EXCAVATIONS IN FRONT OF THE EAST WALL OF THE COURTYARD

We opened a further excavation area along the East wall, where the passage used by Harwa’s workmen to dig the courtyard is found – we are still using it to enter the tomb. We partly emptied the passage of debris and discovered some steps cut into the limestone.

Excavation in front of the passage revealed a series of concentric pits, semicircular in shape, the largest having a diameter of around four metres. Although they will not be completely excavated, it seems they were dug during the course of 100-150 years each for different purposes. Some of them seem to be the result of illegal digging, but a large posthole and a fireplace – where a large number of pottery from different epochs was discovered – were also revealed.

In one of the outermost pits the base of a sandstone statue of Mentuhotep II (Fig. 5) was discovered. Its discovery demonstrates that the pit – or part of it – was still empty when, in the 1980s, the Egyptian Antiquities Service used the courtyard as a place to store large pieces from the temples of Hatshepsut and Mentuhotep II at Deire el-Bahri and from some of the tombs of the Assasif. The base of the statue must have fallen into the pit in transit and was then abandoned there.

A pathway was discovered along the external limit of the largest pit, leading around the pit and heading to the vestibule entrance of the tomb opening in the South-east corner of the courtyard. The pathway corresponds to the furrow left by the passage of the people who, in the 1920s/30s closed the vestibule so that it could be used as a repository in which fragments of the sphinxes from the temple of Hatshepsut and architectural elements recovered during the excavations in Malqata are still stored. This information was given to us by the Qurna Inspectorate of the Supreme Council of Antiquities. The pathway connects stratigraphically with two circles of mud - discovered in the middle of the courtyard in the 2001 season – which were used to produce mud-bricks for the wall that now seals the vestibule.

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