Burial Demography in the Late Middle Kingdom: a Social Perspective

Abstract

The paper aims at analysing the social factors connected with the increase of sequential multiple burials around the first quarter of the Second Millennium BC in Egypt.In particular, in the late Middle Kingdom, the practice of multiple burials became more widespread across the whole country and it was more visible at all social levels, reaching also the uppermost levels of society and the royal court.Such a burial demography pattern can be linked with deeper transformations in the social organisation noticeable through iconographic, textual, linguistic, and archaeological evidence: an increase of plurality of people named/represented on stelae; a lexical deviation inside the vocabulary related to 'familial' groups (CT 146); the interruption in the archaeological record of the texts known as 'Letters to the Dead'; the introduction of an uncommon architectural feature in the eastern Delta (Avaris), the 'house of the dead'.The increase and spread on a preeminent scale of multiple burials drove a renegotiation of the role of the dead body within the burial assemblage.In the light of a changed burial demography, the tomb became the ideal memory container for supporting the identity of a more crowded household structure and dead bodies constituted the tangible mnemonic bridge to the past and social identity.Sequential multiple burials affected also temporality, and the passage of time increased the objectification of the body itself; therefore multiple bodies inside a grave may have influenced the selection of the range of objects to be placed in, as demonstrated by a consistent infiltration of the domestic sphere inside the funerary domain at the end of Twelfth Dynasty.Around the late Middle Kingdom, ca.1800 BC, the composition of burial equipmentand consequently also the ideology of the tombunderwent a profound transformation.With the disappearance of wooden models and Coffin Text decoration on the inside of the coffins, the tomb equipment started to be dominated by objects more connected with practices of the daily life. 1 Contemporary objects for the uppermost elite burials related to the resurrection ritual, the so-called Osirification regalia, became more widespread, and new sets of funerary items 2 started to be specifically produced (including the first prototypes of shabtis 3 and heartscarabs).4 What led to this change has been widely explored from ritual and religious perspectives, 5 but it has been less frequently examined from social and economic * In the first instance, I would like to deeply thank Rune Nyord both for organising the seminar in Cambridge and for all his efforts in assembling the volume, certainly not an easy task.I am also grateful to Wolfram Grajetzki for revising the manuscript and Paul Whelan for checking the English.The statistic setting concerning the stela with multiple people is to be credited to Alexander Ilin-Tomich, who kindly shared his data and knowledge.Finally, I also owe to Juan Carlos Moreno García, Christian Knoblauch, Miriam Müller, Nicholas Picardo, Anna Stevens, and Paul Whelan for sharing their articles and information concerning their researches.I am thankful to all the participants to the seminar day for their inspiring presence and fruitful discussion. 1 Cf.Miniaci, G., Miniature Forms as Transformative Thresholds: Faience Figurines in Middle Bronze Age Egypt (1800 BC-1650 BC) (=BMPES 7), Leuven-Paris-London, forthcoming; Quirke, S., Birth tusks.The armoury of health in context -Egypt 1800 BC.Including publication of Petrie Museum examples photographed by Gianluca Miniaci, and drawn from the photographs by Andrew Boyce (=MKS 3), London 2016. 2 Grajetzki, W., Tomb treasures of the late Middle Kingdom.The archaeology of female burials.Philadelphia 2014, pp.147-63.3 Miniaci, G., 'The case of the Third Intermediate Period "shabti-maker of the Amun domain" Padiamun and the change in conception of shabti statuettes', in JEA 100 (2016), pp.253-82.See also Nyord, R., '"An image of the owner as he was on Earth".Representation and ontology in Middle Kingdom funerary images', in: Miniaci, G., Betrò, M., Quirke, S. (eds).Company of Images.Modelling the ancient imaginary world of the Middle Kingdom.

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