Ta-Kheru's Family

Tja-en-Waset, Ta-Kheru’s father, is also named as father on the coffin of a woman called Nes-mut-aat-neru. Tja-en-Waset had two wives, and Ta-Kheru was probably the daughter of the more junior wife. Ta-Kheru and Nes-mut-aat-neru were therefore either sisters, or half-sisters.

Nes-mut-aat-neru married into a very high status family of Theban priests. She had a son, Djed- djedhuty-iuef-ankh, who became a priest of the falcon god of war Montu and ultimately shared a tomb with his mother and wife in the temple of Hatshepsut, Thebes.

The three remaining mummies of Ta-Kheru’s family are now scattered across the world: Ta-Kheru in Aberdeen, her sister in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and her sister’s son in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. We hope to carry out DNA studies to find out more about their ancestry.

Coffin inscriptions and DNA cannot tell us what family relationships were like. Were the sisters close friends, were there family tensions or harmony? We know that both sisters were given rich burials, suggesting that their relatives wanted to honour them.

Both Ta-Kheru and Nes-mut-aat-neru lived to at least their 60s, a remarkable age for the time. So we can imagine two small girls playing together on the banks of the Nile, and two elderly ladies recalling the past and growing old together in Thebes.