas¹ of the Central Field, many of which were excavated by Selim Hassan² (see photo right) between 1929 and 1939. His findings were recorded in his ten-volume work Excavations at Giza. The excavations of 1936 were covered in The Mastabas of the Seventh Season and Their Description.

The seventh season began on 1 October 1935, and reaching the tombs turned out to be ‘strenuous and exhausting’ as the workmen had to clear large mounds of debris several metres high; chippings, debris, and rubbish had formed a solid mass, cemented together by mud-laden storm water.

In one unplundered tomb, entrance to which was gained via a sloping passage, the sarcophagus was ‘entirely filled with mud’; it had seeped through holes and cracks in the mortar of the chamber and had to be extracted from the sarcophagus ‘flake by flake’ to reveal the skeleton of a woman. Though there was no inscription to identify the occupant of the tomb, its position, between those of two members of the fourth dynasty Khafra family, suggested the deceased female was a member of that royal family.

Hassan designated the tomb ‘The Mastaba of the Princess, Daughter of Khafra’; it is now referred to as G8250. A report of the tomb's discovery in the Illustrated London News (11 April 1936) included a photograph of the portrait head found in the tomb (see below), and described the position of the skeleton when it was uncovered: ‘extended on its back with head to the north’.

There were various other items found in the tomb—jewellery, beads, pottery, the bones of a sacrificial ox, etc—but by the time the Setons visited it these would have been removed, leaving only the skeleton for them to see.

I could be wrong (though my husband insists that this is never a possibility!), but Alexander's description of the tomb, its location, the timing, and the skeleton's muddy condition strongly suggest to me the one discovered by Selim Hassan. And given the amount of coverage the discoveries in Egypt got, and the detail included in reports, I'm surprised nobody saw the connection between the troublesome bone and the mud-covered occupant of G8250 at the time. 

For more information about the various excavations in Egypt, there's The Giza Project at Harvard University. In addition to plans and the such like, you can read the various volumes of Selim Hassan's Excavations at Giza.

__________
1 Mastaba: a type of ancient Egyptian tomb; a flat-roofed, rectangular structure with sloping sides.
2 The Egyptologist Selim Hassan was the first native Egyptian to be appointed Professor of Egyptology at the University of Cairo.