Hieratic Ostraca of the Rameside period in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo: documentation, classification and commentary

We have dealt in this dissertation with 31 ostraca from the Valley of the Kings with various texts. They all attribute to Th. Davis and Carter/ Carnarvon’s excavations. They can classify into administrative, literary, Funny-signs and few jar labels. Coordinated minor institutions may have probably based therein, being administered by a large headquarter settled somewhere in western Thebes. These small administrative stations were in charge of preparing works to be executed into some group of tombs in the vicinity. That can explain the reason why we find some artefacts of a certain king somewhere else other than the area where his tomb is located. The corpus of this research has revealed that workmen might have probably exploited the Valley of the Kings as a place where they could temporarily settle down. This hypothesis may be corroborated by the recent excavations which have discovered a wide-spread of huts throughout the main valley along with its lateral ones. The increase of workmen’s number which took place sometime during the ruling years of Ramses IV would have probably constricted the authority to build these huts as a sort of temporary inhabiting extension to the neighbouring settlement of Deir el Medina.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

m_ph

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

m_ph

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Birmingham

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Abdel Rahman, Abdel Samie Salah Hafez

• DT Africa