THE ENTRANCE PORTICO

The excavation of the entrance portico began in the central area in order to speed the opening of the main access to the Tomb of Harwa. At the beginning of the season it was still blocked by the stone wall built by The Metropolitan Museum Archaeological Mission during the 1920s to convert the vestibule of the Tomb of Harwa into a storeroom. The items which had been kept there have already been moved to the Supreme Council of Antiquities storehouse near Carter House in 2004. The demolition of the wall that blocked the access to the vestibule revealed that the stones used to build it had been taken directly from the original frame of the doorway at the tomb entrance. The wall has been replaced with an iron gate to assure the safety of the tomb.
The area in front of the portico was covered with a layer of sand, more than 1 metre thick. Its removal revealed an interesting archaeological situation (Fig. 3).
Parts of several wooden coffins and at least three mummies were uncovered.
The coffins boards were lying in a sort of bundle in the western part of the area in front of the portico. They can be dated to the Ptolemaic-Roman period. It was possible to identify part of the side of an anthropoid coffin with remains of a large hieroglyphic inscription, roughly painted in blue on white background; a board from a different coffin with a portion of a red and black-painted scene, and the lid of a third coffin lacking any pictorial decoration. A funerary mask, similar to another found some metres to the south-east (Fig. 4) would once have been applied to the lid. A striking parallel to the second is provided by a coffin kept in the Museum of the University of Tübingen (n. 1714; Emma Brunner-Traut, Helmut Brunner, Die Ägyptische Sammlung der Universität Tübingen, Mainz am Rhein 1981, pp.  234-236, tavv. 156-157).
In the catalogue of the collection, the coffin is dated to the 2nd Century AD and it is attributed, dubiously however, (Sarg eines Phöniziers (?)) to an individual who was Phoenician in origin. That statement is based on the fact that the headdress of the funerary mask is similar to a kind of tiara, attested in the Phoenician and Syro-Palestinian world. Other than the two funerary masks uncovered during the present season the Tomb of Harwa has provided a third with similar features. This was found during the 1998 season (HRW 1998, R 29) among the debris that filled the shrine of Osiris, indicating that the funerary mask came from inside the Tomb of Harwa.
The coffin fragments must be ascribed to one of the robberies that took place in the Tomb of Harwa during the 19th century. The stratigraphy does not seem to connect the coffins with the mummy remains found scattered in the portico area. It seems that the mummies were already lying in the area of the portico when the coffin boards were transported there. Parts of at least two mummies were found inside a shallow square pit dug against the south-western wall of the portico, another was lying face down beside the western face of the pillar flanking the main entrance to the tomb to the east.

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