The Past has published a piece on the reconstruction of the funerary furniture of Queen Hetepheres I, the mother of the pharaoh Khufu, tracing the work back to George Reisner's discovery of her tomb at Giza in 1925. The article follows how Reisner engaged William Arnold Stewart to reconstruct the queen's furniture, including her carrying-chair, from the finds recovered during the excavation.
Hetepheres I occupies an unusual place in the record of the Old Kingdom. As the mother of Khufu, the king who built the Great Pyramid at Giza, she belonged to the very heart of the Fourth Dynasty royal family. Her tomb, uncovered by Reisner's expedition in the 1920s, is remembered less for a lavish burial than for the delicate wooden and gilded objects it contained, furniture that had largely decayed but left enough physical evidence to allow careful study.
The value of the burial lay in what could be salvaged and understood rather than in intact grandeur. Reisner's team is credited with meticulous excavation, recording the positions of decayed timber, gold sheathing and inlays so that the original pieces could be worked out. It was on the basis of that documentation that Stewart was brought in to attempt reconstructions, turning fragmentary remains into a picture of how the queen's furnishings once looked.
The carrying-chair named in the account is among the objects associated with the find. Furniture of this kind gives a rare sense of the domestic and ceremonial life of the highest levels of Egyptian society, a category of evidence that rarely survives from the third millennium BC because wood so seldom endures. The reconstruction of such items therefore depends heavily on the quality of the excavation and the skill of those who study the surviving traces.
The Past's coverage sits within its books section, revisiting a chapter in the history of Egyptology as much as the burial itself. The story of Hetepheres I's furniture is one where modern craft and scholarship have worked together to recover something of what was placed with a queen of Giza more than four and a half thousand years ago. For readers drawn to the people behind the great monuments, it is a reminder that the Fourth Dynasty is known not only through pyramids but through the smaller objects that furnished a royal life.
Those who would like to read the names of Khufu and his family for themselves can learn the script with the Hierolyte app, which teaches hieroglyphs from the ground up.