When Professor Jacobus van Djik cried out " my god its Maya!" in February of 1986 he and his colleague Professor Geoffry Martin had found the tomb of King Tutankhamen's famous Treasurer.
Maya had given a number of gifts to the young King's tomb including an image carved in wood of the Boy King on a brier as well as a sumptuous shabti which recorded this fact on the soles of its feet.
Unfortunately Professors Djik and Martin found that Maya and his wife Meryt's tomb had been plundered and almost everything stolen or destroyed, yet within the ruin a piece of the waist of a calcite shabti was found alone, the rest of the object was not identified within the tomb.
So what could have become of the treasurer's shabti troop, often such objects are left within the ruined burial considered to have little value to the ancients, or did they? If all of Maya's shabti had been carved in stone than they might easily have been erased and re carved to sell again, so also may be the case of the missing canopic jars from the tomb of Kings Wife Meryetamen(TT358).
Objects long thought to be worthless to the ancient tomb robbers may have actually have enormous resale value and whether in the Ramaside period his burial perhaps neglected became recycled buy the very parlors that had buried him may never be known.
The objects may not only be re inscribed but perhaps even collected when they come from someone famous like the wife of Amenhotep I the aforementioned Merytamen. I do not know if this fame would still have applied to a mere Treasurer.
The graves of sailors at Carthage contained trinkets which may have come from the burials of a number of ancient kings of Egypt.
The presence of an "Antiquities market" in antiquity has long been known and suspected Pinudjem I reused a coffin of Thutmosis I while King's Wife Neskhonsu and her inner coffin were removed from her outer coffin and the Pharaoh Rameses IX placed into the outer coffin although this object was not re inscribed or an antiquity but merely appropriated for the better protection of the king within the same tomb. Once your dead its hard to hold onto what is yours.
There seems hardly a thing of stone in the royal burials at Tanis that is not a piece of recycled material.
The Reclining figure of the King Psusennes I on the lid of his pink granite sarcophagus wears a belt buckle identifying him as the Pharaoh Merenptah who had died two hundred years earlier and been buried hundreds of miles away in the valley of kings and whose tomb is missing all of its sarcophagus boxes.
Though Amenhotep III probably only had one stone box this is missing from his tomb and has never been identified though it would probably looked much like the one found re inscribed in the tomb of King Tutankhamen?
The shifting courts from Thebes to Aketaten back to Thebes may have left all of these chambers and their Kingly occupants immediately vunerable to plunder below the radar of the distant court.
To die in a moment of elevation or disgrace may make a persons planned burial inappropriate, a store room of valuable objects thrown away or resold where possible.
The true extent of appropriated funerary equipment is further hampered by rapid improvisation even amongst royals whose courts lost control of their subjects. Many would certainly have had to return their funerary equipment because they could not afford the grandiose burial they had hoped for.
The late old kingdoms Kings wife Ankhnespepi buried in a storeroom belonging to another Kings wife's mortuary temple with an old inscribed architectural element carved into a sarcophagus for her. The afterlife was not going to be so grand!
Mortuaries may have been left with large quantities of unclaimed equipment, likewise cemeteries would have tombs carved in better times lay forgotten and unused.
Perhaps one of the most disturbing reuses comes from the tomb of Tutankhamen in which the four boxes that contained the kings internal organs had originally been inscribed for his predecessor who was found in a tomb only a few meters away and whose damaged coffin matches perfectly in style to Tutankhamen's second coffin which bears a different face from Tutankhamen's other two coffins as well as his famous gold mask which clearly has had its face altered.
So in the end a large quantity of original burial material from ancient Egypt may never have existed or have existed only in a moment as over the three thousand years of pharaonic history objects became destroyed or reused in many cases over and over again.
The canopic chest of a king used for the burial of a kings wife and found as a toilet box in her tomb of 17th dynasty date.
Ultimately Amenhotep III sarcophagus may well be one of the most famous missing objects in view.
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