Past Portraits: Early Pictures and Descriptions of the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter

In 1738, the British bishop Richard Pococke was the first to mention the distinctive Egyptian cornice on the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter.

The earliest illustration of the monument appears in a book by the Italian-German traveler Luigi Mayer, who visited Jerusalem in 1801. Mayer depicted the monument against the backdrop of the Kidron Valley at the top of a towering, rocky cliff. The work dramatizes the landscape, making the cliffs higher than they are in reality. Nevertheless, his depiction of the tomb is fairly accurate, showing its entrance and Egyptian cornice, as well as the entrance to another cave—unknown today—in the cliff beneath the Tomb of Pharaoh’s Daughter.