PREFACE

This book attempts to reconstruct and understand the tomb of three foreign wives of Tuthmosis III that

Was robbed by villagers in the Wady Gabbanat el-Qurud near Luxor during 1916. Directly after the find, Mohammed Chaban of the Antiquities Service and Howard Carter, sponsored by the Service, gathered fragments in the tomb. Carter, who was encouraged by Alan Gardiner and funded by the Earl of Carnarvon, went on to pursue objects in dealers’ shops that were alleged to have come from the tomb. He also surveyed the southwest part of the royal necropolis and provided the only archaeological documentation of that remote area to date.

The majority of art market objects thought to have come from the tomb eventually entered The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and those acquired between 1918 and 1922 were variously exhibited and published, culminating with Herbert Winlock’s The Treasure of Three Egyptian Princesses (Winlock 1948). Additional items were acquired between 1958 and 1970, and during the comprehensive review of Egyptian objects for reinstallation at the MMA between 1972 and 1983, a study was begun of aU items associated with the tomb before 1970. When several of the items appeared to be of modern manufacture, it became necessary to determine which items were consistent with that provenance. Of each object the questions had to be asked: Does it match excavated items? Is it reasonably from a royal Tuthmoside tomb? and. If there are unusual features, are they due to poor quality, foreign manufacture, or modem fabrication? Eventually the study was expanded to the site itself, to document finds that might be remaining and to understand the tomb in typological, geographical, and chronological terms.

At the core of the subject is stiU “un ensemble coherent, bien date, d’une epoque pour laqueUe on ne possedait rien d’analogue,” as E. de Keyser wrote after Winlock’s publication (1949: 259). But it is a smaller group than heretofore understood. About half the catalogued items alleged to be from the tomb can be characterized as “probably or certainly,” fifteen percent more as “could be,” and the remainder as “not,” because they are earlier, later, or modem in date. On the other hand, the fieldwork of 1988 created a fuller picture of the tomb in ancient times—of its occupants and the relation of the tomb to other royal monuments of the period.

This study is more prosaic than Winlock’s summary version of 1948. That great scholar called attention to the ambiguities of the “treasure” while presenting a seamless study (see pp. I53f. below), and, notwithstanding the title of his book, knew that the women were neither Egyptian nor king’s daughters. The later appearance of additional objects convinced Nora Scott and Cyril Aldred that Winlock’s Great Headdress in particular should be shortened and the collar arrangements improved. In the main, however, the 1958—70 presentation of the material was a continuation of the assessments made by Winlock, a product of his time.

The present study, begun in 1978, lies at greater temporal distance from the find. It was undertaken in most cases without photos of the objects when they entered the Museum or precise records of restoration, and, in general, belongs to an age more directed toward systematic objectivity with laboratory capabilities than to first-hand experience and informed intuition (see now Rudolph 1996). It was possible here to separate many objects that did not come from the tomb, and identify a number that have non-Egyptian technology or form. Modem scholarship also made it possible to see the women in the context of foreign interchange, possibly even diplomatic marriage, rather than simply as “ornaments.” This revisionist interpretation, however, one that chooses sober documentation over imaginative narrative, could not have been made without the initial work of Carter and subsequent study of Winlock and Scott. Unbounded appreciation goes to all three for the energy they put toward retrieving and understanding this tomb’s ravaged remains.