Funerary Cone of the Scribe Nebamun

This cone has the impression of a stamp seal inscribed for a man named Nebamun, owner of Theban Tomb 179. Nebamun was scribe of accounts of the grain belonging to the god Amun. Unlike the majority of cone inscriptions, which give the name and titles of the tomb owner, this one also identifies his father as a scribe named Itef (or perhaps iti), and his mother as Ahmose.

The area around Nebamun's tomb was cleared in the 1910-1911 field season by Norman DeGaris Davies, director of the Graphic Section of the Museum's Egyptian Expedition. This cone and another of the same type came to the Museum in the division of finds.

During the 1926-27 field season, the Museum's excavators uncovered a Middle Kingdom tomb (MMA 110) with rows of unstamped cones embedded along the upper edge of the façade (see fig. 1). It is quite likely that stamped cones, which date to the New Kingdom and later, were used in the same way, identifying the tomb owner by name and title.
The stamp on this cone is type 558 in A Corpus of Inscribed Egyptian Funerary Cones compiled by Norman de Garis Davies and published by M. F. Laming Macadam in 1957 by Oxford University Press. (CHR)