List of Theban tombs

TT3: The tomb of Pashedu

The Theban Necropolis is located on the west bank of the Nile, opposite Luxor, in Egypt. As well as the more famous royal tombs located in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens, there are numerous other tombs, more commonly referred to as Tombs of the Nobles (Luxor), the burial places of some of the powerful courtiers and persons of the ancient city.

There are at least 415 cataloged tombs, designated TT for Theban Tomb. There are other tombs whose position has been lost, or for some other reason do not conform to this classification. See for instance the List of MMA Tombs. Theban tombs tended to have clay funerary cones placed over the entrance of the tomb chapels. During the New Kingdom they were inscribed with the title and name of the tomb owner, sometimes with short prayers. Of the 400 recorded sets of cones, only about 80 come from cataloged tombs.[1]

The numbering system was first published Arthur Weigall's 1908 Report on the Tombs of Shêkh Abd’ el Gûrneh and el Assasîf (up to TT 45–100)[2][3] and then more fully in Alan Gardiner and Arthur Weigall's 1913 A Topographical Catalogue of the Private Tombs of Thebes (TT 1–252).[4] This was followed by Reginald Engelbach's A Supplement to the Topographical Catalogue of the Private Tombs of Thebes (TT 253 to 334), extended further in Bernard Bruyère,[5] N. de Garis Davies,[6] Ahmed Fakhry,[7] and later in Bertha Porter's Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs, and Paintings.[8] In their publication, Gardiner and Weigall acknowledged that the numbers do not follow any topographical order, and are due the order in which the tombs were discovered.[9]

  1. ^ "Funerary Cones of the 18th Dynasty". Digital Egypt. UCL. Retrieved 2008-01-30.
  2. ^ A. E. P. Weigall, ‘A Report on the Tombs of Shêkh Abd’ el Gûrneh and el Assasîf’, ASAE 9 (1908), 118–36: "As will be seen, I have renumbered them all, and I trust that in future these numbers will always be held to, so as to avoid confusion. The tombs have been numbered in a haphazard sort of way two or three times, and one often finds two or more numerals marked down for each tomb. A few years ago Mr. Newberry made out a complete list of new numbers, and Mr. Carter had these neatly painted on wooden boards. The list, so far as I can make out, was then lost, and the boards were piled in a back room, where I found them. They ran consecutively from 100 to about ho, but I could only find a few of the numerals below 40. For this reason, I commenced my numbering at 100, and outside the doorway of each tomb the number has been nailed so that there can be no mistake."
  3. ^ As Weigall explains, previous numbering schemes, such as that in the Baedeker Travel Guide (1902) had not been followed consistently
  4. ^ A Topographical Catalogue of the Private Tombs of Thebes
  5. ^ B. Bruyère, ‘New Details for Insertion in the Theban 1/1000 Scale Maps: I. Deir el- Madina’, ASAE 25 (1925), 174–177
  6. ^ Norman de Garis Davies (N. de G. Davies, ‘New Details for Insertion in the Theban 1/1000 Scale Maps. II: Sheykh ‘Abd el-Qurna and Dira’ Abu’l Naga’, ASAE 25 (1925), 239–241
  7. ^ A. Fakhry, ‘A Report on the Inspectorate of Upper Egypt’, ASAE 46 (1947), 37–54)
  8. ^ Kaczanowicz, Marta (2020). "Gordon Jelf and his Notes on the Work Conducted in the Theban Necropolis, 1909–1910". The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. 106 (1–2). SAGE Publications: 37–58. doi:10.1177/0307513320966617. ISSN 0307-5133. S2CID 226349562.
  9. ^ A Topographical Catalogue of the Private Tombs of Thebes, p.10: "The numbers employed in this Catalogue are the same as will be found marked outside the actual tombs; it is greatly hoped that these will meet with general acceptance. It will be noted that the numbering follows no topographical order. It will pain the pedantically-minded — I confess it is not wholly pleasant even to myself — that, for example, tomb 42 should adjoin no 110, and access be had to 145 from 17. Such incongruities are for the most part due to the succession in which the tombs were discovered; in practice they do not in any way impair the utility of the numbering. The purpose in assigning numbers to the tombs is to provide a series of abbreviations to be used in quotation, and so long as the numbers given are easily referred to in a printed Catalogue it matters little what order they follow. Any attempt to modify our numbering at the present juncture would introduce serious confusion into the already somewhat chaotic literature of Egyptology. Scholars are therefore begged to make shift with it, whatever its imperfections."