The historical and archaeological reliability of the Middle Kingdom "tomb-group" from el-Matariya (Heliopolis)

A group of Middle Kingdom objects discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, and stated as coming from a tomb near el-Matariya (Heliopolis), was acquired by a French collector, Maurice Nahman, and later widely dispersed across public institutions and private collections worldwide. The group included a large quantity of faience figurines (over 34 pieces identified so far). The aim of this article is to reassemble the group (also visually) and address three critical points about its "discovery": a) the authenticity of each single artefact; b) the reliability of the place of provenance (el-Matariya) and its archaeological setting (a funerary context); c) the validity of the association of the objects as a group, i.e. the likelihood that they were all effectively connected with each other in the same original context (itself a unique archaeological occurrence). While el-Matariya and a single funerary context for them are still plausible hypotheses, next to the possibilities that these objects may have come from either a temple deposit or a multiple burial assemblage, the author aims to demonstrate that in no way can they be considered to have come from a "provenanced context".