The 19th-Dynasty green ushabti statuette (spirit model) of a woman named Hener is back home after travelling abroad for two decades, Nevine El-Aref reports The Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square played host this week to a funerary statuette of a woman named Hener. The statuette, which has been in the Netherlands, will be restored and put on display as a special exhibit. The statuette story began at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden in 2006 when a Dutch collector, who had bought the ushabti from an antiquities auction room, showed it to experts and curators of the museum to check its authenticity and historical value. Shortly after examining it the curators identified the ushabti as one of a group of six unearthed inside the tomb of Iurudef, excavated at Saqqara in 1985 by archaeologists from Leiden and published in 1991. Iurudef was the Scribe of the Treasury of Amun and Scribe of the God's Offerings during the reign of Ramses II. He seems to have acted as the latter's private secretary, and may even have been responsible for the construction of Tia's tomb in Saqqara. This would explain the fact that Iurudef is not only represented in a number of places in the tomb but even had his own burial-shaft within the precinct of his master. If we add that Iurudef may have been the tutor of Ramose, the famous scribe of the village of Deir Al-Medina, he becomes a fascinating figure in his own right. According to the Leiden Museum website, Iurudef's tomb consists of a small chapel on Tia's outer courtyard, abutting the north face of the pylon of the monument Horemheb next door. Thus a priest standing in front of the stelae faced south, not west as usual. All that remain of this miniature chapel are the floor and part of one door-jamb with a bit of the adjacent south wall -- enough to show that it had relief decoration both inside and outside. A tomb-shaft opens directly in front of the chapel and was excavated in 1985. This is 8.08 metres deep and leads to seven tomb-chambers: four on the first level (4.75 metres deep) and three more at the bottom (one entered via a second pit and 9.98 metres deep). These still contained considerable remains of Iurudef's burial gifts. The total number of individuals buried there amounts to at least 32. Iurudef's relatives, however, were not the last persons to be buried there. At some stage the tomb was robbed and its contents burnt. During the Third Intermediate Period (somewhere between 1100 and 850 BC), the four chambers of the upper level were reused for the burial of about 70 people. This was a period of great impoverishment, at least in Memphis. Accordingly, there were badly-mummified corpses wrapped in palm-stick mats, children in papyrus coffers or rectangular boxes, and only 27 proper coffins. The latter are of great interest because of their obvious lack of craftsmanship. The construction is poor, the decoration full of ill-understood details, and the texts have been written in pseudo-hieroglyphs. The find of this intrusive cache has proved to be highly important for a better understanding of the post-New Kingdom use of the Saqqara necropolis. The burial gifts of Iurudef still in the tomb-shaft included parts of inlaid wooden coffins, ushabtis in stone, wood and faience, fragments of a fine openwork mummy cover, a scribe's palette, a pectoral, a scarab inscribed in the name of Ramses II, and cosmetic vessels. In 1985 the collection found was stored in the so-called Sekhemkhet magazine in Saqqara along with other many finds made by the Dutch and British missions. Regretfully, however, some objects of the collection there were stolen in 1987. Since then the artefacts associated with that storehouse have occasionally surfaced. Back in the Netherlands, the collector acted in good faith when acquiring the ushabti as it was a stolen object. All that concerned the authorities was the active pursuit of the safe return of the object to Egypt. The museum has compensated the businessman, and the case was sent to court which issued a ruling that the object be returned to Egypt.
