Merit, Chantress of Amun

A coffin recovered at Dra Abu el-Naga, on the west bank of the Nile opposite Luxor, belonged to a woman named Merit who held the title Chantress of Amun. The funerary inscriptions place her in the Eighteenth Dynasty, between 1550 and 1292 BC, and her coffin indicates she served at the temple of Amun at Karnak.

Painted detail from Henettawy's coffin. Merit held the same title in an earlier dynasty, and her own coffin has not been published. Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The excavation is directed by Abdelghaffar Wadji of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The find came late last year and the ministry announced the wider discovery earlier in 2026, which also included the tomb of a purification priest and a deposit of thirty mummified cats.

The coffins were moved there by other people, long after the burials

Merit’s coffin was not in her grave.

The team was digging out more than a century and a half of accumulated archaeological spoil piled over the tomb area when a concealed tunnel opened up behind it. Inside was a shaft holding around ten wooden coffins, several richly decorated, some carrying the names of the people inside them.

Wadji’s reading of the evidence is that the shaft functioned as a collection point. The coffins were removed from their original burial places and gathered here for reburial.

This was normal practice at moments of crisis. In 1898 Victor Loret, working near the Valley of the Kings, opened the burial chamber of Amenhotep II and found it holding the coffins of Thutmose IV, Amenhotep III, Seti II and three Ramesside kings. They had been put there for safekeeping by Pinedjem II, High Priest of Amun in the Twenty-first Dynasty.

Hesham Hussein of the Ministry of Antiquities in Sinai, who was not part of the excavation, describes the temple priests at Dra Abu el-Naga as behaving like curators, moving decayed or threatened burials out of the reach of robbers. When remains were at risk, they were relocated quickly.

Dra Abu el-Naga was in continuous use for roughly two and a half thousand years, from the late Middle Kingdom around 2000 BC through to the Coptic period, and it sits directly across the river from Karnak.

The outer coffin of Henettawy, a chantress of Amun-Re, shown here for comparison. This is not Merit's coffin, which has not been published. Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Waking the god in the morning and singing it to sleep at night

The title translates two related Egyptian words. Heset means singer and appears as early as the Old Kingdom. Shemayet means musician and is better documented from the New Kingdom. Because nearly all the evidence comes from titles written on coffins, telling the two apart is close to impossible, and both are conventionally rendered as chantress.

The work was daily as well as ceremonial. In the temple routine the singers woke the deity in the morning and sang it to sleep in the evening. Priests cleared and swept the sanctuary, burned incense and laid out an offering of bread, duck, melon, onion, lettuce and cuts of ox, with wine.

Suzanne Onstine, who wrote the standard study of the office and was not involved in the discovery, puts the hymns at the centre of it. The chanting is what draws the god’s attention and brings it into the temple. Everything volatile, the smell of the food, the incense, the sound, is what can reach the plane where the gods are.

At the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, the chantresses walked in front of the barks carrying Amun, Mut and Khonsu across the river to bless the necropoleis. At the Opet festival they led the procession from Karnak down the avenue of sphinxes to Luxor temple. They drummed, clashed hand cymbals and shook the sistrum, and the noise did two jobs at once, calling the god and telling the city the god was coming.

Onstine’s point about that is practical. There were no loudspeakers. A band announcing what was happening was how people knew to come out and see the statue.

The title meant different things in different centuries

This is where the underlying research is sharper than the headlines.

Onstine’s study analysed 861 cases and found the social profile of the title shifting substantially over time. Middle Kingdom holders came from modest backgrounds and were rare. Eighteenth Dynasty women, Merit’s period, came from the highest-ranking families and were comparatively few. Nineteenth Dynasty holders came from more modest backgrounds and were considerably more numerous. By the Third Intermediate Period almost all of them belonged to priestly families at Thebes, and the sheer number of them indicates how powerful the cult of Amun had become.

So the title was at its most exclusive in exactly the period Merit lived. Hussein notes that women holding it generally came from powerful families, as wives or daughters of priests or officials.

The National Geographic account credits Hatshepsut with that change, arguing she consolidated her position partly by adding religious processions to the calendar and by making the chantress role a distinct profession alongside the priestly hierarchy. Onstine’s formulation is more careful. By the Eighteenth Dynasty the word is no longer describing an activity. It has become a title attached to a temple and given to women of elite status.

What is not known about her

A good deal.

We have her name, her title, her temple and her dynasty. We do not have her family, her dates, her tomb or her grave goods, since the coffin was moved before it reached us.

The comparison usually drawn is with Nauny, a chantress of Amun-Re from around 1050 BC who lived into her seventies, carried the title king’s daughter, and was buried with a Book of the Dead scroll more than five metres long showing her heart weighed against Maat. That is the kind of evidence Merit’s burial might once have had, and no longer does.

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Sources. National Geographic, 25 August 2026, reporting by Taylor Mitchell Brown, with comment from Abdelghaffar Wadji, Hesham Hussein and Suzanne Onstine. Onstine, S. (2005). The Role of the Chantress (Shemayet) in Ancient Egypt. British Archaeological Reports.