THE "YA" SHAFT

With the aim of using it as a pottery storeroom we cleared the shaft (YA) opening in the floor of the third southern subsidiary room of the first pillared hall. At its bottom there is a little room (YA.A2) that, after a preliminary examination, proved to be unfinished and with little amount of debris to be removed. After the complete clearing we discovered another unfinished shaft excavated in front of the western wall of the room. In YA.A2 we found some wooden anthropoid coffin fragments dating to Ptolemaic times, the part of a spout of a granite offering-table and the fragment of a limestone one (Fig. 3).

Not far from the opening of the second shaft a limestone ostracon was found. It bears a ten line inscription in hieratic; from the palaeographical point of view it can be dated to 25^th-26^th Dynasty. Among the debris lying against the southern wall of YA.A2 was found another limestone ostracon with numbers and dates in hieratic. A pottery ostracon with a fragmentary hieratic inscription was also discovered during the re-examination of the findings coming from YA.A2.

The three documents are coherent from the palaeographical point of view and could be preliminarily interpreted as a series of working notes taken by a scribe during the excavation of the shaft YA. They were discarded when the work in that part of the tomb was abandoned.