Maarten stayed at the Trust’s Kensington house for the second time in March and April 2o25.

In the library of the UCL Institute of Archaeology

Through the kind support of the Robert Anderson Trust, I was able to organize a week-long research stay at the Archaeology Institute library of the University College in London. There, I conducted vital research for my PhD dissertation on the reign of Mentuhotep II. Specifically, I needed to consult a large number of published works on the people who belonged to Mentuhotep’s court, i.e. his elite administrators, as well as a group of priestesses of Hathor who seem to have played an important ritual role during the reign of Mentuhotep II. These people are all depicted, as well as mentioned by name, in the decoration of Mentuhotep’s funerary temple at Deir el-Bahari, which constitutes the main dataset of my dissertation. During my research stay, I consulted all the publications I needed and I was able to nearly complete my chapter on these people, with just a few details left to be straightened out at home.

In this chapter, I discuss all the attestations of personal names on decorated wall fragments from the temple of Mentuhotep II and match them with people who are attested on other Middle Kingdom monuments or objects from the Theban necropolis. As such I aim to present a full report for each person mentioned in the temple and reconstruct the network of elite administrators during the reign of Mentuhotep II. For instance, the vizier Dagi is depicted on some of the fragments, and he is also known from his tomb on the north flank of Sheikh Abd el-Qurnah (TT 103), but also from objects in museums bearing his name, such as his sarcophagus in the Egyptian Museum Cairo and decorated wall fragments from his tomb in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Furthermore, I have been able to confidently argue against the traditional hypothesis that many of the priestesses of Hathor, who were buried in Mentuhotep’s temple, were of Nubian origin. I have now been able to show that the evidence has almost always been interpreted based on tropes surrounding skin colour, which are rooted in modern scientific racism. Based on the data, I conclude the chapter with a more theoretical discussion of the role(s) of elites in kingmaking, and their intrinsic participation in a ritual framework that was established to affirm not only the power of the king, but also their own, in society at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom.

Additionally, I have also had the opportunity to develop possible ideas for a workshop on the Theban necropolis during the Middle Kingdom, which will hopefully be held in London in 2026. During my week in London, I had a meeting with Dr Chris Naunton, the director of the Robert Anderson Trust. Together, we discussed ongoing research on the Middle Kingdom funerary monuments in the Theban necropolis. The current idea is to have talks presented by me and one or two more colleagues who are also working on Middle Kingdom monuments in the area, followed by a discussion on the possibilities and challenges of current research, as well as possible new research avenues for the future.

For more information about the other students in the 2025 cohort please see here.