Early in the morning the local stone masons visited the tomb TT 313 with the purpose of breaking a massive rock lying in the courtyard. It took a while and a lot of sweat to crush and remove this huge chunk of limestone with an approximate weight of 3-4 tons. This special spectacle happened at the same time as the excavation of three different trenches was ongoing. This required a large amount of supervision and organisation. Kelly, Jónatan, and Sergio finished the clearing of one of the side chamber where several decorated reliefs fragments and pieces of a sarcophagus were found in the first week of the field season.
In TT 315 the excavation of the northwestern corner continued, just where new structures have been discovered in the last two days. Also, the unearthing of a reed mat found the previous day was ongoing under the supervision of our conservator Rawda and our archaeologists Mohamed, Abd El-Ghani, and Sebastian. In this area, a lot of interesting small finds have appeared. One of them was the lower part of a mummified body wrapped in textiles and stained with resins. It is always exciting and also a challenge to work with human remains since one constantly tries to imagine the life of the person now lying in your hands. In the meantime, Raúl and Ana continued working with the textiles: as they were taking measurements they provided valuable data for Salima, who is very excited about the quality and quantity of our findings, whose publication will reveal very interesting aspects of the mummification. Apart from this, Dina continued with the epigraphic study of the sarcophagus in Ipi’s burial chamber. Her progress is due partially to the application of infra-red photography, which was conducted by our conservator Mohamed Hussein, making hieroglyphic signs come to light again.
Apart from this, today we received guests on our archaeological site! We were happy to receive part of the Argentinian mission directed by Violeta Pereira working in the tomb of Neferhotep (TT 49), with Violeta, Antonio y Pedro, who received a complete tour into our tombs given by the moudir.
