Thank you to everyone who came to my talk on Herihor, priest-kings and the western wadis in September 2021, or in March 2022 for the Kemet Klub. This is the usual guide to further reading and online resources should any of you wish to take your interest in any of the themes discussed further.

First of all, for anyone who missed the talk and would like to see it, a recording is available for the £6 fee which you can pay via PayPal or Monzo. Please include a private message / note including your email address and a ref. to the talk e.g. ‘For access to Herihor talk’. Any questions, please let me know via this page.

Second, my slides are here and below should you wish to review them at your own pace:

The historical setting for this talk is the Twenty-first Dynasty. The major study of the Third Intermediate Period, of which the Twenty-first Dynasty is the first part, remains Kenneth Kitchen’s, The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt, 1100-650 BC, a revised edition of which was published in 1986 (and a new preface was added to reprints from 1996 onwards). This is a masterful synthesis of the mass of confused and confusing evidence and remains indispensable for this reason. Much has been written since however, and some aspects of his reconstruction of the period are now out of date.

For a more readable and up-to-date overview of the period written by another of the leading specialists, one who has also made a number of very important contributions to the subject, I recommend the most recent edition of Aidan Dodson’s Afterglow of Empire: Egypt from the Fall of the New Kingdom to the Saite Renaissance.

As in previous talks I often mentioned, and showed images of, objects in the British Museum. More information and photos about these objects can be found via the Museum’s online catalogue, here. Search for the object’s accession number (digits only) e.g. 10541 in the case of the papyrus of Herihor’s wife, Nodjmet, below, and you should find what you’re looking for, albeit in among a small number of other objects with similar numbers. Papyrus BM EA 10541 – part of the Book of the Dead papyrus of Herihor’s wife, Nodjmet (this papyrus is simply too long for a single photograph but you can see the whole thing via the online catalogue, here).

The genealogical chart that appears several times from slide no. 18 onwards is adapted from Aidan Dodson and Dyan Hilton’s brilliantly useful book The Complete Royal Families of Ancient Egypt.

The news stories about the projects of John Romer and Andrzej Niwinski, both of which mention the search for Herihor are as follows:

‘Cliffhanger hunt for treasure to rival Tut’ in The Times, Sunday March 30th 2014 – see here (paywall).

‘Poles seek funds to uncover Ancient Egyptian tomb’ Radio Poland, 2 January 2014 – see here.

Howard Carter’s account of the discovery of what turned out to the tomb of the famous Hatshepsut before she became pharaoh and while she was still just a princess was published in Carter, H and Mace, A The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen vol. I (1923).

His detailed article on the tomb, and also his wider survey of the western wadis, ‘A Tomb Prepared for Queen Hatshepsuit and Other Recent Discoveries at Thebes’ JEA 4 (1917), 107-118 is here. Carter’s section drawing showing the extraordinary location of the tomb of princess Hatshepsut, as published in JEA.

The image of princess Hatshepsut’s sarcophagus which is now in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo is ©Hans Ollermann and was taken from Flickr here.

My satellite map of the wadis is here. Please note though that I added most of the annotations that appear in the image below in Powerpoint so they do not appear on the satellite map. I also darkened the map for my presentation so that the landscape features would show more clearly. I include the link here so that you can do your own exploring if you like!

The results of the New Kingdom Research Foundation survey of the area were published in Litherland, P, The Western Wadis of the Theban Necropolis. I used a number of the excellent images from this book in the presentation.

The definitive study of the tomb of the princesses of Thutmose III, from which a number of other images in my presentation were taken, is Lilyquist, C, The Tomb of Three Foreign Wives of Tuthmosis III. Brilliantly, this has been made available for free online – see here – as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s programme of providing free access to out-of-print titles. This is brilliant not only because it’s out of print but also because it was very expensive to buy when it wasn’t!

The Met’s website also provides lots of information and excellent photos of the objects discovered in the tomb, see here. Cuff bracelet decorated with cats. Gold, carnelian, lapis lazuli, turquoise, glass from the Tomb of the Three Foreign Wives of Thutmose III. Image: Public Domain via metmuseum.org

Images of the coffins and mummies from the two royal caches (TT 320 and KV 35) come from two volumes of the Egyptian Museum’s catalogue général, as follows:

Coffins: Daressy, G, Catalogue général des antiquités égyptiennes du Musée du Caire N° 61001-61044. Cercueils des cachettes royales (1909)

Mummies: Smith, G E, Catalogue général des antiquités égyptiennes du Musée du Caire N° 61051-61100. The Royal Mummies (1912)

Both are freely accessible via Archive.org (click the titles above). In addition The Royal Mummies was reprinted for the Duckworth Egyptology series a few years ago and is available as an affordable reprint (of good quality!), here.

The outer coffin of Pinudjem I as it appears in Daressy’s volume

My talk on ‘Egypt’s Silver Pharaohs’ referred to on slide no. 92 which deals with the burials of the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Dynasty kings at Tanis is now available via this page.

The article by Kevin Cahail and Ayman Damarany on ‘The sarcophagus of the High Priest of Amun, Menkheperre, from the Coptic monastery of Apa Moses at Abydos’ MDAIK 72 (2016) is freely available via academia.edu here.

Finally, this talk was based on the fourth chapter of my own book Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt so for a single account of all the above, if you’ll excuse the promotion, I’d recommend that!