Inner Coffin Lid of Taenty

Ta-enty’s small undecorated tomb was just big enough to hold her mummy nested inside two coffins. The lid of her inner coffin is mummiform in shape and has a brilliantly painted exterior. It has a yellow painted face and a wig striped in red, blue and yellow. Around the neck is worn a broad collar of beads and lotus petals. Below is an image of the sun god at dawn in the form of a ram-headed falcon. Like the sun, Ta-enty wanted to be reborn every day. Painted on the footboard are three columns of text inscribed for Ta-enty but the text is damaged. Ta-enty’s name is a little bit of a mystery to us. It means ‘she who’ and we think this is probably an ancient error made by the artist who spelt her name incorrectly. The text also mentions her ‘good name’ which may be Baket-en-heret-nenet, meaning ‘servant of the upper and lower sky’. This is a very unusual name as it refers to places in the Underworld. An earlier reading by Professor Percy Newberry was Bak-en-heret-nakht. Ta-enty's intact tomb was found during John Garstang's excavations at Kostamneh (Nubia) in 1906. The rock cut tomb was given the number 200K. II 06. It is now lost beneath the waters of Lake Nasser. John Garstang describes the discovery in his handwritten report to the excavation committee: “To the north of the chief necropolis were a few tombs of pure Egyptian character of the New Empire, probably the graves of the officials concerned in the governing of this site. The above shows the door of the tomb built up with stones: upon removing these there was seen the rather good mummy case of one “Antï”, and excellent mummy within which has not been disturbed in any way. Date about XX Dyn.”