TT55 was carved into the cluster of private tomb chapels at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna and originally incorporated a large hypostyle-like hall with multiple columns leading into subsidiary chambers. Its wall reliefs and painted scenes preserve high-quality examples of late Eighteenth Dynasty elite iconography, ranging from conventional funerary procession and offering scenes executed in established Theban modes to more experimental, elongated figural types and compositions associated with the early Amarna aesthetic. Because Ramose held office across the political and artistic transition from Amenhotep III to Akhenaten, the tomb’s decoration has been studied as a near-contemporary witness to changing royal ideology and visual language. The tomb was published first in the early 20th century CE by Norman de Garis Davies and remains a primary source for both formal description and plate reproduction.

Two aspects make TT55 especially instructive for historians of the period. First, the tomb belongs to an individual attested in other administrative contexts (for example, jar labels and royal inscriptions associating Ramose with Amenhotep III’s administrative apparatus), which anchors the monument within the known bureaucratic framework of the late reign. Second, the coexistence of traditional and experimental decorative modes within TT55 makes it an empirical touchstone for debates over whether the Amarna aesthetic emerged abruptly as a courtly, royal innovation or whether it spread gradually among elite patrons and artisans working in ancient Thebes. Recent iconographic and architectural inquiries have focused on specific scenes—such as an “unidentified temple” representation in the tomb chapel—to determine whether private tomb owners were visualizing royal temples, provincial cults, or schematic composites of religious space; these studies use TT55’s material as evidence for the complexity of late-Eighteenth Dynasty religious expression.

circa 1360 BCE

Layout / Plan
TT55’s internal arrangement follows the broad pattern used for elite Theban tomb chapels in the late Eighteenth Dynasty: an entrance corridor (often cut through the village face), leading into a pillared or columned main hall that functioned as the public chapel, with smaller side rooms or a rear chamber that served funerary and storage purposes. In Ramose’s case, published plans and descriptions indicate a long entryway followed by a principal hall that originally contained a substantial number of papyrus-shaft columns, together creating an impression of a formal, almost monumental chapel integrated into the living space of the Theban village necropolis. Excavation and conservation records emphasize that much of the surviving architecture is heavily restored or supported in modern interventions, but the fundamental plan—entrance, columned hall, and subsidiary rooms—remains clear from Davies’s plates and subsequent field reports. Architectural features such as block-cut column bases and preserved plastered surfaces corroborate the tomb’s intended function as a public cult and funerary installation rather than a purely subterranean burial chamber.

circa 1360 BCE

Decorations
The tomb’s wall decoration is the principal reason for its scholarly prominence. In the earlier registers Ramose’s tomb contains traditional Theban scenes: a detailed funeral procession, mourners, and offering bearers rendered in the conventional proportions and registers of late Amenhotep III–period art. Notably, several sections of TT55 display a marked stylistic shift: figures carved and painted with elongated limbs, attenuated faces, and novel compositions that parallel iconographic changes normally associated with the early years of Akhenaten’s program at Akhetaten. Because these stylistic changes appear within a single monument, Egyptologists frequently cite TT55 when tracing the chronology and diffusion of Amarna-style innovations into private elite contexts. In addition to human figures and narrative funerary scenes, the tomb includes representations of temple architecture and cultic processions that have prompted recent iconographic studies attempting to identify the specific temple complexes depicted and to gauge Ramose’s relationship to royal cultic activity. Conservation photographs and plate reproductions—many first recorded in the Davies volume and reproduced in later museum and photographic archives—show well preserved painted plaster in cream, red, brown, and blue pigments and finely incised raised relief in places where original carving survived.