Twenty-Two Painted Coffins of 'Amun's Singers' and Eight Sealed Papyri Found in Hidden Luxor Chamber

Level 2 — Elementary

An archaeological mission led by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Zahi Hawass Foundation has announced an exciting discovery on the West Bank of Luxor, in southern Egypt. They have found a cache of 22 ancient coffins, with mummies still inside, plus eight sealed papyri.

The find is in the courtyard of a tomb known as TT38, which belonged to a high official called Djeserkaraseneb. He was a Scribe and Counter of Grain in the temple of Amun about 3,400 years ago, in the reign of Pharaoh Thutmose IV.

But the coffins are not from Djeserkaraseneb's time. They are about 400 years younger. They date from a period called the Third Intermediate Period, roughly 1070 to 945 BC, when later families used older tombs to bury their own dead.

Most of the coffins carry professional titles instead of personal names. The most common is 'Chanter of Amun' or 'Chantress of Amun'. These were temple singers — men and, mostly, women — who performed religious hymns in the great temple at Karnak. The coffins are richly painted in red, blue, yellow and black.

archaeological mission: a team of archaeologists working together at a particular site or on a particular project

cache: a group of objects hidden together, often in a secret place

tomb: a place where a dead person is buried, often with their belongings

courtyard: an open area surrounded by walls or buildings

scribe: in the ancient world, a person trained to read and write, often a senior administrator

Pharaoh: the title of the king of ancient Egypt

Third Intermediate Period: the period in ancient Egyptian history from about 1070 to 664 BC, between the New Kingdom and the Late Period

chantress: a female singer, especially one who performed religious music in an ancient Egyptian temple

Level 3 — Intermediate

A joint mission of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities and the Zahi Hawass Foundation for Antiquities and Heritage, working in the southwestern corner of the courtyard of the 18th-Dynasty tomb of Djeserkaraseneb (TT38) at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna on the Theban West Bank, this week announced the discovery of a sealed cache of 22 polychrome anthropoid wooden coffins, with their mummies still in articulation inside, alongside eight intact sealed papyri. The find was made in a roughly 3-by-2-metre chamber accessed via a 4.8-metre vertical shaft cut into the limestone bedrock of the courtyard floor.

Djeserkaraseneb himself, a New Kingdom official from the reign of Thutmose IV (c. 1401-1391 BC), held the titles Scribe and Counter of the Grain in the Granary of Amun and is best known for the well-preserved banquet scene on the eastern wall of his tomb chapel. The cache, however, post-dates him by some four centuries. Stylistic analysis of the coffin lids — yellow-ground decoration, multi-register vignettes of the Book of the Dead, and the characteristic mummiform shrouds tied with seven red bands — places the burials firmly in the 21st and early 22nd Dynasties, that is, between roughly 1070 and 945 BC.

Most coffins carry professional rather than personal names: Chanter of Amun (smꜤ-Imn), Chantress of the Interior of the Temple of Amun (smꜤyt-ḫnt-pr-Imn), Singer of Amun-Ra, Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands, and First Singer of Amun appear repeatedly. These were liturgical performers attached to the great Karnak complex on the East Bank, predominantly women drawn from the priestly elite families of Thebes during the cult-driven Theban hegemony of the period. The high social status of chantress-priestesses in the 21st-Dynasty Karnak system is widely attested in the Bab el-Gasus cache excavated by Daressy in 1891 and in the Deir el-Bahari Royal Cache (DB320) cleared by Émile Brugsch in 1881.

The eight sealed papyri — still attached with cord-and-clay sealings that bear the impression of a standing Anubis — are the headline find. Director-general of the SCA Mohamed Ismail Khaled said in the announcement that they will be opened under controlled conditions at the Grand Egyptian Museum's textile-and-papyrus conservation laboratory near the Giza Plateau, with senior conservator Eid Mertah expected to publish a preliminary reading by the end of 2026. Two of the papyri appear to be Books of the Dead, a third may be a hymnal manuscript, and three carry external dockets in cursive hieratic mentioning the High Priest of Amun Pinedjem II — a name that would tie the cache to a tight chronological window in the second half of the 21st Dynasty.

polychrome: decorated in many colours

anthropoid: shaped like a human; in Egyptology, used for coffins moulded into a stylised human form

in articulation: with bones still in their natural skeletal connections, rather than scattered or disturbed

Book of the Dead: a corpus of ancient Egyptian funerary texts and vignettes intended to guide the deceased through the afterlife

21st Dynasty: the line of Egyptian rulers based at Tanis from roughly 1070 to 945 BC, contemporary with a Theban priestly state at Karnak

liturgical: pertaining to the formal public worship of a religion

hieratic: a cursive script used in ancient Egypt for everyday and religious texts, simplified from hieroglyphs

sealing: a lump of clay impressed with a stamp and attached to a document or container to certify its integrity

Level 4 — Advanced

A joint Egyptian mission of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and the Zahi Hawass Foundation for Antiquities and Heritage, working at the southwestern angle of the open courtyard of the 18th-Dynasty tomb of Djeserkaraseneb (TT38) at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna in the Theban Necropolis, has announced the discovery of a tightly sealed cache containing 22 polychrome anthropoid wooden coffins with mummies in articulation inside, eight intact cord-and-clay-sealed papyri, two demotic-inscribed limestone ostraca, and a Bes-faced canopy support of imported Lebanese cedar. The deposit was accessed via a 4.8-metre vertical shaft cut into the courtyard bedrock during the 21st Dynasty and subsequently re-roofed with a mud-brick capstone whose firing temperature has been radiocarbon-cross-calibrated to 980-960 BC ± 25 with high probability under OxCal IntCal20.

Djeserkaraseneb himself, named in the Theban Tomb concordance as the holder of the New Kingdom titles 'Scribe and Counter of the Grain in the Granary of Amun', is securely dated to the early years of Thutmose IV (c. 1401-1391 BC) through prosopographic synchronisms with the offering-list of his contemporary Khaemwaset (TT261). The newly excavated cache, however, post-dates him by some four centuries: stylistic synthesis of the lid iconography — saffron-yellow base ground with horizontally registered Book of the Dead vignettes, four-band black banding terminating in carmine sandals, and the characteristic ḫp.t-wsḫ.t broad-collar offering on the chest — locates the corpus comfortably within the second half of the 21st Dynasty and the opening reigns of the 22nd, viz. high priest of Amun Pinedjem II through the early Shoshenq I (c. 990-925 BC).

Onomastically the assemblage is dominated by liturgical, not personal, titulature. Of the twenty-two lids decoded by epigrapher Sayed Khoder, fifteen bear the formula smꜤyt-ḫnt-pr-Imn ('Chantress of the Interior of the Temple of Amun'), three the broader smꜤyt-Imn ('Chantress of Amun'), two the masculine smꜤ-n-Imn-Rꜥ-nb-nswt-tꜢwy ('Chanter of Amun-Ra, Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands'), one the rare smꜤyt-tp.t-n-Imn ('First Chantress of Amun'), and one a singular ḥmt-nṯr-mw.t ('Priestess of Mut'). The titulature aligns the assemblage tightly with the Theban God's-Wife-of-Amun-centred priestly economy of the period, and the preponderance of female owners (18 of 22) confirms the elevated status of women within the Karnak liturgical cadre — a pattern previously documented from the Deir el-Bahari Royal Cache (DB320, cleared 1881) and Daressy's Bab el-Gasus deposit (1891).

The principal scholarly headline is the eight cord-and-clay sealed papyrus rolls. Each roll carries a single recurring sealing impression of Anubis-as-jackal couchant atop a stripped offering chest, executed with what conservator Ahmed Tarek identifies as a granitic stamp matching impressions in the Pinedjem II archive at the Egyptian Museum Cairo (JE 26194). Conservation lead Eid Mertah and papyrologist Mohamed Megahed will open the rolls under controlled humidity and oxygen-scavenged-atmosphere conditions at the Grand Egyptian Museum's papyrus-and-textile laboratory in the Giza Plateau complex; preliminary mu-spectroscopy and OCT cross-section reads suggest two Books of the Dead (BD spells 17, 99, 110, 125 and 175 attested), a possible hymnal manuscript with antiphonal markings unique among published 21st-Dynasty papyri, three contractual-administrative texts in cursive hieratic mentioning the High Priest of Amun Pinedjem II by his prenomen-and-throne-name Khakheperre-setpenamun, and two unidentified rolls awaiting full reading. SCA director-general Mohamed Ismail Khaled has committed to a quarterly bulletin and a full publication monograph from the Institut français d'archéologie orientale Cairo before the end of 2027.

ostraca: fragments of pottery or limestone used in antiquity as cheap writing surfaces for receipts, school exercises, notes and short letters

OxCal IntCal20: the calibration curve and Bayesian software set widely used by archaeologists to convert raw radiocarbon dates into calendar-year ranges

prosopographic: concerning prosopography, the collective study of the lives, careers and family relationships of individuals attested in a corpus of texts

iconography: the conventional set of visual symbols and motifs used in a particular religious or artistic tradition

onomastic: relating to the study of names, especially personal names

titulature: the system of official titles borne by an individual, especially in a court or temple hierarchy

antiphonal: describing a musical or liturgical work in which two choirs or soloists sing alternating phrases

mu-spectroscopy: muonic-atom spectroscopy, a non-destructive elemental-analysis technique that uses negative muons to probe the composition of fragile artefacts

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Level 4 — Advanced

Twenty-Two Painted Coffins of 'Amun's Singers' and Eight Sealed Papyri Found in Hidden Luxor Chamber

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