Funerary Cone of the Royal Tutor Heqarneheh

This cone has the impression of a stamp seal inscribed for a man named Heqarneheh (Heqa-er-neheh) who owned tomb 64 (TT 64) in the Sheikh Abd el-Qurna cemetery of Western Thebes. He was a Child of the Nursery, which probably means he was brought up with the royal children. He was also Royal Tutor of a prince named Amenhotep who became the pharaoh Amenhotep III.

Hundreds of inscribed pottery funerary cones dating to the New Kindom and later have been found in the non-royal cemeteries of the Theban necropolis. During the 1926-1927 field season, the Museum's excavators uncovered a Middle Kingdom tomb with rows of uninscribed cones embedded along the upper edge of the facade (see fig. 1). The later inscribed cones were probably used in the same way, identifying the tomb owner by name and title. Although some are inscribed with the names of officials whose tombs are known, such as Heqaerneheh, other cones record the names of people whose tombs have not yet been identified.

Nine cones of this type were uncovered by the Museum's excavators at various locations in the Theban necropolis (for more on this, see the Research tab below). This example came into the collection as a gift from Norman de Garis Davies, Director of the Egyptian Expedition's Graphic Section. He was preparing a corpus of the cones which was eventually finished by M. F. Laming Macadam and published in 1957 by Oxford University Press as A Corpus of Inscribed Egyptian Funerary Cones. The stamp on this cone is type 102 in the corpus.

(CHR)