Ancient Egyptian Tombs E-Book

Steven Snape

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 539

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

This book explores the development of tombs as a cultural phenomenon in ancient Egypt and examines what tombs reveal about ancient Egyptian culture and Egyptians' belief in the afterlife. * Investigates the roles of tombs in the development of funerary practices * Draws on a range of data, including architecture, artifacts and texts * Discusses tombs within the context of everyday life in Ancient Egypt * Stresses the importance of the tomb as an eternal expression of the self

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Blackwell Ancient Religions

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The Problem of the Dead

Relationships with the Dead

Egyptian Tombs and Egyptian Archaeology

Chapter 1: Nameless Lives at Tarkhan and Saqqara

Burials and Beliefs in Predynastic Cemeteries

The Emergence of the Bipartite Tomb

Elite Mastabas at Saqqara: The Tomb as a Storeroom

The Human Spirit (1): The Ka

The Tomb as a House for the Ka

Chapter 2: Pits, Palaces and Pyramids

Royal Tombs of Dynasty 1

Stairway to Heaven? The Royal Step Pyramid

The Rise of the True Pyramid

Offerings for the King: Peopling the Pyramid Complex

Chapter 3: Non-Royal Cemeteries of Dynasty 4

Dynasty 4 Mastabas at Giza

Tombs and Houses in Old Kingdom Egypt

False Doors and Real Offerings

Priests, Temples and Cults

Ka-Priests and Funerary Estates

Alternatives to the Ideal

Acquiring a Tomb

Being Imakhu

Chapter 4: Unas, Teti and Their Courts

Trends in Royal Tombs in the Late Old Kingdom

Chapter 5: The Tombs of Qar and Idu

The Tombs of Idu and Qar

The Human Spirit (2): the Akh

Funeral Ritual in the Old Kingdom

Protecting the Dead from the Living: Threats and Curses

Talking to the Dead

Chapter 6: A Growing Independence

Self-Presentation in Late Old Kingdom Tombs

The Rise of the Regions: Local Autonomy and Self-Memorialization in the Late Old Kingdom

Weni and the (Re-)Emergence of Abydos

Sub-Elite Tombs in the Late Old Kingdom

Chapter 7: Ankhtify

A Time of Chaos?

The First Intermediate Period at Saqqara

Town Cemeteries of the Late Old Kingdom

‘A Man without Equal’: Ankhtify at Moalla

A Time of Chaos Revisited: Destruction and Restoration?

Chapter 8: Osiris, Lord of Abydos

The Osirian Afterlife

The Development of Abydos in the Middle Kingdom

Chapels and Stelae at Abydos

Self-Presentation on Abydene Stelae

Acquiring a stela

The Spreading Cemetery at Abydos

Chapter 9: ‘Lords of Life’

The Multi-Functional Coffin

Predynastic and Archaic Period Coffins

Coffins in the Old Kingdom

Coffins at the End of the Old Kingdom

The Decoration of a Standard Box Coffin

Box Coffins in the First Intermediate Period and Middle Kingdom

Osirian Features of Box Coffins

Chapter 10: Strangers and Brothers

Continuity and Change

Beni Hasan: The Archetypal Middle Kingdom Necropolis

Elite Tombs at Asyut and Rifeh

Chapter 11: North and South

Court Cemeteries of the Middle Kingdom

The Return to the North: Court Cemeteries of Dynasty 12

Chapter 12: Ineni, Senenmut and User-Amun

The Middle Kingdom to New Kingdom Transition at Thebes: Tradition and Innovation

The Rise of Thebes

Ineni, Tuthmosis I and the Valley of the Kings

Senenmut, Hatshepsut and ‘Mansions of Millions of Years’

Designed for Afterlife: Ineni, Senenmut, User-Amun and Private Tombs at Thebes

Chapter 13: Rekhmire and the Tomb of the Well-Known Soldier

Wall-Scenes in Theban Tombs of Dynasty 18

A Guide to the Afterlife: The Book of the Dead

Local Elites at el-Kab

The Contents of Dynasty 18 Tombs

Chapter 14: Huya and Horemheb

Life and Death at Amarna

New Kingdom Tombs at Saqqara

Temple-Tombs at Saqqara

Post-Amarna Tombs at Thebes and Elsewhere

Chapter 15: Samut and the Ramesside Private Tomb

Standard Tombs of the Ramesside Period

The Ramesside Afterlife

The Tomb as Temple: Samut and Djehutyemheb

Offerings and Offering-Systems in the New Kingdom

Anhurmose at Mashayikh: Ramesside Tombs in the Provinces

The Ramesside Coffin

Chapter 16: Sennedjem

The Servants in the Place of Truth

Aping the Rich? Tombs at Deir el-Medina

Chapter 17: Petosiris

Trends in Tomb Building in the Post-Imperial Age

The Demise of the Valley of the Kings

Private Tombs in the Third Intermediate Period

Royal Tombs of the Third Intermediate Period and Late Period

Private Tombs of the Late Period

Changing Traditions in Graeco-Roman Egypt

Epilogue

References

Further Reading

Index

Blackwell Ancient Religions

Ancient religious practice and belief are at once fascinating and alien for twenty-first century readers. There was no Bible, no creed, no fixed set of beliefs. Rather, ancient religion was characterized by extraordinary diversity in belief and ritual.

This distance means that modern readers need a guide to ancient religious experience. Written by experts, the books in this series provide accessible introductions to this central aspect of the ancient world.

Published

Ancient Greek Divination

Sarah Iles Johnston

Magic in the Ancient Greek World

Derek Collins

Religion in the Roman Empire

James B. Rives

Ancient Greek Religion, Second Edition

Jon D. Mikalson

Ancient Egyptian Tombs: The Culture of Life and Death

Steven Snape

Forthcoming

Religion of the Roman Republic

Lora Holland

This edition first published 2011

© 2011 Steven Snape

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Snape, S. R. (Steven R.)

Ancient Egyptian tombs : the culture of life and death / Steven Snape.

p. cm. – (Blackwell ancient religions)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-2089-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Tombs–Egypt. 2. Funeral rites and ceremonies–Egypt. 3. Egypt–Social conditions. 4. Egypt–Civilization–To 332 B.C. 5.

Egypt–Antiquities. I. Title.

DT62.T6S56 2011

932–dc22

2010034207

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

For Philippa and Jack

Preface

This book has been written with the intention of making available to the general reader primary evidence and secondary discussion of a range of material relating to the ways in which the ancient Egyptians saw the tomb and the diverse ways in which it represented aspects of life, and the afterlife, for them. I have tried to indicate to the reader where they might further explore different aspects of this, bearing in mind that most readers of this book will have a preference for works in English. However, such is the range of primary publications and recent scholarship (especially in German) that it is important to point out some key publications which are in other languages.

In addition I have tried, wherever possible, to let the Egyptians speak to us in their own words since tombs are both an important physical context for Egyptian texts and (along with matters to which they relate, from personal autobiographies to presentations of views of the afterlife) an important subject for such texts. Once again I have tried to use translations from a relatively small number of reliable and wide-ranging anthologies. These include Lichtheim's well-known three-volume collection of key texts ranging over the Dynastic Period, but also the anthologies in the ‘Writings from the Ancient World’ series produced by the Society of Biblical Literature; the volumes on the Old Kingdom by Nigel Strudwick, the Amarna Period by Bill Murnane, and the Ramesside Period by Liz Frood have been, as will be obvious from the relevant chapters, particularly important as collections of relevant texts.

This book does not pretend to be an even chronological overview of tombs and burial practices in Egypt during the Dynastic Period (and a little later) because the evidence does not allow it to be so. It will be clear to the reader that there are some periods in which the creation of elaborate, well decorated and (crucially for us!) informative tombs was very important to the elite, and these tombs can themselves tell us about the religious and social context in which they appear – tombs of the late Old Kingdom in the Memphite necropolis, the early Middle Kingdom in Middle Egypt and Dynasty 18 at Thebes are especially informative in this regard. If I have given particular prominence to elite tombs from the Old Kingdom it is partly because this period sees the first examples of trends in tomb building and decoration and, more importantly, underlying belief and practice, which affect the rest of Egyptian history. In the periods following the Old Kingdom, while following the evidence and trying not to miss out anything important, I have endeavoured to stress changes in tomb types and decoration which represent important developments (or continuity) in underlying belief systems about the afterlife.

Inevitably the tombs which are the most informative are those which are the largest and best decorated, equally inevitably built for those in society with wealth and status. As Assmann (2003: 46) notes, ‘The construction of sacred space in tomb architecture is a rather elitist concern.’ The owners of these tombs can be referred to in a number of ways, and it is common to read about ‘tombs of the nobles’ or ‘tombs of the courtiers’. I have chosen to use the term ‘elite’ tombs because it makes no specific assumptions about the owners of the tombs – it does not differentiate whether they received their position and tombs through the gift of the king or whether they built them from their own resources, whether they were part of the royal court or regional leaders, whether they were from a long-established ‘aristocratic’ family or arrivistes. All of these factors are, of course, important in providing a broader social and cultural context for the role of tombs and the status of their owners at different times and places in ancient Egypt. But, as a term to cover all of these structures and, more particularly, their owners, ‘elite’ seems to be the most suitable.

Royal tombs are relevant to this story – often they influence, sometimes in indirect ways, developments in private tombs – but they are not the centre of this story as it is with private tombs that we are most concerned here. Royal tombs are often significantly different from non-royal tombs not just in scale and form, but also in underlying ideas of the available afterlife, although these, too, could, as we shall see, ‘bleed’ into private practice.

Acknowledgements

It would be seriously remiss of me not to acknowledge the people who have helped to bring this book into being. For the reader who wishes to identify these people the References would be a good start. More specifically I would like to thank teachers, colleagues and students at the University of Liverpool, past and present, who have provided inspiration and/or stimulating discussion regarding the topics covered in this book: Aly Abdalla, Violaine Chauvet, Mark Collier, Ashley Cooke, Judith Corbelli, Khaled Dawoud, Roland Enmarch, Liz Frood, Glenn Godenho, Gina Laycock, Campbell Price, Ian Shaw, Peter Shore and, especially, Chris Eyre.

I acknowledge the School of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool for the use of images from John Garstang's excavations at Abydos and Beni Hasan.

I would also like to thank Wiley-Blackwell's anonymous readers for their helpful comments, Karen Exell for her practical assistance, and Joyce Tyldesley for her forbearance and support during the over-long gestation period of this book.

Figure 0.1 Map of Egypt showing the location of sites mentioned in the text

Introduction

The Problem of the Dead

The death of a human being presents other human beings with a set of problems.

The first is the practical matter of the necessary disposal of the dead body. Despite imaginative solutions, such as ‘sky burial’, most humans, in most parts of the world, at most points in human history, have dealt with this issue in one of two ways: dig a hole and bury the body, or burn it until it becomes a more manageable collection of inert ashes and burnt bone (which themselves require disposal, albeit of a much less pressing and inconvenient kind than the body itself). For the ancient Egyptians, burial was the preferred option, although with added complications brought about by the particular ways in which the dead body was regarded as an active vehicle for the animated Dead. However, despite the ‘active’ nature of the dead body, access by the Living to the bodies of the Dead was strictly limited, and the burial chambers of the rich and the graves of the poor were normally very much off-limits.

The second problem is what to do about the property of the Dead. On the one hand, sometimes quite literally, are the items of personal jewellery which might be retained by the Living as a personal keepsake of the Dead, or which may be buried with the Dead, perhaps as a token of a personal relationship, such as a wedding ring. Such tokens are a rare exception to the general rule which applies to burials in the Jewish–Christian–Muslim tradition, and in the secular West, which is that of a minimal or non-existent deposition of objects with the body, in tombs and graves. This is, of course, diametrically opposite to the ancient Egyptian tradition, which is of significant deposition of objects with burials, for a variety of reasons. On a different level are other assets owned by the Dead such as land and other property of real economic value. These can no longer be enjoyed by the Dead, but are available to the Living. To what extent is the use to which the Living can put these assets limited by control by the Dead? Although one might argue that a will is a straightforward mechanism by which the Dead (while alive) can dictate the destination of their property once dead, the extent to which many lawcourts are willing to overturn the stated intentions of the now-Dead in favour of the complaining Living gives a clear sense of the weight given to the legal rights of the Living and the Dead; not only can the Dead not speak for themselves, this inarticulateness can be regarded as an aspect of the Dead being, effectively, non-persons. The ancient Egyptian situation, we shall see, is quite different; not only are the Dead very much regarded as ‘persons’, they are also seen as property holders, whose rights to that property need to be protected, because the Dead make active use of that property for their own benefit, in their status as a dead individual, for eternity.

The third problem is the most complex, although it is related to that of property. What is the relationship between the Living and the Dead? To what extent are the Living and the Dead part of one community? Is the nature of one's view of the Dead, and death itself, mediated through a wider belief system? Does the personality survive after death, and, if so, what form does it take, where does it reside, and can the Living communicate with it? The answers to these questions might be very varied. If we have a firm religious faith, we may have answers which are embedded within a divine plan for the universe. Otherwise our answers might be individual, disorganized or might simply tick the box ‘don't know’. Once again the Egyptians developed clear answers to these problems, by following lines of reasoning based on a specific view (or, rather, views) about the nature of the human ‘soul’ and its specific nature both within and without this world.

Relationships with the Dead

A devoted son visits his mother's grave on Christmas Day every year, before returning to celebrate the season's festivities with his living family. Why? Does he expect some form of meaningful communication with her, in a cold village churchyard? Who can say – it is between him and her. What is very clear, though, is that this is an occasion of remembering, but, in some ways, a curious form of remembering. There is a paradox here in that the grave, with its headstone, on a cold hillside, is a very different locale from the places of the recollected landscape of the remembered past. This is a place of burial and a place of specific commemoration in the form of the headstone, but are the Dead really ‘there’? Again this is a matter for individual belief, though in most cases the Living think of the happy Dead not as inhabiting cemeteries but as dwelling within ‘a better place’. Yet the grave does have an important function: although the Dead may not ‘be there’, the function of providing a specific locale where a specific act of remembering is sanctioned is a means by which physical space is provided so that some form of relationship between the Living and the Dead can take place. The specifics of that relationship are dependent on individual attitudes to it, but it is essentially a one-sided relationship – one might ‘talk’ to a dead relation on such an occasion, but would probably regard any reply by the Dead as somewhat startling. The relationship being played out here is between a living individual and their memory of a dead person, not the dead person themselves, although this might well not be regarded as so by the individual concerned.

The headstone has another important function: the preservation of identity through the name and limited genealogy of the Dead. Dates also indicate when the person was a living being. The preservation of identity seems to be a fluctuating human need: ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’ is a sentiment which is paradoxically undercut by the very real materiality of the stone block into which the inscription was incised. Although the tomb is not the only place to do this, it is an obvious one given its connection to the remains of the physical body. So what is a tomb? A convenient place to dispose of a dead human body? A location where the Living can remember the Dead? An opportunity to display wealth and status? For the Egyptians the tomb was all of these things, but also very much more. Throughout the Dynastic Period the tomb took on a great number of roles and functions with, for the Egyptian elite, its importance often reflected in architectural and artistic elaboration. A whole range of factors came together to determine the nature of the tomb, some of which were determined by the expectations of the afterlife, which the tomb was intended to satisfy or facilitate, and the relationship of the Dead with the Living. As Godenho (2007: 7) notes, one function of Egyptian tombs was to ‘embody social order by monumentalizing social relations’.

Egyptian Tombs and Egyptian Archaeology

Why are we, as archaeologists, so interested in ancient Egyptian tombs and their contents? The most obvious answer to this question is that the tombs which the ancient Egyptians built, decorated and equipped for themselves are one of the largest, richest and most informative classes of archaeo-logical material anywhere in the world and from any period of human history. Funerary remains are the most obvious and remarkable physical remnants from ancient Egypt. Whether pyramids, mummies or Tutankhamen, it is tombs and the things which come out of them which provide the most instantly recognizable and (for most people) defining examples of ancient Egyptian-ness. These are funerary artefacts which are not just strange or opulent but also distinctive – no other civilization did things quite like the ancient Egyptians, especially in the provisioning of their tombs. They did this for a whole range of different, related reasons, which we shall be exploring in this book, but an important starting point is to note the very obvious physicality of the Egyptian response to the problem of death and what comes after. Ensuring a happy afterlife is often to do with having the right sort of tomb, the right equipment within the tomb, and the right hieroglyphic texts on the equipment. Eternity could be assured by having the proper kit. This is, of course, a simplification, but a simplification with a good deal of truth in it. The tombs and the objects within them are part of a more complex context of ways of imagining the nature of the human personality after death, the relationship between the Living and the Dead, and the relationship between humans and the divine, but these are, nevertheless, issues which are partly resolved by physical objects which provide the context and tools with which these problems can, to a significant extent, be solved.

A significant factor is that of preservation. Egypt is a land of very marked contrasts when it comes to the preservation of archaeological material. The damp soil and the annual flooding of the Nile in the floodplain of the Nile Valley and Delta were extremely prejudicial to the survival of all but the hardiest of materials. The Egyptian desert, with its dry, desiccating sands, is capable of preserving in remarkable condition even the most delicate of materials – textiles, flora, the human body. It was, naturally enough, the desert edges which were chosen as the locations of cemeteries when local conditions allowed it. The Nile Delta provides a more problematic environment, but for most of the Nile Valley the desert is never very far away and, in some places, comes close to the Nile itself, so that local cemeteries overlook both the local town and the river, providing a landscape in which the Living and the Dead are equally present. The desert edge was chosen for very practical reasons – putting cemeteries on productive agricultural land would be a waste and, more importantly, while the Living could move away from the rising waters of the often-unpredictable Nile inundation, the Dead could not. Towns, villages and houses could be, and were, easily rebuilt using mudbrick, the ubiquitous building material of living Egypt, but the flooding of tombs would be catastrophic. In fact the effects of preservation, viewed by the Egyptians, gave an impetus to preservation as a goal. When they saw the naturally preserved bodies of the Dead, desiccated by the sands of the desert, the Egyptians, who were well aware of the speed of decomposition of meat in a hot climate, seem to have given a special quality to this preservation. Preservation of the tomb, the grave goods, and especially the body became seen as the vehicles by which the afterlife could be achieved. But this stress on the material provision of tombs and tomb contents, allied to their high level of preservation, had another effect. It made cemeteries particular targets of early explorers and archaeologists. The knowledge that digging in a cemetery would yield a rich harvest of finds, certainly when compared to the slim pickings from settlement sites, made sure that the early history of Egyptology was characterized by the excavation of a high proportion of cemetery sites.

Two other factors encouraged this concentration. One was a general interest in religious beliefs and practices of ‘primitive’ humans which came out of the developing subject of comparative anthropology, best exemplified in the English-speaking world by James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1930). Egyptian myths, transmitted through Classical literature, could be seen as part of a wider set of comparable beliefs in the afterlife, and the discoveries made by early archaeologists in Egypt seemed to fit well within this scheme, especially with regard to ideas regarding the Egyptian version of the ‘Dying God’, Osiris. The second factor was the way in which early fieldwork in Egypt was conducted. Excavations organized by the major museums of the world which wished to develop a profile within Egyptology would, not surprisingly, have as one of their aims the acquisition of objects which would expand their collections and, in a more basic way, justify the expense of such archaeological work. This may have been only a minor concern in scholarly terms of the excavator, but a practical one. Some of the great collections of the world have grown directly as a result of such work. Sometimes the relationship between object discovery and support for the excavation was more overt. A particularly good example is John Garstang, Professor of Methods and Practice of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool and active excavator in Egypt from 1899 to 1909. His excavations were funded by a committee of patrons who, in return for their financial support, would receive a ‘dividend’ on their investment in the form of a proportion of the objects which Garstang excavated and which was granted by the Egyptian authorities as his 50 per cent share of all the objects he recovered. While many of Garstang's backers were motivated by philanthropic and scientific concerns, the pressure to produce a good ‘yield’ from each year's excavations was one (albeit only one) of the reasons Garstang chose to concentrate on cemetery sites, including some of the most important in Egypt such as Abydos and Beni Hasan. Even Flinders Petrie, the doyen of scientific archaeology in Egypt, recognized the importance of high-quality objects as important tools for the development of the subject when he wrote: ‘Perfect and pretty things are no doubt very useful to serve as lures for attracting the public to the education prepared for them’ (Petrie 1888: vi), while his development of important techniques such as seriation (which he called sequence-dating) was dependent on the analysis of a substantial number of complete groups of archaeological material from closed contexts (Petrie 1901). Only tombs were guaranteed to provide both ‘pretty things’ and the closed context groups. The reason that the study of ancient Egyptian tombs and their contents is so important is that they provide a wealth of primary evidence which can be used in different ways by archaeologists with very different research agendas. Whether these are the anthropological interest in the ‘dying god’, the arguments over diffusionism, the economic motives for human actions or a concern with the nature of self-constructed identity, the tombs of the ancient Egyptians continue to offer a multi-faceted range of material which can be used to try to understand the lives and afterlives of the ancient Egyptians.

It is probably worth issuing a word of caution at this point. In looking at tombs and what they have to tell us, it is all too easy to fall into generalizations which do not do justice to the complexity of the material, perhaps especially in ascribing monolithic belief systems and common, shared responses to those beliefs; the archaeological material and human responses to the problem of death are much more complex than that (Eyre 2009). Nevertheless, inevitably, a study with such a, perhaps unwisely, broad chronological scope is by its nature bound to focus on general trends and seek for a norm to describe. However, we must always be aware of the sometimes surprising results of looking at the ways the Egyptians did regard their tombs, sometimes with all too recognizable human ambivalence. Discussing the slow rate of progress on Amarna private tombs, and the lack of urgency in that project compared to house building at the site, Owen and Kemp (1994: 128) have remarked that it is possible that ‘in the minds of some owners acquiescence in a slow rate of progress encouraged fate to be generous with their lifespan’.

Chapter 1

Nameless Lives at Tarkhan and Saqqara

Early Tombs and the Ka

Burials and Beliefs in Predynastic Cemeteries

One of the most regularly repeated refrains within Egyptian archaeology is the extent to which the subject is relatively blessed with the survival of ancient tombs and cemeteries when compared to settlement sites. Indeed many ancient towns and cities can only be located because of the survival of their cemeteries while the dwellings of the Living have disappeared beneath the floodplain of the Nile. This is especially true for the Predynastic – the period before the unification of Egypt at c.3050 BC. While shifts in the course of the Nile over the past six thousand years mean that a few Predynastic towns are now on the desert rather than submerged beneath the damp Nile silt of the cultivation, it is still the desert-edge cemeteries, deliberately placed there, which provide the best corpus of evidence for Egypt before the pharaohs (Wengrow 2006; Wilkinson 1999).

The evidence from the excavation of hundreds of Predynastic graves (Castillos 1982), especially from the cemeteries of southern Egypt, makes it possible to describe, in broad terms, typical burials of the Predynastic Period and its sub-divisions, although it should also be noted that, as later, no two graves of the Predynastic are identical in their form or contents. Typical burials of the Badarian (c.4500–3800 BC) consist of oval pits containing contracted burials, lying on their left side, head to the south, facing west, lying on a mat and wrapped/covered by a mat or gazelle skin. Grave goods include distinctive handmade pottery, long-toothed bone/ivory combs, slate palettes and personal jewellery (Midant-Reynes 2000: 153–8). Graves of Naqada I (c.3800–3500 BC) are essentially similar to those of the Badarian, but with some degree of differentiation based on the size of the grave and the number and quality of its contents, especially at the major centre of Hierakonpolis (Adams 1987; Midant-Reynes 2000: 170). This differentiation became more marked in Naqada II (c.3500–3300 BC). Other innovations of Naqada II included much less consistency in the orientation of the body and the replacement of animal skin coverings with matting and linen; in richer graves they were superseded by the introduction of coffins made of basketwork and, ultimately, wood. (Midant-Reynes 2000: 187; see Chapter 9 below). The move towards a clear differentiation between small numbers of large and well-provisioned tombs and a majority of much less impressive graves, probably indicating social status within larger, politically sophisticated communities, is seen most starkly during Naqada III (c.3300–3100 BC; Midant-Reynes 2000: 235ff.). However, the most remarkable tomb of the Predynastic – the so-called ‘Painted Tomb’ at Hierakonpolis – probably dates to Naqada II (Midant-Reynes 2000: 207ff.); in any case this tomb belongs to an owner who can certainly be regarded as elite, and probably quasi-royal, and a precursor to the definitely royal tombs of Dynasty 1 (see Chapter 2).

We can be reasonably confident about the reconstruction of these Predynastic graves and their contents owing to the exceptionally high levels of preservation of objects placed within the grave, which was filled with the dry, desiccating sand of the desert. These high levels of preservation extended to the body itself, which had effectively, but in all probability accidentally, been provided with ideal conditions for natural mummification as the dry desert sand acted as a natural absorbent for the potentially destructive decompositional fluids. This natural preservation of the body would have far-reaching consequences for Egyptians' attitudes to the body in their view of the afterlife and, consequently, tomb design itself. However, although these Predynastic graves and their contents are often extremely well preserved, we have little idea as to how, if at all, the position of the graves was marked since no substantial superstructures have survived until relatively late in the period. It is possible that a simple mound of sand/gravel was the most usual covering of these graves. In addition, we do not know how the graves of the Dead were regarded by the Living. In fact we have no real idea about what the Predynastic Egyptians actually believed would happen to them after death. The evidence of the graves themselves is ambiguous and capable of radically different interpretations.

A good case in point is a burial excavated by Petrie in 1912–13 at the late Predynastic cemetery of Tarkhan, which is 60 km south of Cairo on the West Bank of the Nile. The interment in question was numbered 1845 by Petrie (1914) and was particularly important as it seems to have been the only one of the burials he excavated that season which had not been robbed, and therefore the only one where the placement of the objects within the grave could be confidently said to be a deliberate arrangement at the time of burial. On the basis of the pottery found within it, the grave was assigned Sequence Date (SD) 77, which places it just before the unification of Egypt; it might therefore be seen as sitting on the cusp between the somewhat enigmatic graves of the Predynastic Period and the explanation-rich tombs of the Dynastic Period. An alabaster bowl, with a slate palette placed over it, had been positioned in front of the face of the contracted body, lying on its left side with head to the south facing west, while other pottery storage jars had also been put into the grave (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Tarkhan Tomb 1845: the burial (after Petrie 1914: Pl. 12)

Faced with this evidence, it is possible to produce a range of hypotheses which explain the observed phenomena. One might draw the conclusion that the grave and its contents represent a belief (or, rather, possible sets of beliefs) in the afterlife – the body buried in the foetal position might reflect the cycle of birth and death; the body facing west towards the setting sun and the land of the afterlife beyond the horizon; the objects within the tomb might have been placed there for the use of the Dead in the afterlife, or for their journey there. Predynastic graves might therefore display a developed spirituality in respect of the afterlife which can be directly traced into those belief-systems which are very clearly expressed in the Dynastic Period.

However, one might also look at the evidence of Tarkhan 1845 and decide that it represents a very different state of affairs in that the body buried in the crouched position within a shallow grave minimizes the effort needed to dispose of a dead human body by burial and that the objects placed within the grave represent a fairly minimal set of comparatively low-value objects which were personally associated with the dead individual and, for superstitious reasons, would not be wanted by a living member of the community. Predynastic graves might therefore represent a minimal effort to dispose of the inconvenient dead and no belief in the afterlife need be assumed.

Both these explanations represent extreme cases of trying either to find or to deny a belief in an afterlife in every feature associated with these burials, and the ‘truth’ is unrecoverable since we cannot reconstruct the mental states of those individuals who lived and died in Predynastic Egypt. In fact the interpretation of beliefs in an afterlife based on the fact of burial and the presence of grave goods is fraught with difficulties, and any ethnographic survey of burial practices and the social and belief-systems which gave rise to them presents us with a surprising kaleidoscope of possibilities; such a survey was carried out by Ucko (1969), from whose work the following examples are drawn. Burial itself does not necessarily imply any specific belief in an afterlife, nor may it be socially important to the society which carries it out – it may simply be the necessary disposal of waste in the form of an inconveniently large dead human body. For the Nuer of the Sudan, burial involved the disposal of the body, with little in the way of funeral ceremonies, in an unmarked grave. This raises the interesting issue that the treatment of the body after death does not necessarily correlate with ideas regarding an afterlife for the non-corporeal person; Dynastic Egyptians, as we shall see, were unusually concerned with the dead body as a vehicle for eternal well-being.

The objects placed within the grave might be interpreted as things which were needed by the Dead, but this is also not necessarily the case. For the Lugbara of Uganda, grave goods do not reflect a belief in an afterlife but rather the social personality of the tomb owner, with specific objects reflecting specific elements of the person – a quiver for a hunter/warrior, a stool for an elder, firestones for a wife, grinding stones for a mother. The issue of ‘person-ness’ connected to the tomb was a fundamental one for the Dynastic Egyptians and, at particular periods, the selection of material placed within a burial reflects this concern. It may also be the case that the disposal of objects within the grave represents not the needs of the Dead but those of the Living, who, at the time of burial of a loved one, ‘simply wished to dispose of objects which had particular emotional connotations’ (Ucko 1969: 265). It is also the case that the specific positioning of the body within the grave, although it hints at a special treatment of the body with a specific aim in mind, is also capable of varied interpretations. Is an eastwards-facing body always looking towards the rising sun, or one looking westwards towards the setting sun? Is the east or the west a place where the Dead face because that is where the Dead go? Are there specific local or more distant (e.g. Mecca for Muslims or Jerusalem for mediaeval Christians?) points of orientation which are more significant than cosmological factors?

The ambiguity of Tarkhan 1845 seems, as an example of Predynastic burials, to stand in marked contrast to the high-quality, understandable material from the elite tombs of Dynastic Egypt, and the interplay and different levels of explanation provided by that material – architecture in its localized context; extensive visual depictions and explanatory texts on the walls of those tombs; contents including specialized mortuary ‘kit’, among which is the body itself, elements of which are also often inscribed with explanatory text – which provide a very solid platform to understand the afterlife beliefs of the ancient Egyptians.

However, Tarkhan 1845, like other late Predynastic tombs from this site, and unlike most earlier Predynastic burials, had a carefully constructed superstructure which, although modest in size and made from simple mudbrick, indicates a significant development in tomb design which itself reflected the development of a major idea in the role of the tomb as a vehicle for the well-being of the Dead.

The Emergence of the Bipartite Tomb

Tomb 1845 at Tarkhan contains, as we have seen, an interment consisting of a shallow oval grave within which was buried a contracted body and a modest selection of grave goods which may, or may not, tell us something about the afterlife beliefs of the society which produced it. However, the wider context of the burial is rather more informative since the grave is only one part of a larger and more complex tomb. The grave was marked by being surrounded by a mudbrick rectangle which, if filled after burial, could form a rubble-filled, solid ‘box’ now more than a metre high. The position of the burial was therefore clearly marked, but equally clearly no-one was intended to enter this part of the tomb. Attached to the outside wall of this mastaba (the name derives from the low mudbrick benches found outside some village houses in Egypt) was an addition – a tiny room just big enough for a human to enter (Figure 1.2). Petrie found that this room, and the area outside the tomb near it, was filled with large pottery storage jars and food containers. This evidence need not in itself imply any particular beliefs in the afterlife since it might simply be the remains of a funeral feast by the living at the time of inhumation, but there is one further relevant detail: the body within the grave was orientated so that it faced the wall shared by the grave enclosure and the external room, and that wall was pierced by ‘two slits in the brickwork of the mastaba wall, for the offerings to reach the deceased’ (Petrie 1914: 2). This architectural feature was not unique to Tomb 1845, but shared by other similar tombs at Tarkhan. Although it would be dangerous on the basis of this evidence alone to draw wider conclusions about the beliefs behind the development of this tomb-type, two things seem reasonably clear: the importance of food to the Dead and the possibility of some connection between the Dead buried underneath the mastaba and the food brought by the Living and placed in the liminal zone of the attached room. In fact it is almost certain that these Tarkhan tombs represent an early version of what would become a fundamental feature in the way that the form of Egyptian tombs reflected their function – the tomb was essentially bipartite in nature, consisting of two distinct elements which were linked together through overall function, but significantly different in practical use. It is probably accurate at this stage to regard the external rooms at Tarkhan as Offering Chapels and the burials underneath the mastabas as Burial Chambers.

Figure 1.2 Tarkhan Tomb 1845: the Burial Chamber and Offering Chapel (after Petrie 1914: Pls 12 and 14)

However, the Tarkhan tombs only represent one solution to what seems to be a major issue in the afterlife beliefs and burial practices of late Predynastic/early Dynastic: the problem of providing food for the Dead. This problem seems to be the main determinant in the Tarkhan tomb with its separate, accessible Offering Chapel, but other approaches to the problem were experimented with at other sites, especially the among the elite non-royal tomb owners of Dynasty 1.

Elite Mastabas at Saqqara: The Tomb as a Storeroom

The unification of Egypt had a number of important effects on the way the Egyptians expressed the way they understood the afterlife through their tombs. One aspect of this was the apparently unique position of the king and, initially at least, the very separate nature of his burial at the exclusive Umm el-Qa'ab cemetery at Abydos (see next chapter). This royal exclusivity meant that emerging court elites – the high officials who acted for the king in the government of what had become the largest and potentially most powerful country in the early Bronze Age of the Near East – had to look elsewhere for a suitable place to be buried. This suitable place was, essentially, self-selecting. The unification of the Delta in the north and the Valley in the south required a new administrative centre from which both halves of the new country could be governed. The location chosen was Memphis, close to modern Cairo, which was (with a few breaks) the most significant administrative, economic and population centre of Egypt until the foundation of Alexandria in 332 BC. Partly because of the movement of the Nile in this part of its floodplain, the actual location of the city of Memphis shifted over the next 2,500 years, gradually moving eastwards to follow the river. Comparatively little of pre-New Kingdom Memphis remains to be seen today and the location of Old Kingdom Memphis is still unknown. However, although the houses, streets and districts of the ancient city now seem to be lost, the tombs of its cemeteries have survived to a very much greater degree since they were built on top of the desert escarpment immediately to the west of the ancient city.

The desert edge to the west of Memphis which was used as the cemetery for this ancient metropolis stretches a huge distance – c.30 km from Abu Roash in the north to Dahshur in the south, and even further if the southern outlier of Meidum is included – the result of rapid development during the Early Dynastic Period and Old Kingdom. As far as significant tomb building is concerned, the earliest part is North Saqqara, where the court officials of Dynasties 1 and 2 were buried in huge mastaba-tombs, probably overlooking the city in which they lived and worked (Emery 1938, 1949, 1954, 1958).

These mastabas are so large, particularly when compared with what might appear to be relatively modest royal tombs at Abydos, that their excavator, Bryan Emery, came to believe that the Saqqara mastabas of Dynasty 1 were in fact the real royal tombs of that period, with the Abydos structures merely being dummies or cenotaphs. The presence of royal names in these Saqqara tombs seemed to support this identification. However, when the ‘funerary enclosures’ at Abydos are brought into consideration, it is clear that the total amount of funerary provision made for the king at Abydos is greater than any of the Saqqara mastabas. In addition, the presence of objects naming court officials found within the Saqqara tombs points the way to their real owners, members of the royal court based at Memphis and buried there.

There are a number of features shared by the elite Saqqara tombs throughout Dynasty 1. They were all designed to be strikingly impressive, with a superstructure consisting of a huge mastaba made of mudbrick, whose external appearance was embellished by decorative brickwork producing a series of plastered vertical niches of varying depth which, because of its supposed connection with early palace architecture, is often referred to as ‘palace façade’ decoration. In contrast to the large and deliberately visible superstructure, the burial apartments under these mastabas were comparatively modest, essentially designed to house the body and those grave goods which were of especial connection to the deceased, or of significant value. The bulk of the objects which accompanied the deceased were housed not within the burial apartments under the mastaba, but within the body of the mastaba itself, which, initially at least, was not solid but composed of a series of closed ‘cells’, each one of which was effectively a sealed storeroom for the grave goods which were placed within them.

Perhaps the most famous example is the tomb of Hemaka (numbered 3035; Emery 1938), a high official who lived during the reign of King Den. His tomb is a typical large mastaba-tomb, made of mudbrick and with an external surface with elaborate palace façade decoration. The underground burial chamber was relatively modest in size but the mastaba itself was enormous, measuring over 65 × 25 m. The massive proportions of the superstructure made an impressive statement about the status of their owner, but there was an important functional element too since the interior of the mastaba was divided into a series of 45 individual cells which were intended to serve as closed storage rooms or magazines. Although robbed, Hemaka's mastaba still contained some of its original contents when it was excavated, which included ox-bones and, in a series of four connected rooms, over 700 large storage jars. Other objects from Hemaka's mastaba represent extremely high levels of craftsmanship in the creation of luxurious items, such as ivory gaming pieces and thin stone bowls of elaborate shape, but the vast majority of the objects discovered by Emery in Hemaka's tomb were ordinary storage jars for food and drink. Hemaka's mastaba, like those of his contemporaries, was, in effect, a huge larder. Whatever the uncertain specifics of the ideas about an afterlife represented by this tomb and its contents, it seems to have a concern with the provision of food which is not very different in essence to that of Tarkhan 1845. The difference seems to be, at least in the case of the tomb of Hemaka and some similar Dynasty 1 mastabas, that the wealth of the owners meant that they were able to fill their tombs with the food they would need. The potential flaw in this system is that if the stored food is ‘consumed’ by the tomb owner, eventually any amount of stored food will run out and other systems need to be put in place to ensure a continued flow for eternity. Some of these changing ideas seem to have influenced the development of elite mastaba-tombs at Saqqara during Dynasty 1, which, despite their similarities, reveals a distinct evolution of the form. For the excavation reports of the mastaba-tombs described here see: 3035 (Emery 1938); 3471 (Emery 1949: 13–70, pl. 2); 3036 (Emery 1949: 71–81, pl. 14); 3507 (Emery 1958: 73–97, pl. 85); and 3505 (Emery 1958: 5–36, pl. 2).

Saqqara Mastaba 3471 (Figure 1.3) probably dates, on the evidence of jar sealings found within it, to the reign of King Djer, early in Dynasty 1. Its substructure consists of a series of seven rooms cut into the bedrock, and roofed with timber, the central, deepest room being the Burial Chamber itself. The superstructure is a rectangular mudbrick mastaba, just over 41 m long and 15 m wide, with palace façade niches, with its interior divided into 29/30 cells, turning the mastaba into a large storeroom. The superstructure rooms were largely empty, but the substructure rooms contained a range of grave goods, especially hundreds of copper vessels and implements.

Figure 1.3 Saqqara Mastabas 3471 (plan, top), 3036 (plan, middle) and 3507 (cross-section, foot) (adapted from Emery 1949: Pls 2 and 4; 1958: Pl. 85)

Saqqara Mastaba 3036 (also Figure 1.3) probably belonged to Ankhka, who served under King Den. The superstructure of the tomb – a honeycomb of storerooms – is essentially the same as that of 3471, but there are a number of significant differences, particularly the depth of the burial pit and the ease of access to the Burial Chamber by the innovation of a stairway running down to it from the eastern side of the mastaba. Hemaka's tomb, from this reign, is also a ‘stairway tomb’.

Saqqara Mastaba 3507 also dates to the reign of Den (Emery believed it to be the tomb of Queen Her-neith, mother of Den). It has much in common with 3471 and 3036. It may be earlier than 3036 (pre-stepped phase). But although the superstructure is dominated by the rectangular, niched mastaba, the superstructure has embedded within it a further feature: the burial chamber itself is covered by a mound or tumulus of sand and rubble, but given a casing of mudbrick to regularize this loose pile into a definite feature 10.5 m long × 9.2 m wide and just over 1 m high (Figure 1.3). It is possible that this is an artificial re-creation of the tumuli piled on top of earlier tombs; if so, this may represent a compromise between a ‘mound’ tradition of tomb superstructure and the development of the new rectangular niched ‘palace façade’ mastaba/enclosure, which some scholars argue comes to a full flowering in King Djoser's step-pyramid complex in Dynasty 3.

Saqqara Mastaba 3505 (Figure 1.4) is dated to the reign of King Ka'a, last ruler of Dynasty 1, and therefore the latest in this group. It represents a distinct break with the earlier mastabas in a number of important respects. Superficially it looks the same, a large niched mudbrick mastaba, but the interior of the mastaba is not filled with storerooms but is solid. The underground burial apartments are accessed via a stairway on the east side of the mastaba, but the mastaba is within an enclosure, marked by a surrounding mudbrick wall. A remarkable object was found close to the southern end of the eastern wall of the mastaba, a limestone stela 1.73 m tall naming and depicting a high official called Merika. There has been much debate over this object (Bestock 2007: 102): Emery thought it belonged to a nearby subsidiary burial and that the mastaba was the tomb of King Ka'a himself, while other later scholars, led by Kemp (1967; this view is not universally shared – see Morris 2007b: 171), believe it to name the owner of the mastaba himself and that the stela originally occupied one of the nearby niches, in a position which would become standard in later mastaba-tombs. But the tomb complex of Mastaba 3505 also housed another important structure, a multi-roomed mudbrick building built immediately to the north of the mastaba which it is tempting, based on parallels with later structures, to think of as a funerary temple/offering chapel, particularly as one of the rooms within this building contained the feet of a pair of standing wooden statues which, in later mastabas, one would expect to be figures of the tomb owner, provided as a focus for offerings. It may be that Mastaba 3505 provided the prototype for later elite tombs of the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom, not just in the early emergence of specific architectural features and stelae/statues but, much more fundamentally, in the abandonment of the idea of the tomb as being self-sufficient in stored food; instead it was to provide an appropriate reception point for the Living to bring food for the Dead.

Figure 1.4 Saqqara Mastaba 3505 adapted from Emery 1958: Pl. 2)

This might be regarded as a triumph of the design model of Tarkhan 1845. It is certainly the case that the bipartite tomb – Burial Chamber and Offering Chapel – despite sometimes radically different local variants, and the over-layering of other requirements, became the model for almost all Egyptian tombs which followed for the next 3,000 years. In essence, the Burial Chamber is the place where the body, once interred, is intended to be left in peace. The Offering Chapel, in marked contrast, is designed to be a busy place, where the Living came to leave offerings – particularly food offerings – for the Dead. These two factors – a secure Burial Chamber and an accessible Offering Chapel – are the essential elements of tomb design. But underlying all of these architectural developments is a set of basic questions which still need to be answered. What happens to an individual after death? What is the relationship between the Dead and the Divine? What is the relationship between the Dead and the Living?

The Human Spirit (1): The Ka

The Egyptians have left us with a mass of evidence which relates to their answers to these three questions. Unfortunately their answers are not necessarily simple or consistent. This is perhaps to be expected since we are talking about the evolution of religious beliefs over 3,000 years, but the Egyptians' attitude to the afterlife, and indeed to the spiritual nature of humans in general, is also confusingly sophisticated.

The first point to note is that the Egyptians did not have a unitary view of the spiritual component of a human being. That is to say, they did not believe that a human being had a single ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’, but a cluster of spiritual entities, each with a different nature and different potential. Death caused the disaggregation of this bundle of spiritual entities, releasing them to their own specific afterlives. The unitary concept of the soul is one which is perhaps taken for granted by most people in the West and the debate regarding the afterlife centres on what happens to this single spiritual form. Is it reincarnated? Does it go to a much better (or much worse) place? Does it roam the world in an incorporeal state? Does it exist at all? For the Egyptians the multiple possibilities provided by the multiplicity of personal spiritual forms were a source of varied opportunities for a beneficial afterlife, but also multiple potential problems.

Another factor which needs to be taken into consideration is the ways in which expectations of an afterlife changed over time. Although there was no fundamental revolution in the ways the Egyptians viewed the afterlife, there was a gradual agglomeration of possibilities – new possibilities were added to older ones without necessarily replacing them. In particular, ideas which began as solely royal prerogatives filtered down to the population at large. By the New Kingdom a private individual could look forward to a kaleidoscopic existence after death compared to the more restricted range of opportunities available to his or her Old Kingdom predecessor. This evolution of possibilities is one of the drivers behind changes to the form of the tomb itself, its decoration and its contents.

The starting point for an examination of the spiritual entities which were released on death is the k (ka), a word which is incorporated within the names of three of the individuals who owned elite Dynasty 1 Saqqara mastabas: Hemaka, Ankhka and Merika. The ka as a spiritual entity remained of fundamental importance throughout Egyptian history, even when other expectations of the afterlife had developed (Bolshakov 1997). It was the entity which, in essence, determined the basic nature of the bipartite tomb as a place for the protection of the body and for interaction with the Living. It is often difficult to directly render into a simple word or phrase the religious or cultural concepts of different cultures. The ka is just such a concept. It might be defined as the ‘life force’ or ‘spiritual essence’ of a person, their ‘spiritual double’. The word ka was usually written using a sign of two upraised arms, perhaps a sign of a person being embraced or protected by their ka, and the term is related to words for ‘food’ and is connected to the idea of sexual potency (Bolshakov 1997: 159–63). This indicates that the ka was rooted not in an ethereal existence beyond the limits of physical existence, but very much in the real world of the human body and its needs. It can best be summoned up by the idea of ‘vital energy’; as such, a superhuman individual such as a god or a king could have more than one ka. The ka-force of the king was sometimes shown as a separate entity, and often identified with the god Horus. An important New Kingdom ceremony which was concerned with the rejuvenation of the king – the Opet Festival – saw the merging of the god Amen-Re with the ka of the king at Luxor Temple (Bell 1985). The origin of the ka seems to have been as a person's inner force, yet was also connected to their essential personality or even their destiny. But the Egyptians were skilled in taking spiritual entities and personifying them. A good example of this process is the concept of maat, the idea of rightness, justice, the antithesis of chaos – very much an intangible concept but one which was coalesced into the figure of the goddess Maat, a woman with an ostrich feather as her emblem. Other divine concepts were given personifications, but so too were human spiritual attributes, most importantly the ka. The ‘inner ka’ was personified as the ‘external ka’, a spiritual entity which, on death, became a quasi-independent entity separate from, yet connected to, the human body which it had inhabited.

But, although a spiritual entity, the ka was intimately connected to the body, not just in life, but also after death, when the direct link created at birth between the physical and spiritual had been broken. Crucially, the Egyptians chose to view the external ka as having a range of possibilities and limitations which it had shared with its living being/host: a body as a physical host, the sustenance of food and drink, a home in which to live. These limitations meant that the ka did not leave the physical world, but dwelt within it: although a spiritual form, it continued to need a physical host, ideally the body; although a spiritual form, it required sustenance in the form of food and drink. Other requirements, or desires, for a beneficial afterlife would follow, but the core need of the ka as a spiritual entity requiring physical necessities was one of the major factors which dictated the attitude of the Egyptians towards the Dead, including the form and use of the tomb as the place where the necessary ongoing relationship between the Living and the Dead was crystallized. This is obvious from the way in which the tomb developed during the Old Kingdom; it is also obvious from the term used by Egyptians of the Old Kingdom to refer to the tomb – pr k – ‘house of the ka’. Arguably, the tomb owner who is depicted on the walls of a non-royal tomb is not the living person but their ka. In this context it is important to note the stress which was also placed on the survival of the name, the rn (rn