The aim of the grant, awarded to Dr. Edward Brovarski, is to prepare the publication of the Old Kingdom tombs excavated by Prof. Abdel-Moneim Abu Bakr in the 1950s and early 1960s in the cemetery named after him in the far Western Field at Giza, Egypt.
Between 1902 and 1942, Reisner uncovered nearly four hundred mastaba-tombs at Giza. The results of his excavations were published in A History of the Giza Necropolis, Vol. 1 (1942) in exhaustive detail from every conceivable architectural and archaeological perspective. The systematic publication of the wall decorations of the tomb chapels excavated by Reisner, however, was only initiated in 1974 with the appearance of The Mastaba of Queen Mersyankh III, by Dows Dunham and William Kelly Simpson. It was at the latter's instigation that the Giza Pyramids Mastaba Project came into being. It was also Kelly Simpson who made me a part of the Giza Mastaba Project and introduced me to the Giza pyramid plateau and its extraordinary monuments. In fact, it was actually Dr. Peter Der Manuelian, now Director of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, along with Mr. Lynn H. Holden, epigrapher and artist of the Department of Egyptian and Ancient Near East at the Museum of Fine Arts, who taught me what I know about the methods of epigraphy utilized by the Giza Mastabas Project.
These were in the days before digital epigraphy was perfected by scholars like Prof. Der Manuelian. The procedure used by the Giza Pyramids Mastaba Project consisted of an artist or Egyptologist tracing directly the reliefs of daily life carved on the tomb walls with soft pencils on a high transparency acetate film spread over the wall surface. Color traces need to be recorded as well as any damage that might interfere with the decoration or hieroglyphic inscriptions. An advantage the project possesses is a large archive of photographs of the wall reliefs taken by Reisner when the tombs were first excavated. Since the wall surfaces have experienced considerable deterioration in the intervening years, the photographs are frequently consulted. After the tracings are collated by a second Egyptologist, the full scale drawings were returned to Boston where they were redrawn in ink on drawing paper, then reduced photographically to one-fifth the original size for publication as book plates.
The direct tracing method does have its downsides. The large sheets of acetate need to be carefully taped to blank areas of the wall to be copied, not on the relief decoration of the same. Alternatively, a dusty ceiling may have to suffice. The sheets in certain cases have to stay in place for several days. Lining up a sheet that had slipped is a daunting task. And all this often has to be accomplished while balanced on a ladder with a flashlight in one hand and pencil in the other (Figure 1). Moreover, the direct tracing method cannot be used on fragile walls surfaces or on painted surfaces. On the other hand, when all that remain of an inscription or scene are the faint lines of the ancient chisel, the direct tracing method, after many hours of staring and examination, can be very revealing, picking up traces that a camera would miss.
So far, eight volumes in the Giza Mastabas series of the Museum of Fine Arts have appeared in print, with several more anticipated. Two of those volumes, dedicated to the Senedjemib Complex, a family complex of tombs belonging to viziers and royal builders who served kings from the end of the Fifth Dynasty to the end of the Sixth, were authored by the present writer. As in all the volumes of the series, the contents of the wall scenes are described and the hieroglyphic inscriptions translated.
The present writer worked for twenty years as a member or co-director (with Prof. Simpson) of the Giza Pyramids Mastaba Project recording tombs in the concession of the Harvard University-Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, at Giza. The same methods of epigraphy used by the Giza Mastaba Project were utilized in copying the tombs of the Abu Bakr Cemetery at Giza, when Cairo University and Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, established a joint expedition in 1999 to publish the tombs in the far western cemetery at Giza discovered by Prof. Abdel-Moneim Abu Bakr, but left unpublished at his death in 1976. As Adjunct Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at Brown University from 1999-2006, the writer served as co-director of the Cairo-Brown Expedition along with the late Prof. Tohfa Handoussa of Cairo University. In addition to copying tomb reliefs in the cemetery the aim of the project was to train graduate students from Cairo and Brown universities as well as Inspectors from the Giza Pyramids Inspectorate (Figure 2).
The Abu Bakr Cemetery at Giza is of great interest because the majority of tombs belong to relatively low-ranking individuals. This is all in contrast to the mastaba tombs of the courtiers and high officials of King Khufu and his successors who were buried further to the east, at the foot of the Great Pyramid. For this reason, the cemetery has the potential to shed considerable light on the social status of Egypt's ”working classes,” a study which has been the subject of scant attention in the Egyptological community.
With the exception of the great mastaba of Persen who, as Overseer of All the Works of the King, was a high official charged with public works, an interesting aspect of the portion of the Western Field in the Cairo University concession is the number of tombs that belonged to relatively low-ranking individuals. Numerous inscribed offering basins, false door panels with table scenes, lintels and drums attest to the identity and status of the individuals buried in the tombs of the Abu Bakr Cemetery. The owners of tombs in the concession so far identified include a washerman, brewer, chief sweet-maker, two lay-priests, a ka-servant, a master of the seat, an overseer of the six of the boat, a scribe, a tenant-farmer of the palace, a director of carpenters, a simple carpenter, and a tomb-maker. A small mastaba was found in the area north of the Persen Complex as the result of the discovery in situ of a limestone offering basin belonging to a woman named Renpet-nefret (Figure 3). As the inscriptions on the basin show, it was made for her by her son, the carpenter Per-her-nefret. At the lower left of the basin is an elegant little figure of Renpet-nefret sniffing a fragrant blue lotius blossom. As modest a monument as the offering basin is, it was probably all a simplecarpenter could afford. Nevertheless, it was doubtless a heartfelt tribute to a beloved parent. Preliminary analysis of the skeletal remains by the expedition osteoarchaeologist Stephen Phillips confirmed that Renpet-nefret was approximately 30-35 years old at the time of her death, and osteologically healthy.
The Abu Bakr Cemetery at Giza is now with the publisher. The appearance of the volume would have been impossible without a generous grant from the Shelby White-Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications at the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East (formerly the Semitic Museum) that provided funding for preparatory work toward the publication of the Old Kingdom tombs excabated by Prof. Abdel-Moneim Abu Bakr in the 1950s and 1960s in the cemetery named after him in the Western Field at Giza.
