Some of the tomb houses excavated by Sami Gabra as well as their associated parts of buildings with wall paintings, photographically documented by Bernd Harald Krause in the 1980s and early 1990s, are now digitally available as datasets: https://arachne.dainst.org/project/tuna_el_gebel.
We are very grateful for funds from the German Foreign Office through it´s Cultural Preservation Programme. This enabled us to conserve one of the tomb houses, whose roof was restored by Sami Gabra in the1930ies, but actually was almost collapsing. Mohamed Fattouh Sayed and Hisham Elsheikh, conservator-restorers from the Egyptian Museum Cairo, worked together with the German conservator-restorer Heike Pfund to secure the wall paintings before the architectural intervention. The reconstruction of the new roof was planned and realized by the architect Katharina Westphalen and Egyptian carpenters.
On October 1st, 2019, we started our third season of excavation at Tuna el-Gebel. Cleaning the western area of GB 72, a large building of adobe bricks, we discovered not only a stone building, but also a so far untouched room! Inside the stone tomb we found a large quantity of pottery, like amphorae, cooking pots, flasks, oil lamps... According to our ceramologist Clementina Caputo they all belong to the Late Antiquity and formed a storage for a community.
As we consider site management an important task at Tuna el-Gebel, we commissioned an Egyptian company in Cairo to produce four new signs according to our area of research. The four signs are: “Welcome at Tuna el-Gebel” at the entrance gate of the archaeological area, “The tomb of Petosiris” next to the famous tomb, and “The Roman necropolis” and “The tomb of Isidora” next to the tomb house of Isidora. They were placed at the site on October 29th, 2018 by Katja Lembke and Sayed Abdel Malik.
In March 2018 we started the first excavation and chose as the first site an area south of the tomb houses excavated by Sami Gabra. Here we discovered a building with a dome and a barrel vault.
In spring 2018 we held another field school as part of the “International Summer- and Field-School Program for Archaeology, Conservation and Restoration of Arts and Cultural Heritage” and is financially supported by the Volkswagen Stiftung, Germany. It is a cooperation project of the Ministry of Antiquities (MoA), Minya University, the State Museum of Lower Saxony Hanover/Germany and supported by the University of Applied Sciences HAWK in Hildesheim, Germany.
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