Canadian Egyptologist - Rexine Hummel
Part VII - Her Favourite Pot
DD: While I attempted to ask specific questions, Rexine would often just send me her own work. This is great - because I think you can get a better feel for her, and her work, from hearing about them directly. Thank you Rexine, for sharing so much with us. Following is her writing about her ‘Favourite Pot’.
Background
The Mortuary temple of QueenTausret is located on the West Bank of the Nile across from the modern city of Luxor, Egypt. It is situated between the Ramesseum ( Mortuary temple of Ramessses II) and the Mortuary temple of Amenhotep II. The ruins of this temple belonging to the 19th dynasty queen Tausret were examined briefly in the 1890s by the famous English archaeologist Flinders Petrie. In the 2000s THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION: TAUSRET TEMPLE PROJECT was given the permit to excavate the site.
I was the ceramicist for this project directed by Pearce Paul Creasman from 2013 to 2016. It was a great project. The team members were very nice and the accommodation, which changed over the years from a hotel room looking over the Nile to a huge apartment on the West Bank, was exceptional. The apartment was so large that the entire crew gathered there every evening for dinner and often came in the afternoons to work in the large living room.
I worked in a tent with the registrar and the photographer.
I was protected from the hot summer sun and had the use of 2 work tables and an additional table set up for gluing pottery.
In 2015 a few interesting sherds came up in the pottery buckets. They appeared to be fragments of a female vessel of some kind. I quickly assembled the pieces to try and judge what was missing. I had seen lots of Hathor vessels which have female faces and breasts, but these pieces were a little different.
HATHOR JARS
I immediately sent out a message to the supervisor of the square that was producing these sherds telling him to sift all the earth from his square and all the adjacent squares. In the end we were rewarded with 17 fragments. My favorite activity is gluing pots together so this was a joy. We affectionately called this new pot “Sybel” The head had been made separately and had an opening at the top which formed the rim of the jar and an opening at the bottom which would be joined to the body. The entire base and most of the side which included the back of her head were missing.
I took to the books and started researching female vessels and I found a German article written by Anne Seiler. She described a new type of female vessel that had many of the same attributes that our Sybel had including the top of the entire head being the rim of the vessel, the prominent eyes, nose, chin and an arm that was raised to the head. She called her new form an “Isis” vessel.
My research pointed me to the suggestion that these vessels represented a woman in mourning. I consulted other ceramicists and discovered many more of this type of vessel. I think many of them in the past and even in the present were still mistakenly called Hathor vessels. This is understandable since they are so fragmented you don’t notice the clues unless you glue the pieces together. Why Sybel was found at a mortuary temple I don’t know.
Debborah Donnelly who was the artist on the project drew a beautiful archaeological rendering of Sybel. (Thanks Rexine!)
The XIIth International Conference of Egyptologists happened the same year and I attended with drawings and photos of Sybel. I approached ceramicists that I knew worked on New Kingdom sites and found that they were very interested in this new vessel type. Many conference goers began approaching me wanting to see Sybel and she soon became a mini celebrity.
The story of Sybel has now been published in “The Temple of Tausret 2”. [1]
[1] Hummel, R (2024) A Mourning-Woman Vase from the Temple of Tausret. In P.P. Creasman, T.L. Finlayson, R.H. Wilkinson (Ed.), Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, Volume 42, June 2024, The Temple of Tausret 2, pp. 237-256. https://egyptianexpedition.org/volumes/vol-42-the-temple-of-tausret-2/
