Wenshet

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Wenshet (also spelled Weneshet) was an ancient Egyptian princess who lived around 2500 BCE, probably after the reign of Khufu in the 4th Dynasty and before the 5th Dynasty.

She is buried in the Giza Necropolis, in tomb G 4840, a mastaba with one burial shaft and two small chapels. The shaft measures about 2.1 by 2.1 meters and contains a reserve head sculpted in mud, a rarity since most reserve heads are made of limestone. The head has a projecting back of the skull and another projection at the base of the neck, with brows molded but not drawn. If this head belongs to Wenshet, the tomb would be one of only three mastabas known to preserve both a reserve head and a stela.

The southern chapel is a single white limestone room roughly 5 by 1.5 meters, with only about 1 meter of height surviving. The northern chapel features a fully decorated false door and appears more prominent than the southern chapel, which contains an undecorated false door in a chamber entered from the east. The decorated false door was found on March 21, 1914, by Hermann Junker and is now housed in a museum in Hildesheim. The unusual placement of the decorated false door may indicate it was moved at a later date.

The decorations depict various relatives bringing offerings. A limestone inscription near the tomb states that Wenshet was the king’s daughter, priestess of Hathor and Neith, and mistress of the sycamore. The inscription sits in a pinkish mortar made of gypsum and calcium sulfite, which has obscured some hieroglyphs. The mortar’s pink color comes from iron oxide exposure. The inscription’s exact identification is uncertain: the characters are unusually large for a slab stela but small for a false-door architrave, leaving questions about its purpose.

Expert Peter Der Manuelian suggests the artifact is best described as a stela. Its height is about 11–12 centimeters, similar to other stelae, and there are no matching architrave fragments to confirm a false door. If it is a stela, the tomb would be one of the few where a stela and decorated walls belonging to the same person were preserved together.