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Neferabu's tomb no. 5 at Deir el-Medina

Neferabu was a worker from Deir el-Medina whose title was "The Servant in the Place of Truth". He worked in the necropolis during the first half of the 19th dynasty. Thanks to the surviving textual evidence from the village, the dates can be narrowed down to the years 36 (O.Gardiner 133) and 40 (O.BM 5634) of Ramesses II. (Davis, 1999, 158)
The tomb of Neferabu (numbered TT5) is an excellent source from which to construct his family tree. Neferabu was the son
of "The Servant in the Place of Truth" Neferrenpet and his wife Mahy. The tomb inscriptions refer to Amenmose as the "father" of Neferabu, but it has been proved that Amenmose was actually the father of Neferabu's wife Ta-Isis (or Isis or Taiset). (Davis,1999,158)
The names of his numerous children are recorded on the walls of the tomb. He had sons Nodjemger, Neferronpet, Ramose and Meriunu and daughters Henuttu, Mahi, Tenthaynu, Hotepy, Mutemopet, Istnofret, Henut-iunet and Roruti.
The tomb of Neferabu is nestled against the Theban hills in the northern part of the western necropolis of Deir el-Medina.
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Photography © 2007 Andy Peacock
A plan of the tomb of Neferabu, no. 5. Drawn by Lenka Peacock, after a drawing in Vandier, Jacques : Tombes de Deir el- Médineh, 1935.
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History of the discovery

Almost nothing is known about the discovery of the tomb of Neferabu. Most likely, it was discovered more than two centuries ago. Maspero suggested 1818 as the year of discovery on the basis of the stele of Neferabu now in the British Museum (EA 589, more details below). The stele came from a collection of Count Belmore and was said to have been found in a tomb at Thebes in 1818. Although this votive stele may have come from his tomb, it is more likely that it came from one of the shrines at Deir el-Medina, or possibly from the rock shrine between the village and the Valley of the Queens.
There is other evidence that dissuades us from accepting Maspero's claims.


1. From a papyrus in the Louvre, we know that the tomb was violated during the Ptolemaic period, when it served as a catacomb: "Appointed Horus leaves to each of his sons a quarter that belongs to him in Neferabu's catacombs, and a
quarter of the dead."
2. The tomb was probably inhabited by Copts. In the first hall and the two connecting rooms, there were numerous burn marks on the ceiling and walls. This does not prove with certainty that the tomb was inhabited by Copts (some marks are modern and made by the Arabs), but they can often be taken as a sign of the presence of Copts, and it is very likely that the tomb of Neferabu, after serving as a catacomb, was used as a dwelling by Copts.
3. After visiting Deir el-Medina in the 1880s, Alfred Wiedemann described the tombs of the 19th dynasty, but did not mention the tomb of Neferabu in his article published in 1908.
4. In 1929 Bernard Bruyère discovered another stela in the shaft of pit 1195. This proves once again that the stela from Belmore's collection which was found in a tomb in Thebes did not come from the tomb of Neferabu.
However, it is not impossible that the tomb of Neferabu was already known in 1818 and then quickly forgotten. This is not without precedent in Deir el-Medina - wall scenes in Tomb No. 3 were copied by Hay between 1825 and 1838, and then the tomb was rediscovered by Howard Carter in 1910. This hypothesis seems likely. The tomb known in 1818 could have been filled with sand shortly afterwards. There is another example of this happening at Deir el-Medina: the tomb of Inherkau was partly drawn by Lepsius in the mid-19th century, then lost and rediscovered by Bruyère in 1930.
1930.

It is not possible to conclude whether the tomb was known in the early 19th century and we cannot answer the question who discovered the tomb of Neferabu and when. (Vandier,1935,1-4)

Drawn by Lenka Peacock, after a drawing in Vandier, Jacques : Tombes de Deir el-Médineh, 1935.

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The architecture

The tomb belongs to the category of chapel tombs. It had the following layout: a small open courtyard at ground level, a one-room vaulted chapel surmounted by a brick pyramid topped by a stone pyramidion, and a large funerary stele beyond. The vaulted chapel was very richly decorated. The shaft near the courtyard leads to the underground passage and two burial chambers.
This type of tomb was widely used during the 19th and 20th dynasties.
The tomb consists of two distinct parts: the underground part for the deceased, and the outer side, which was visited by family and friends and served as a place for worshipping the dead. This part was almost completely destroyed, but the preserved remains and other data gathered from other tombs can help to reconstruct its shape.

 

The courtyard was a square of 6.5 metres on each side, surrounded by walls of stone and adobe. The entrance, which was on the south side, probably consisted of two brick pillars and was accessed by a ramp or stairs. At the end of the courtyard was a pyramidal building.

A small chapel, the layout of which, as Bruyère noted, is the same as the hieroglyphic sign for the house, was built of adobe and stone and measured 2 x 3.10 metres. The door, located on the longer side, opened to the south. At the end of the chapel - opposite the front door - there was a niche where the floor was raised to the height of a step. The niche measured 2 metres by 1.5 metres. The funerary stele and an offering table were usually placed here. In his 1926 report (p. 86), Bruyère says of the chapel: "The fact that the slope collapsed has almost completely destroyed the remains. We can only assume that it was a vaulted room, made of brick, with a west-east axis parallel to the front". The walls of the chapel were painted with multicoloured figures on a yellow background.


Pyramid. The walls of the chapel were the base on which stood a brick pyramid topped by a pyramidion. The pyramidion was made of painted limestone with inscriptions in honour of the sun. Each of the four sides represented a phase of the sun during the day. On the south side of the pyramid was a niche containing the round stela found by Bruyère in 1929 in a neighbouring pit No. 1195.
The inside of the pyramid was hollow so as not to put too much weight on the walls of the chapel. The
The outer walls of the pyramids were washed with lime. (Vandier,1935,5-6)

Drawn by Lenka Peacock, after a drawing in Vandier, Jacques : Tombes de Deir el-Médineh, 1935.

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Shaft. In the courtyard, two metres in front of the chapel, there was a burial shaft. It was dug vertically into the ground. It measures 0.75 x 1.40 metres and is 4 metres deep. Its walls were made of mud bricks covered with white paint. There are slits in the walls of the shaft at intervals of about 0.60 metres, so that it is possible to descend. Four steps leading to the first chamber are modern, the 5th is original. The door in the eastern wall opened to the west.
 

The first hall. It is a long hall, oriented from north to south, measuring 2 metres by 5.08 metres. The ceiling is vaulted and made of mud bricks laid in diagonal lines. The walls are completely covered with paint on plaster. A large part of the vault and the north wall are blackened and burnt, making it very difficult to read the text of the inscriptions and to study the murals.
Around the centre of the hall, the vaulted ceiling is cracked. Traces of an old brick structure, no doubt the old shaft, can be seen. This suggests that Neferabu reused an earlier tomb as his resting place. It is likely that the earlier tomb dates from the 18th Dynasty.
The original shaft is about 2 metres away from the later shaft. The remains of the southern wall of the old shaft can be seen in the courtyard of the chapel. It was also built of mud bricks, as was the later shaft of Neferabu.

A small long room leads from the first hall to the west side, and two other small interconnected rooms are on the east side. It is difficult to say whether the small rooms were part of the original tomb or were added by Neferabu. These areas may have been used as storage rooms and were filled with funerary objects. The walls of these rooms are blackened by smoke, either from Ptolemaic or Coptic times. The first room of the eastern group has a cavity in the floor along its eastern wall, representing a kind of oblong tank in which the sarcophagus could have been placed at some point.

At the end of the northern side of the first room of the tomb, there is a kind of stage or mastaba, 47 cm high and 2 m wide. The family of the deceased probably placed their offerings on this altar, which takes up the entire back of the hall, during the funeral ceremony. This mastaba is a common feature of tombs in the area, but is usually located at the bottom of the burial chamber. The mastaba in this tomb masks the shaft leading into the burial chamber. The shaft was filled with hard packed earth, which also formed the mastaba itself. The entrance to the second chamber was probably closed by a large vertical stone that slid into two vertical grooves. The grooves are still visible at the entrance to the tomb, although they are covered with white plaster.


The entrance to the burial chamber has 4 steps, which are modern. Farina's photographs from the time when the tomb was excavated by Bruyère show us the original state: there was a shaft with three walls whitewashed with lime. The fourth wall was formed by the stopper. At the bottom of the southern wall, the last three layers of mud bricks were not plastered. Either there was a step or, more likely, it is simply a sign of damage.


Burial chamber. The second room, the burial chamber, is larger than the first. It measures 6.25 by 3 metres. Its height reaches 2.6 metres, but is also reduced by the vaulted ceiling. Its floor is about 1.5 metres below the level of the first hall. A rather large crack in the ceiling, which has damaged the scenes on the front wall and areas in the south-east and south-west corners, allows a glimpse of the remains of the original masonry, as in the first hall.
The east wall is damaged by a large crack, about a metre wide, probably caused by probing at the time of the discovery. It leads to a small lower cavity measuring 2.0 by 1.4 metres. The texts and scenes on the walls are intact.

The niches were drawn by Lenka Peacock, after a drawing in Vandier, Jacques : Tombes de Deir el-Médineh, 1935.
At the end of the burial chamber there is a peculiar and interesting detail: there are small oblong vertical niches on the east and west walls, about half a metre from the northern corner. Bruyère thought that they were intended to hold a wooden beam to support the weight of the sarcophagus as it was lowered into a room below. In 1929 he made a probe into the floor at the foot of the north wall, but found nothing except a small empty cavity at a depth of 1.5 metres.
metres deep. The purpose of these niches remains a mystery.
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When the tomb was decorated, the niches were bricked up and lime-washed, but the artist left them empty and unadorned.
It is difficult to explain these elements as nothing similar has been found in other tombs. (Vandier,1935,6-9)


Objects connected to Neferabu housed in the British Museum
Fragment of a stela of Neferabu
19th dynasty
Limestone
From Deir el-Medina
British Museum EA 1754
Location: Gallery 63/11
Height: 17.5 centimetres
Length: 52 centimetres
Acquired in Luxor
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The stela above may have come from his tomb TT5 or perhaps from one of the shrines at Deir el-Medina.
The relief shows the deceased's sons and relatives together with the draughtsman Pabaki, the draughtsman Pashedu and the scribe Ipu(y) carrying various funerary objects to be placed in his tomb. These include various boxes and stools. Merysekhmet is described on the stela as a sn (brother) of Neferabu, but Jac Janssen identifies Merysekhmet as Neferabu's nephew. He argues that Merysekhmet is not his real brother but a member of the same generation to which Janssen refers by sn. (Gleanings,1982,128). This argument is supported by the identification of at least 11 so-called brothers (sn) from several monuments attributed to Neferabu. The filiations recorded on Egyptian funerary reliefs do not always reliably reflect a particular blood relationship and closer examination in certain cases allows Egyptologists to determine the true relationship to the individuals involved (Davies,1999,158).

It is in good but incomplete condition. In the literature it is always quoted together with stela 150 (as BM 150+1754). It was published by Kitchen in his Rammesside Inscriptions, Vol. 3, p. 774, part of 154. It has also been published in The British Museum hieroglyphic texts from Egyptian stelae etc, edited by T. G. H. James, Part 9: Plate XXX Registration number: 1931,0613.11
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Ostrakon bearing an attendance record of  workmen
EA 5634
Neferabu's name appears on line 3 of the ostrakon:
Neferabu: month 4 of Spring, day 15 (his daugher was bleeding), day 17 (burying the god), month 2 of Summer, day 7 (embalming his brother), day 8 (libating for him), month 4 of  Summer, day 26 (his wife was bleeding).
To view and browse the digitised version of The Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Statues, Reliefs and Paintings, (also known as Porter & Moss or TopBib) for this tomb, go to
http://www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/topbib/pdf/pm1-1.pdf#page=30
Material for the Bibliography is gathered from an ever-expanding range of multi-lingual sources, encompassing both specialist and semi-popular Egyptological and Near Eastern publications, periodicals, museum guides, exhibition and auction catalogues, together with the growing wealth of web resources. The Bibliography also analyses a range of unpublished manuscripts, including those housed in the Griffith Institute Archive. Published in May 2014 by the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford, the volumes are constantly revised and augmented.


Text on this page written by Lenka & Andy Peacock
Photographs © Lenka Peacock, The Trustees of the British Museum
With many thanks and gratitude to Ing. Jaroslav Bican, my brother, for the translation of the French text into Czech.
Sources:
1. Vandier, Jacques : Tombes de Deir el-Médineh : la tombe de Nefer-Abou
Le Caire : Impr. de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale, 1935.
2. Davies, Benedict G.: Who's who at Deir el-Medina : a prosopographic study of the royal workmen's community
Leiden : Nederlands Instituut voor Her Nabije Oosten, 1999
3. Davis, Benedict G.: Genealogies and personality characteristics of the workmen in the Deir el-Medina community during the Ramesside period. Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Liverpool : University of Liverpool, February 1996.
4. Gleanings from Deir el-Medina / editors, R. J. Demarée and Jac. J. Janssen.
Leiden : Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten te Leiden, 1982.
5. Journey through the Afterlife : Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead / edited by John H. Taylor
London : The British Museum Press, 2010. 320 p.
6. The British Museum web site www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk
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