Amenemhat I and t he Early Twelfth Dynasty a t Thebes Lila Acheson Wallace Curator, Egyptian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art AN UNFINISHED ROYAL FUNERARY MONU- MENT AT WESTERN THEBES ETWEEN THE HILLS of Sheikh Abd el

Qurna and Qurnet Marai in the Theban necropolis runs a valley that meets the floodplain at the site of the mortuary temple of Rameses II, the Ramesseum (Figures i, 2). The valley is a counterpart to the valley of Deir el-Bahri, where the temples of Mentuhotep II Nebhepetra and Hatshepsut are situated. But unlike the Deir el-Bahri valley, this valley does not contain famous standing monuments. Today, the valley presents a wild, almost desolate, appearance (Figures 3, 5, 21). A closer look, however, reveals features that indicate major landscaping efforts were undertaken in ancient times. Figures 2 and 3 show two separate places where quarrymen cut trenches into the rock preparatory to removing the entire rock face at the southwestern side of the valley.2 And at the western end of the valley where the limestone rock surrounds a natural bay, a considerable part of the ground was leveled to form an even plateau (Figure 3). Herbert E. Winlock in 1914 was the first to recognize that the plateau and trenches were traces of building activities.3 The discovery was important enough for him to record it in the opening paragraphs of The Rise and Fall of the Middle Kingdom in Thebes (1947). It is a memorable description of archaeological intuition: One day just before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the groom and I were exercising my horses behind Sheikh Abd el Kurneh Hill. The light was exactly right, and as I came to the highest bit of path, with the towering cliffs to the right and the lower hill to the left, I noticed below me for the first time a ? The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1991 Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 flat platform and the upper part of a sloping causeway ascending from the cultivation. In a flash I was spurring down the hill and up onto the level place to look down the line of the ancient roadway to the point where it disappeared behind the Ramesseum. I realized that in the flat terrace under the cliffs we had the grading for a temple like the one built in the Eleventh Dynasty at Deir el-Bahrijust to the north. In 1920-21 Winlock cleared the platform under the cliffs of later debris.4 In the course of this work, he recleared an underground passage and burial chamber (Figure 4) that had first been excavated by Robert Mond in the winter of 1903-4.5 Winlock rightly connected this burial chamber of royal proportions with the landscaping efforts described above, and he identified the ensemble as an unfinished royal funerary monument. At first, it seemed a simple matter to identify the individual for whom this monument had been intended. The similarities in the plan of the burial chamber-as well as in the general shape of the causeway and funerary temple-to the great funeral monument of Mentuhotep II Nebhepetra in the neighboring valley of Deir el-Bahri6 pointed to a successor of that king as the owner (Figure 1, nos. 1 and 5). Further indications of a late Eleventh Dynasty date for the structure were thought to exist because of the large tomb of the chancellor Meketra, situated at the northern side of the valley (Figure 5). This official was known to have served Mentuhotep II Nebhepetra as "overseer of the six great law-courts" around year 39 of that king's reign.7 During the last years of Nebhepetra's reign, Meketra was "chancellor" (imy-r' htmt) and was depicted or mentioned in this capacity several times in the relief decoration of Nebhepetra's funerary temple at Deir el-Bahri.8 The fact that Meketra's tomb was not sit-The notes for this article begin on page 41. 5 The Metropolitan Museum of Art is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Metropolitan Museum Journal www.jstor.org ® uated among the tombs of the other officials of Nebhepetra's court, on the slopes around the valley of Deir el-Bahri (Figure i, nos. 6 and 7),9 suggested to Winlock and others that Meketra outlived Nebhepetra and went on to serve his successor, Mentuhotep III Seankhkara. It was therefore logical to assume that the unfinished royal tomb in the valley, situated below the tomb of Meketra, belonged to King Mentuhotep III Seankhkara. (See Appendix I.) A group of inscriptions on nearby rocks seemed to corroborate the identification of the unfinished monument as the mortuary temple of Mentuhotep III. Between the valley, or rock bay, of Deir el-Bahri and the bay in which the unfinished royal funerary monument is situated lies yet another, smaller bay surrounded by limestone cliffs (Figure i, no. 4).1' In this smaller bay numerous graffiti of Middle Kingdom date are incised in the rock cliffs high above the valley floor. Winlock recognized that various groups of priests had incised their names here." Among these names, the greatest number were