Abstract
During the archaeological season of 2012, a false door was found in the filling of shaft 4 in Sheretnebty’s courtyard (AS 68). The limestone stela (66.0 × 38.0 × 10.5 cm) belonged to a certain Khai.
Both the decoration of the door and the execution of the incised hieroglyphic text are of rather poor craftsmanship. Two pairs of jambs, a lintel, a central panel and an architrave are framed by the torus moulding and crowned with a cornice.
Khai’s false door features the “inverted T-shape panel” which occurs in a small number of stelae from the end of the Old Kingdom and the First Intermediate Period. Remains of mud and whitewashing on the surface of the door suggest that the stela was originally placed in a niche, probably one of the two niches embedded in the west wall of Sheretnebty’s courtyard.
These recesses correspond with shafts 4 and 12 above which they were cut. The niches were plastered with mud and whitewashed, same as the space around them, including the floor in front of the recesses ca. 30 cm above the original courtyard floor.
We can find similar whitewashed cult places in the late Old Kingdom necropolis excavated by the Polish-Egyptian missions at North Saqqara. The typology of Khai’s false door, iconographic, paleographic and epigraphic features on the stela, personal name, stratigraphy in Sheretnebty’s courtyard and the whitewashed cult place are indicators of the late Sixth Dynasty or the First Intermediate Period.
Who was this man of low social status with a humble tomb and a small false door who lived perhaps two centuries after princess Sheretnebty’s death? The inscription on the false door does not reveal whether his choice of eternal dwelling related to the funerary cult of an individual buried in one of the four rock-cut tombs in tomb complex AS 68. A connection between Khai and these high ranking persons cannot, however, be excluded.