The Discovery of Queen Ahhotep’s Burial at Dra Abu el-Naga (Thebes) in the Nineteenth Century AD: Between Tale and Archaeological Evidence

In 1859 some Egyptian workmen digging in the northern sector of the Theban necropolis on behalf of Auguste Mariette brought to light the coffin of a queen called Ahhotep (Second Intermediate Period), which contained rare and unparalleled items, forming the largest “treasure” of the goldsmith’s art then known from Egypt. The discovery of the burial equipment quickly received international attention, triggering the need for more definite and appropriate contours of its story. Nonetheless, the accounts produced have wrongly been interpreted as archaeological reports, generating an inaccurate understanding of the events and assumptions handed down in the Western Egyptological tradition. The article aims at deconstructing and then reconstructing the history of this discovery through archival research, in order to: a) retrace the most important events in the timeline; b) determine the roles played by the people involved; c) provide the approximate spatial coordinates for location of the burial; d) shed light on the type of burial in which the coffin was found; e) determine the total number and type of recorded objects; f) analyse the consistency of the assemblage. The final objective is to define more realistic contours for the discovery, moving away from the narrative which Egyptological tradition contributed to build.