Funerary Cone of Sebekmose

Culture: Egyptian

Period: New Kingdom, late 18th or 19th dynasty, 1330-1189 B.C.

Material: Terracotta

Dimensions: 7 cm x 6.7 cm

Price: Sold

Ref: 1457

Provenance: Viennese private collection Ernst Degasperi (1927-2011), acquired in the 1960s to 1970s. Thence in the family estate.

Condition: Unrestored.

Description: Terracotta cone from the tomb of the chief Wab priest Sebekmose, which was discovered around 1918. The tomb is located in Thebes West in the necropolis Qurnet Murai and has the number TT275. Sebekmose must have been an important person. His name means “The Crocodile God”. The cone depicts on its flat side a hieroglyphic inscription in three registers which are separated by horizontal lines. The inscription reads: “The revered one before Osiris, the head Wab-priest Sebekmose, justified.” The duties of Wab priests were to bring offerings, music instruments and holy cult objects to the altar or shrine and to clean them. They lived chaste, bathed twice a day and twice at night, and were shaved from head to foot. Overall, around 300 funerary cones were found in Sebekmose’s tomb, most of them only fragmentarily preserved. They are published in the standard work about funerary cones “A Corpus of Inscribed Egyptian Funerary Cones” by Norman de Garis Davies and Miles Frederick Laming Macadam, Oxford 1957 as number 501.