AS THE family of Nebamun — the “scribe who counts the grain in the granary of divine offerings” — carried his mummy to the west bank of the Nile, they prayed that he would rest in peace for eternity. To ensure that his ba (life force) was sustained, a magical incantation in his tomb provided “1,000 loaves and jugs of beer, 1,000 oxen and fowl”.

On its painted walls he inspected his cattle and counted his geese, “looking at good things, without a wish in the world”. The Fields of the Dead were not, however, separate from the land of the living. The accountant’s name, Nebamun, means “My lord is Amun”, and soon after he died his god was swept aside, with the support of Pharaoh Akhenaten, by the sun-god Aten.

Richard Parkinson, of the department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan at the British Museum, said that someone then hacked out the offending hieroglyphs, depriving Nebamun of one of his magical guarantees of immortality. Also destroyed were rams’ heads sacred to Amun.

Less than a decade later, however, as the young Tutankhamun restored the old gods, someone — perhaps Nebamun’s son or grandson — resketched the sacred images. But Nebamun, like Tutankhamun, was soon forgotten. The tomb was probably robbed within a couple of generations, then perhaps hijacked for other mummies.

Greeks visited, treating the likes of Nebamun’s chapel, already a thousand years old, as tourist sites: Herodotus might have seen it thus. Then, almost another millennium on, under the rule of Rome, Nebamun’s god finally died, starved by the power of another deity claiming to be the one and only.

The accountant’s tomb might then have been home to one of the usurper’s followers, a Coptic hermit.

Fast-forward 1,500 years, and Nebamun’s eternity was finally, and decisively, interrupted. It was autumn 1820. Giovanni d’Athanasi, the young agent of Henry Salt, the representative of the latest alien ruler, found Nebamun’s tomb-chapel. The scholarly British Consul-General was enraptured by the unusually lively style of its paintings.

They were carefully removed, destined for the British Museum. There the fragile mud and gypsum base was encased in plaster of Paris, and for the next 160 years Nebamun’s afterlife was displayed to scholars and children, who learnt from him their ideas of “everyday life in Ancient Egypt”. In Egypt, however, little notice was taken of Nebamun’s eternal home once the best paintings had been removed, and the site of the tomb was lost.

In the late 1970s, that fact captured the imagination of Lise Manniche, a student of Egyptology in Copenhagen, who spent more than a decade painstakingly reconstructing the “lost tombs” of Thebes, of which Nebamun’s is just one. Scholarly interest had been reawakened, so in 1993 the British Museum, which had begun to remodel its Egyptian galleries, seized the chance to find out more about Nebamun’s tomb, and to work with others to find the tomb itself. This would allow the paintings to be put in proper context.

For images examined by millions, the number of new discoveries they have yielded is amazing. In the fowling scene, the hunting cat has gilding around its eye, the first time that the technique has been known in a Theban wall painting. “Nobody expected it; nobody looked for it,” Dr Parkinson said.

Dr Manniche had suggested that the geese and cattle counts went together, and the investigation has proved it. “We have both ends of this wall. It is amazingly small: the tomb-chapel must have been like walking into a jewel-box,” Dr Parkinson said.

Every fleck of the 19th-century plaster is being removed. Eric Miller, chief conservator, said that as there were no records of the depth of the originals, work proceeded slowly, for the backs held what could be a vital clue to the site of the tomb. Dr Parkinson holds the resin cast from the fowling scene and a glint enters his eye. “This is Cinderella’s slipper. All we have to do is to find the wall that matches.”

Pigments might also hold vital clues. The museum has been using the new technique of Raman spectrometry, shining lasers at the paint to find a “fingerprint”. That could be tested against a candidate site, as could the geological characteristics of a fragment of the base rock found in the original plaster.