A landmark year in Egyptology, 2022 marks 200 years since the decipherment of hieroglyphs, which unlocked access to ancient Egyptian written sources, and 100 years since the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, whose splendour sparked global Egyptomania. People were captivated by the golden ‘treasure’ of Tutankhamun’s tomb, but much of its significance and enduring fascination comes from the fact that the burial was almost intact and much of it had remained undisturbed since antiquity. Relatively few time capsules like these survived the early era of European collecting in Egypt. Now, new research on another intact royal burial group from Egypt, dating to about 275 years before the burial of Tutankhamun, is demonstrating the importance of reassessing historic museum collections. The burial group of the ‘Qurna Queen’ (c.1600 BC), now at National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh, dates to a less well understood period of Egyptian history, a time of political turmoil. Recent analyses of the objects are offering new perspectives on Egypt’s relationship with its southern neighbour, Nubia, in what is now northern Sudan and the southernmost area of Egypt. This dimension helps us to move on from an understanding of Egypt’s ancient past that has been coloured by colonial-era biases, in particular the misrepresentation of Egypt’s African context.
The discovery
In 1908, an intact burial of a woman and a child was discovered by a team of Egyptian excavators and the British archaeologist W M Flinders Petrie on the west bank of Thebes (modern Luxor). They were digging in an area that had not been excavated before, to the north of the road that leads to the Valley of the Kings, which Petrie referred to as ‘Qurna’. Although the burial was simple, in a mere shallow trench, the woman and child were accompanied by over 100 objects, including gold and electrum jewellery, a carrying pole used to suspend ceramic vessels in rare examples of well-preserved net bags, wooden furniture, baskets, cosmetic vessels, food, and various other items. The excavation and recording of the burial were conducted with more care and attention than was usual at the time, probably because of the fragility of some of the objects, but ultimately it was cleared in just ‘around five hours’. At the time of its discovery, it was described as ‘the richest and most detailed undisturbed burial that has been completely recorded and published.’
During that time, Egypt was under British military control, and finds from archaeological excavations were typically divided between the Egyptian Antiquities Service and the foreign excavation teams. The Head of the Antiquities Service did not want the burial group to be split up, so he agreed that it could go to the UK provided that it was kept together. While the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum insisted that all objects be displayed typologically, the Royal Scottish Museum (now National Museums Scotland) agreed to display the burial group together as an assemblage, so the ‘Qurna Queen’ came to Edinburgh.
History hidden in plain sight