The Qau bowl (UC16163), inscribed inside and out with Shepsi’s two letters to his dead parents. Credit: Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL, via Google Arts and Culture.
A red pottery bowl in the Petrie Museum at University College London, catalogued as UC16163, carries two hieratic letters from a man named Shepsi to his dead parents. He addressed his father Iinkhenmut on the inside and his mother Iy on the outside, and according to Gianluca Miniaci’s 2016 study both texts concern land a man named Henu was taking from him. Noel Wheeler excavated the bowl in 1924 at Qau for Flinders Petrie, and scholars date it between the late Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom. Estimates of how many such letters survive range from 19 to 24.
Ancient Content, November 9, 2026
A bowl behind a buried man’s head holds two letters
Wheeler dug the bowl from tomb 7695 in the southern cemetery at Qau, ancient Antaeopolis in Upper Egypt, and G. Brunton published the excavation in Qau and Badari I in 1927, according to Miniaci. The tomb is a shaft about 3.5 metres deep with a chamber to the south. The chamber held one man, and the red pottery bowl lay behind his head with hieratic writing inside and out. The Petrie Museum catalogues it as UC16163.
Sources date the bowl in three ways. The Petrie Museum’s record on Google Arts and Culture gives 2100 to 2050 BCE, and Wikipedia places it in the First Intermediate Period. Miniaci notes that the vocabulary echoes the Coffin Texts and that the handwriting resembles 6th Dynasty papyri from Elephantine, which suggests a date between the late Old Kingdom and the Middle Kingdom. He cites Gardiner and Sethe (1928) and Kemp (1975) for this.
