A FRAGMENT FROM THE OSIRIS CHAPELS AT DENDERA IN BRISTOL OLAF E. KAPER A sandstone slab with Ba-bird and text The Egyptian Gallery in the City Museum and Art Gallery, Bristol, possesses a fragmentary sandstone relief block with the registration number H 4972, which is the subject of the present article (Fig. 1). 1 The block was bequeathed to the museum in 1956 as part of the collection of Charles R. Mapp, when Leslie Grinsell was curator of Archaeology and Anthropology. 2 It is not known from where Mapp had obtained the items in his collection. He had been a schoolmaster from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, and was not trained as an Egyp- tologist, although he had a collection of books on the subject. Grinsell remarked in his autobi- ography: “My recollection is that the assemblage contained a fair proportion of modern fakes such as any collector without special knowledge would be likely to accumulate”. 3 Apart from antiquities, Mapp also collected geology specimens. The geology collection of the Cheltenham & Gloucestershire College of Higher Education (formerly in the Cheltenham Museum) is based on the Mapp collection, which is said to have been assembled in the early 20 th century. 4 The dimensions of the block are as follows: Height 31 cm, width 32 cm. There are no remains of plaster or colour. The piece remains unpublished. Previously it was mentioned in L.V. Grinsell’s Guide Catalogue to the Collections from Ancient Egypt as: “a sandstone slab with Ba-bird and text” and it is dated “Ptolemaic or Roman”. 5 The block bears an image in raised relief (Fig. 2), showing a falcon with a male human head (ba-bird), facing right. There is a solar disk set on top of the human head. The bird’s feet are placed on top of the hieroglyph nbw, “gold”. Its wings are spread out in a protective ges- ture and between the wings three separate elements are added: 1. A seated image of Osiris holding the sign of life on his knees and seated on the hiero- glyphs nb and Ìnt: . 2. Behind Osiris is a sceptre, the top of which has been damaged, but it is likely that this was a Ìw-hieroglyph, “protection”, through which is drawn a protective sn-ring, 6 set against the back of the god. 1 I am grateful to Sue Giles, Curator of Ethnography & Foreign Archaeology at the City Museum & Art Gallery for permission for publication and for her kind assistance. Thanks are also due to Aidan Dodson and Dyan Hilton for introducing me to the collection. 2 Grinsell, Guide Catalogue to the Collections from Ancient Egypt, City Museum Bristol 1972, 12; Aidan Dodson and Sue Giles, ‘Ancient Egypt in the City and County of Bristol, England’, KMT a Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt 18/4 (2007), 20-32, p. 29. 3 L.V. Grinsell, An Archaeological Autobiography, Gloucester and Wolfeboro 1989, 30. 4 Information obtained from the website of the South West Museums Council, dated November 1999. 5 Grinsell, Guide Catalogue, 62. A more specific dating as “Ptolemaic” is given in the inventory on p. 83. 6 On this feature, cf. S. Cauville, Le temple de Dendara: Les chapelles osiriennes, Dendara X, 2 vols, Cairo 1997, 240,9: sn [Ìr] írt mkt=k.