The Tomb of Meryneith at Saqqara


Book Description

This funerary monument of a high Memphite official was discovered by a joint expedition of the Leiden Museum of Antiquities and Leiden University in 2001. Meryneith started his career as steward of the Memphite temple of the sun god Aten during the reign of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten. During midlife, he may have joined the court set up by the Pharaoh at the new capital at Amarna. He ended his career under Tutankhamun as high-priest of the Aten in the Memphite temple again. Thereby, the importance of the tomb of Meryneith lies in the fact that for the first time it allows us to witness various stages in the rise and fall of the Amarna heresy from a Memphite point of view. Thus the tomb-owner was apparently forced to change his name from Meryneith - with its reference to the now proscribed goddess Neith - into Meryre. Several other variants of his name and some additional titles came to light, revealing various stages in his career. These stages mirror the ideological developments of the Amarna Period and its immediate aftermath, which are further illustrated by the different styles of the decoration of the tomb. This proved to be remarkably well preserved and consists of both wall-reliefs and paintings on mud plaster. Thanks to the evidence of the inscriptions, it can be observed how the tomb was built and decorated in various stages, each characterized by a marked change in style and iconography. The present report includes a full description of these wall scenes, as well as chapters on the career of the tomb-owner, on the double statue of Meryneith and his wife found in one of the west chapels, and on the objects, pottery, and skeletal material found in the course of the excavations.




The Tomb of Iniuia in the New Kingdom Necropolis of Memphis at Saqqara


Book Description

"Iniuia, a high official under King Tutankhamun, started his career as Scribe of the Treasury of the Lord of the Two Lands in Memphis. Next he became overseer of the cattle of Amun and High Steward of Memphis, His tomb, situated just south of the tomb of General Horemheb, was excavated in 1993 by the Joint Expedition of the Egypt Exploration Society and the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. There are two chapels, one of which is decorated with painted scenes showing Iniuia and his family officiated before the gods of the beyond. They are the finest wall-paintings found to date in the New Kingdom necropolis at Saqqara. The walls of the other chapel are covered with pained reliefs in a style which is reminiscent of the art of Amarna. The scenes show Iniuia performing various activities in his capacity of a high official of the king. The chapel has a pyramid, one of the best preserved examples of its kind discovered in Saqqara up to now. The book contains chapters on the architecture of the tomb, on the decoration of both chapels including reliefs, other monuments and objects from Iniuia's tomb but now in museum collections, such as the anthropoid sarcophagus on Iniuia in the Musée du Louvre. Apart from chapters on the objects and the skeletal remains found in the tomb - the latter by Eugen Strouhal - the book contains a comprehensive contribution by Barbara G. Aston on the pottery found in the tomb of Iniuia and surrounding area."--Page 4 of cover.




The Saqqara Necropolis through the New Kingdom


Book Description

This book is the first comprehensive monographic treatment of the New Kingdom (1539–1078 BCE) necropolis at Saqqara, the burial ground of the ancient Egyptian city of Memphis, and addresses questions fundamental to understanding the site’s development through time. For example, why were certain areas of the necropolis selected for burial in certain time periods; what were the tombs’ spatial relations to contemporaneous and older monuments; and what effect did earlier structures have on the positioning of tombs and structuring of the necropolis in later times? This study adopts landscape biography as a conceptual tool to study the long-time interaction between people and landscapes.




The Tombs of Ptahemwia and Sethnakht at Saqqara


Book Description

An excavation report of two New Kingdom tombs at Saqqara (Egypt) dating to the reigns of Akhenaten and Tutankamun.




The Walking Dead at Saqqara


Book Description

Funerary rituals and the cult of the dead are classics of research in religious studies, especially for ancient Egypt. Still, we know relatively little about how people interacted in daily life at the city of Memphis and its Saqqara necropolis in the late second millennium BCE. By focussing on lived ancient religion, we can see that the social and religious strategies employed by the individuals at Saqqara are not just means on the way to religious, post-mortem salvation, nor is their self-representation simply intended to manifest social status. On the contrary, the religious practices at Saqqara show in their complex spatiality a wide spectrum of options to configure sociality before and after one's own death. The analytical distinction between religion and other forms of human practices and sociality illuminates the range of cultural practices and how people selected, modified, or even avoided certain religious practices. As a result, pre-funerary, funerary and practices of the subsequent mortuary cults, in close connection with religious practices directed towards other ancestors and deities, allow the formation of imagined and functioning reminiscence clusters as central social groups at Saqqara, creating a heuristic model applicable also to other contexts.




The Tomb of Parennefer, Butler of Pharaoh Akhenaten


Book Description

Theban Tomb 188 is the sole archaeological site in the ancient Theban necropolis securely dated to the reign of the “heretic pharaoh” Akhenaten (1353–1336 BCE). The result of several years of clearance and recording by Dr. Susan Redford, director of the Akhenaten Temple Project’s Theban Tomb Survey, this richly illustrated book provides a detailed description of the remaining wall scenes and texts of this historically important ancient monument. In the fourteenth century BCE, Pharaoh Akhenaten attempted to institute a radical religious reform and moved his capital city to Amarna. This book publishes important evidence related to the Amarna period in ancient Egypt, specifically the plans, reliefs, and inscriptions of Theban Tomb 188, belonging to Parennefer, the tutor and butler of the king. Dr. Redford’s detailed archaeological study traces the rapid evolution of ideology, iconography, and iconoclasm, as revealed in Parennefer’s tomb. The decoration kept pace with the momentous changes in the king’s thinking, so that, when dovetailed with the pictorial evidence from the excavations of the great Gem-pa-aten temple at Karnak, it becomes possible to chronicle these rapid changes. This definitive study of the tomb of Parennefer will appeal to archaeologists, Egyptologists, historians of religion, and art historians working on the ancient Near East.




The Tomb of Iurudef


Book Description

(Egypt Exploration Society, Excavation Memoirs 57, 1991)




Following Osiris


Book Description

Osiris, god of the dead, was one of ancient Egypt's most important deities. The earliest secure evidence for belief in him dates back to the fifth dynasty (c.2494-2345BC), but he continued to be worshipped until the fifth century AD. Following Osiris is concerned with ancient Egyptian conceptions of the relationship between Osiris and the deceased, or what might be called the Osirian afterlife, asking what the nature of this relationship was and what the prerequisites were for enjoying its benefits. It does not seek to provide a continuous or comprehensive account of Egyptian ideas on this subject, but rather focuses on five distinct periods in their development, spread over four millennia. The periods in question are ones in which significant changes in Egyptian ideas about Osiris and the dead are known to have occurred or where it has been argued that they did, as Egyptian aspirations for the Osirian afterlife took time to coalesce and reach their fullest form of expression. An important aim of the book is to investigate when and why such changes happened, treating religious belief as a dynamic rather than a static phenomenon and tracing the key stages in the development of these aspirations, from their origin to their demise, while illustrating how they are reflected in the textual and archaeological records. In doing so, it opens up broader issues for exploration and draws meaningful cross-cultural comparisons to ask, for instance, how different societies regard death and the dead, why people convert from one religion to another, and why they abandon belief in a god or gods altogether.




4. Symposium Zur Ägyptischen Königsideologie


Book Description

The fourth symposium in the series on Ancient Egyptian Royal Ideology was held at the British Museum in London in 2004, taking at its theme 'Egyptian Royal Residences: Structure and Form'. The scholars who participated in this gathering approached the subject from a broad range of perspectives. They embraced all phases of history from the foundation of the Egyptian state to the Late Period, and covered a variety of interrelated topics. These included the physical layout and architectural design of palaces, the activities which happened inside, and the ideological questions raised by the status of the king - his divine, personal and institutional functions. Beginning with these focal points, the papers and discussions ranged further afield to include the roles of members of the court, their relationship with the king and their activities at the residence. The papers published in this volume focus strongly on the Middle and New Kingdoms, since it is from these periods that the richest sources of data concerning the royal residence survive. Textual sources and archaeological traces of palaces have been carefully studied in conjunction to provide new insights and to open new avenues of research.




The Sacred Landscape of Dra Abu el-Naga during the New Kingdom


Book Description

In The Sacred Landscape of Dra Abu el-Naga during the New Kingdom, Ángeles Jiménez-Higueras offers the reconstruction of the physical, religious and cultural landscape of Dra Abu el-Naga south and its conceptual development from the 18th to the 20th Dynasties.