The massive tomb of an unknown pharaoh is the latest discovery at the ancient Egyptian site.
Buried for millennia by mounds of featureless desert sand, the sacred city of Abydos was one of the great sites of Egyptian civilization. And the Penn Museum has played a major role in its gradual unveiling for the past 125 years.
Working with Egyptian archaeologists, Josef Wegner C’89 Gr’96—curator of the museum’s Egyptian section and a professor of Egyptian archaeology in the School of Arts and Sciences—has now discovered a massive tomb of an unknown pharaoh in the ancient city that sheds new light on a long-lost dynasty and a lesser-known period of Egyptian history. The discovery was made in January and announced in March.
Abydos thrived for almost 3,000 years as an important royal and religious center. The wider site covers more than six square miles some 300 miles south of modern Cairo between the steep cliffs of the Nile valley and the low-lying desert fronting the floodplain. Regal activity in the area, which is the focus of Wegner’s work, was intensive from roughly 1800 to 1500 BCE. The once flourishing city and environs was known to the Greeks and Romans, but then largely forgotten and nearly invisible until the end of the 19th century when the earliest scientific excavations were conducted at the site.
The first professional Egyptological curator at the Penn Museum, David Randall-MacIver, who was appointed to his post in 1905, went to southern Egypt with the pioneering British archaeologist and Egyptologist William Flinders Petrie in 1899 on an expedition to which the Penn Museum had contributed funds. Almost immediately he noticed a worked limestone block protruding from the sand. It constituted part of the ruins of a large temple. Excavations revealed the mammoth tomb of the pharaoh Senwosret III, ruler of Egypt from 1878 to 1839 BCE at the height of a period of peace and prosperity—a discovery Wegner has called “a magnificent example of ancient Egyptian royal mortuary architecture and a truly remarkable engineering achievement.”
Work by archaeologists directed by Petrie, along with the museum’s own fieldwork in 1905–07 under Randall-MacIver’s direction, yielded a steady stream of objects of historical importance and aesthetic interest for the museum’s collections. Six decades later, a Penn Egyptologist returned to Abydos as codirector of a combined Penn and Yale expedition. David O’Connor, then associate curator of the Egyptian section and an assistant professor of ancient Egyptian history and archaeology, joined the faculty in 1964—the year he carried out a field survey covering 30 major Egyptian archaeological sites—and two years later was granted a concession to begin excavating in Abydos.
Over three seasons of excavations from 1967 to 1969 (at which point political developments in Egypt resulted in a suspension of his work), O’Connor detected the presence of a settlement site, including the surviving wall of a temple with inscriptions indicating it was one of many built by Rameses II (1304–1237 BCE). Wegner notes that scholars had long known that “Abydos wasa royal necropolis for the first kings of a unified Egypt.” A thriving city 5,000 years ago when it was a political center, later pharaohs were still building shrines, temples, and tombs at the site after the capital shifted north to Memphis. The city continued to flourish as a regional hub and remained an important link to Egypt’s ancestral rulers.
The Greek historian Herodotus remarked wryly that the Egyptians were “religious excessively beyond all other men.” Following Petrie’s discovery of the symbolic tomb of the god Osiris, constructed around 1300 BCE, the excavations at the site that O’Connor resumed in 1977 and that Wegner has undertaken since 1994 confirm that Abydos was a major religious center. Association with Osiris, regarded as the first (mythological) king of Egypt as well as lord of the underworld, originally meant pharaohs would become one with Osiris in death, ensuring divine status in the afterlife. Over time, ordinary Egyptians also came to believe they could identify with Osiris. As early as 2000 BCE, pilgrims flocked to Abydos to worship him, participate in festival processions, and seek for themselves an existence after death.
O’Connor reinvestigated ruins of the large mud brick enclosures built for some of the early pharaohs and concluded that they had once been topped by towering mounds made of sand and gravel. His hypothesis (proven incorrect by later excavations) was that they were prototypes of step pyramids, making them, he thought, the forerunners of the monuments at Giza. In 1991, accompanied by Penn graduate students including Wegner, O’Connor also found the largest collection of boat graves in Egypt—12 long and narrow depressions under the sand lined in brick that had housed actual wooden boats. An excavated hull suggests they were impressively large. O’Connor described them as “a virtual fleet” moored by some unexcavated funerary enclosure to transport the souls of the dead.
Expanded excavations that Wegner undertook in 1994 resulted in the discovery of the ruins of a town called Wah-Sut, located to the south of the early monuments at Abydos. Further digging revealed its mayor’s house, a building of “palatial proportions” that was the focus of the community’s “social and economic interaction” for two centuries, Wegner says. Built around 1850 BCE, the residence, once 20 feet high and now no more than a few feet in the best-preserved areas, stands as a “visible statement of authority, wealth, and power,” he adds. Wegner has written that it “offers unique information of daily life and society.” One unique artifact is a painted birth brick used in rituals of childbirth, the only one of its kind that has been discovered in Egypt.
Clay seals impressed with hieroglyphic characters also preserved the names of the series of mayors who lived and worked in the complex as administrators of Wah-Sut and the mortuary foundation of Senwosret III. Wegner has translated the excavated evidence of the mayor’s house into a three-dimensional computer reconstruction that, he says, “not only helps visualize the building but also helps us understand the principles behind the overall architectural design and the ways parts functioned in relation to one another.”
Heralding his latest discovery, Wegner’s 2013–14 field season resulted in the uncovering of the tombs of two pharaohs. A limestone stela identified the first sarcophagus chamber as likely that of King Sobekhotep IV, who reigned around 1800 BCE, and nearby was the vibrantly decorated chamber of a previously unknown pharaoh, Seneb-Kay (ca. 1650–1600 BCE). Although ancient tomb robbers had stripped it of its contents, Wegner found the skeletal remains of the king’s body left by plunderers in search of amulets and jewelry. He believes its presence, together with the tombs of seven other royal personages he uncovered in the same vicinity, confirms that the site is the burial ground of perhaps two dozen kings—an Abydos Dynasty.
The necropolis lies at the foot of a high desert cliff ancient Egyptians called the Mountain-of-Anubis—where Wegner discovered the unknown pharaoh’s tomb in January. The 3,600-year-old limestone burial chamber was nearly 23 feet underground. “It was protected by the drifting sand that most certainly contributed to its preservation,” he says. The tomb’s decorated entryway leads to several rooms and soaring 16-foot vaults made of mud bricks, Wegner says. “The king’s name was recorded in hieroglyphic texts on the painted yellow bands adorning the entryway,” he adds, “but not enough survives of the inscription to read it.” There are several possible candidates for owners of the tomb. When he returns to the site with his students in the summer and at the end of the year, Wegner plans to look for fragments of materials that may provide enough clues to solve the mystery.
“The new discovery is helping us understand the longevity of the Abydos Dynasty,” he says, “and we will be searching for more evidence of where the unnamed pharaoh falls in the sequence of kings. Our excavations are illuminating an important but once obscure period in Egyptian history that we now know was marked by social and political conflict but also was an era of innovation that preceded and perhaps prompted the unification of the country under a single ruler.”
In cooperation with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, Wegner hopes to make the entire site visitable by tourists—who can now, as the result of his work, inspect the tombs of Senwosret III and Seneb-Kay. And even in the face of potential cuts in federal support for archaeological research, Wegner hopes that some combination of private and government monies will fund further excavations—and new discoveries—at Abydos in the years ahead.
—Mary Ann Meyers Gr’76
