Funerary Customs of the New Kingdom

Mummies, coffins, canopics, and shabtis are amongst the finds most commonly associated with burials of the New Kingdom. In addition, the dead should be buried in nicely decorated tombs – rock tombs where cliffs exist or temple like tombs, ideally with a little pyramid in other regions. These customs seem to have been quite homogenous throughout the whole country, including Nubia. We think we know all there is to know about New kingdom burial customs, but this course aims to question some commonly held generalisations and look deeper.

There has been a long held idea that tombs reflect the deceased’s status in life, i.e. the higher the rank and the higher the economic resources, but does this reflect the reality? Were the customs really so uniform or were there variations? Did individuals choose how and with what they wanted to be buried or is it connected to the membership in specific groups? How did less affluent people bury their dead and did the customs change within the 500 years of the New Kingdom? Another important question are the mostly missing burials of babies and children. What happened to them? Were they not considered worthy enough to be buried in a regular tomb?

Over this 8 week course we will consider questions like these and look again at burial practices through  cultural, socio-economic, and temporal dimensions.

We will also review the interpretation of excavation reports,  as most extensive excavations of large cemeteries date back to the later 19th and the first half of the 20th century. These excavations have delivered the largest amount of data available until today due to their large scale and they still heavily influence our view on Ancient Egyptian burial customs.

The early history of Egyptology and the interpretations of pioneer Egyptologists still shape our ideas of  Ancient Egyptian burial customs and mortuary religion. This becomes especially evident regarding such terms as “eternity” and the question of the interpretation of mummification. Was this meant as an eternal conservation or was the act of mummification the important part and mummification mostly a rite of passage?

Week 1) Introduction: Coming to terms with death and burial.

Week 2) The history of excavating cemeteries

Week 3) The ideal burial?

Texts and representations of tombs, burials, and burial goods (second part by Dr Barbara Gilli)

Week 4) High status burials: Ideal and reality

Week 5) Cultural vs. economic affluence: Literacy and the knowledge of burial customs through time

Week 6) Poorly equipped burials: remains of the poor in Ancient Egypt?

Week 7) Burials of the young: Where did the children go?

Week 8) Burials and ethnicity: Can we see foreigners in Egyptian tombs?            Final discussions