Maya

Who is Maya?

Maya was the Overseer of the Treasury during the reign of Pharaoh Tutankhamun, Ay and Horemheb of the eighteenth dynasty of Ancient Egypt. He was also an important official and was noted for restoring the burials of several earlier Pharaohs in the Royal Necropolis in the years following the deaths of Tutankhamun and Ay. The statues of Maya and his wife Merit have been put on display in the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, Netherlands since 1823. He donated a shabti figure to the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Maya collected taxes and performed other services for these pharaohs, including supervising the preparation of their tombs. Maya's own tomb at Saqqara was initially partly excavated in 1843 by the archaeologist Karl Richard Lepsius,and its impressive reliefs were recorded in sketches and some of them brought to Berlin. Over time, however, the tomb was covered by sand, and its location was lost. In 1975, a joint expedition of archaeologists from the Egypt Exploration Society in London and the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, Netherlands began a quest to rediscover the tomb, and on February 6, 1986 they finally succeeded. On this date, Professor Geoffrey T. Martin together with Dr. Jacobus Van Dijk representing the Leiden museum discovered the burial chamber of Maya's subterranean tomb at Saqqara some 18 metres below the surface.