1.1 Theme, Rationale, and Scope of This Book

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Figure 1

Map of Egypt

Image by the author

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This book is the first comprehensive monographic treatment of the New Kingdom (c. 1539–1078 bce; Table 1)¹ necropolis at Saqqara,² the vast archaeological site c. 15 km south of present-day Cairo (Fig. 1).³ The site is named after the modern town, ‮سقارة‬‎, located at the south end of the North Saqqara plateau.⁴ The modern place name, Saḳḳāra, was adopted in the 19th century to refer to the adjoining archaeological site located on the elevated desert plateau on the west bank on the Nile.⁵ The ancient Egyptians employed a range of toponyms to refer to the specific locations on this plateau.⁶ ḥr i҆mn.tt Mn-nfr, ‘on the west of Memphis’, was often used to refer to the site in the New Kingdom.⁷ The place name brings the urban context of the cemetery in focus, emphasising that the site was viewed as a component of the lived urban environment.⁸ A network of paths and tracks, more and less formal, connected habitation areas in the east to the extra-urban city of the dead in the west.

For more than three millennia, Saqqara had served as the main place of burial for the inhabitants of Memphis, Egypt’s metropolis in the north. Memphis was a centre of major political and religious importance throughout Egyptian pharaonic history, and sat among the most important capital cities of the ancient world in the 2nd millennium bce.⁹ The living inhabitants of Memphis shaped the necropolis over many generations,¹⁰ and so the life histories of both the city and its necropolis were closely intertwined.

The city’s eminent position in the New Kingdom affected the nature of its desert-edge necropolis. The latter’s prominence is underlined by the fact that some of the kingdom’s most influential priestly, administrative, military, and court officials chose to construct their tombs¹¹ in this cultural landscape which, at the time, was already ancient. It also used to be a very lively place, one where ancient people worked, lived, and moved through.¹² In the past, it was not just a place for the dead. Rather, or perhaps first and foremost, it was a place frequented and shaped by the living.¹³ The living are at the heart of this study, asking how they, as individuals and in groups, shaped, perceived, and experienced this cultural landscape through time, and how, vice versa, their actions were shaped by the (ever changing) landscape.

1.2 The ‘Walking Dead’ at Saqqara

This book is the outcome of a study conducted within a four-year research project, entitled ‘The Walking Dead at Saqqara: The Making of a Cultural Geography’, funded by the Dutch Research Council (nwo), and hosted by the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (lias).¹⁴ The overarching research project seeks to answer the question of how religion was appropriated by individuals and groups at Saqqara. This question emerges from the long-held view that Egyptian religion is essentially static; a view which contrasts sharply with the archaeological and textual evidence derived from cemetery sites throughout Egypt. The case study of Saqqara is exceptionally well-suited to analysing long-term changes and traditions, because of the time depth represented in the archaeological record.

The term ‘cultural geography’ is meant to cover the full range of activities, religious and non-religious, performed by groups and individuals at Saqqara (or elsewhere). It is used as a neutral term that covers the various adjectives commonly practiced in Egyptology to classify landscapes. Necropolises are often referred to as ‘religious landscapes’, for example.¹⁵ An Egyptian necropolis surely was a place imbued with religious significance. Such is implied by one of the words Egyptians used to refer to such sites, ẖr.t(y)-nṯr, to be translated as ‘that which is under (the charge of) the god’.¹⁶ Yet not all activities that took place there were religiously motivated or of a strictly religious nature. Equally common classifiers of cemetery landscapes, such as ‘ritual’,¹⁷ ‘sacred’,¹⁸ and ‘cultic’,¹⁹ fail to fully account for the multiplicity of meanings a necropolis site potentially had, and the pluriform nature of activities that took place in them. For example, the ancient site of Abydos in the south of Egypt, according to David O’Connor, “is best understood as a sacred landscape (…), albeit one with important administrative and economic dimensions as well” (emphasis ns).²⁰ The clause of this observation suggests that sacred landscapes have usually no administrative or economic dimensions. The case of Saqqara, so well documented for the later periods of pharaonic history,²¹ emphasises that these realms were fused and that their boundaries were extremely fuzzy. In addition, all the above adjectives hold predominantly Western ideas that are projected onto non-Western contexts, which is problematic.²² ‘Cultural geography’ thus serves as a more neutral umbrella term to help detect the manifold ways in which in landscapes “meaning and social understandings are constructed, contested and negotiated”.²³

The Walking Dead project holds that the formation of a cultural geography can be traced through the analysis of three overlapping fields of human action. These are identified in relation to this study as the three main expressions of ‘religious agency’, namely ‘religious practices’, ‘transmission of images and texts’, and ‘landscape’. In the landscape, religion can be ‘instantiated’ (a term signalling the (material) form and content which the actions of (religious) agents can take)²⁴ through a virtually endless range of different media like gestures (e.g., voice offerings, pr(i҆).t ḫrw), objects (e.g., offering pottery, votive stelae, graffiti), monuments (e.g. memorial chapels, tombs), and images and texts (e.g., Book of the Dead spells and vignettes).²⁵ Within the framework of the Walking Dead research project, the religious practices at New Kingdom Saqqara are studied by Lara Weiss,²⁶ and the transmission of religious texts (taken from the Book of the Dead corpus) by Huw Twiston Davies.²⁷

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Figure 2

The early-19th century excavations transformed the surface of the North Saqqara desert plateau into a moon-like landscape

Photograph by the author, 2019

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1.3 Problems and Research Questions

To the modern-day visitor, the North Saqqara plateau might seem like a quiet and desolate place. It is difficult for the non-specialist, and, admittedly, for many trained Egyptologists also, to make much sense of the site now dotted with countless ruins of structures, sandy hills, and pits both deep and shallow (Fig. 2). The present-day situation differs little from that witnessed by some of the early European explorers of the site. Take, for example, Georg Erbkam (1811–1876), the surveyor and architect of the four years long Prussian expedition to Egypt led by Carl Richard Lepsius (1810–1884). Two days after Erbkam had set foot on the terrain (on 13 February 1843), he penned down the following account that leaves little to the imagination:

Ich orientiere mich heut zuerst von dem Pyramidenfelde, indem ich zuvörderst auf die größte der hiesigen Pyramiden steige, dann nach dem äußersten, sehr entfernten Punkt des Feldes wandre (…).²⁸ Das Feld ist öde, wüst und langweilig, nichts als Schutthaufen und Brunnen; fast nirgends hat man einen Überblick als auf der Pyramide. Knochen, Schädel, Thiergebeine, Mumienfetzen, Alles liegt umhergeworfen rings um Einen, ein trostloser Anblick, zumal die Wüste selbst weder Formen noch Farben darbietet; dieses Todtenfeld hält gegen das von Ghize keinen Vergleich aus.²⁹

Lepsius’s team had just travelled south from Giza, the site that had served as the expedition’s first base camp, from where countless monuments were explored and documented. Giza had a lot to offer, certainly to the eyes of an architect. Saqqara, on the other hand, was less impressive, to put it mildly. Erbkam describes the desert-edge archaeological site as a “barren, desolate, and boring” place that offered “nothing but piles of rubble and pits”—certainly no great advertisement.

Erbkam’s observations touch upon two major problems that have, in the past, affected the study of Memphis and its necropolis and which modern scholars are also facing to this day:³⁰

1. Saqqara as a scattered necropolis existing virtually outside the Memphite necropolis

   The New Kingdom necropolis of Saqqara exists largely in public and private collections around the world.³¹ The large-scale and uncontrolled excavations of the (early-) 19th century resulted in the unparalleled dismantling and (partial) removal of tomb structures (Figs 3–4). These early stages in the exploration of the Memphite necropolis were often poorly documented (if at all). Moreover, the sale of the large collections gathered by prominent collectors (European diplomats and businessmen) led to the dispersion and worldwide distribution of tomb elements and funerary objects. These activities, again, are generally poorly documented. It goes without saying that these activities cumulatively led to the loss of information about the archaeological context and architectural setting of the scattered tomb elements and objects, which has ultimately detracted from their scientific value.

2. A biased view of Memphis in Egyptological literature

   There is a scarcity of surviving, standing monuments at Memphis (e.g., the temple of Ptah) and its necropolis. The comparatively favourable situation at Thebes has created a bias in the Egyptological literature. The ‘Southern City’ and its necropolises have long been the main sources of information for studies on a range of aspects of New Kingdom society. The idea has long persisted that Thebes functioned as the administrative capital of Egypt during the entire New Kingdom, and that its temple complexes represented the country’s most important sacerdotal centre.

These observations are taken as the main thread of this study, and by setting the living users of the necropolis in focus, the two-fold aim of this book is formulated as follows.

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Figure 3

The mud-brick ‘skeleton’ of the tomb of Ry (038/usc)

Photograph by the author, 2013

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Figure 4

Buried courtyards of New Kingdom tombs in the Unas South Cemetery

Photograph by the author, 2019

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First, it is meant to serve as a companion to the New Kingdom necropolis at Saqqara. Surprisingly, to date no complete overview of tombs in the Memphite necropolis built in the New Kingdom exists.³² This study endeavours to fill this gap in the Egyptological literature. Academic research hitherto has focused mainly on the study of individual tomb structures (e.g., archaeological tomb publications), usually detached from their spatial setting. Yet, any monument is meaningful only within the larger landscape that provides its context.³³ Without knowledge of the landscape setting, we cannot answer questions pertaining to the choices underlying tomb location, or make statements about a cemetery’s growth over time. Thus, the research questions that guide the analysis of this study, include:

• Why were certain areas of the necropolis selected for burial in certain time periods?

• How were tombs accessed from the distant habitation areas?

• What were the tombs’ spatial relations to contemporaneous and older monuments?

• What effect did earlier structures have on the positioning of tombs and structuring of the necropolis in later times?

• How was access to (certain parts of) the necropolis managed? Was access restricted? If so, to whom, and who decided?

Second, this book aims to introduce landscape biography³⁴ as a useful conceptual tool to study the long-time interaction between people and landscapes in the shaping of a cultural geography.³⁵ Writing a biography of any landscape is all about examining how a landscape and its dwellers created and ‘reshaped’ each other in one continuous movement.³⁶ It also involves producing a (not the) story about the landscape, and, as an “explicit act of remembrance”, this story produces an account of life and dwelling in the Memphite region in the 2nd millennium bce for present-day society.³⁷ This makes the study itself a form of heritage practice, which also enables one to critically evaluate heritage practices at the Saqqara archaeological site.

1.4 A Few Notes on Landscape Archaeology

Studies focused on landscape are numerous in archaeology.³⁸ It is therefore surprisingly difficult to find a clear and satisfactory definition of what is meant by this “fuzzy and ambiguous”³⁹ term. Traditionally, scholars have struggled in particular with the dichotomy between nature and culture in defining what a landscape is, who dwells in it, and who is responsible for its construction. Because of the difficulty of defining the term, it is useful to start with a very brief historic outline of ‘landscape’.

At its origins, the term landscape denoted a communal, collective work. The English word derives from Dutch landschap or German Landschaft. In its early, 16th century usage, ‘lantschap’ indicated “an area carved out by axe and plough, which belongs to the people who have carved it out”.⁴⁰ It was “an area of cultural identity based on tribal and/or blood ties”. In today’s popular usage of the word, landscape signifies the specific arrangement or pattern of “things on the land”, and refers to “the look or the style of the land”,⁴¹ by which is meant the social or cultural significance of the observed order or make up. For geographers, landscape is understood as a built morphology. To them, landscape refers to the shape and structure of a place. Landscape also refers to a form of representation, a usage heavily influenced by the genre of landscape painting.⁴² This view of landscape has been adopted in the Merriam-Webster dictionary (2018), in which two definitions are presented for landscape: (1) “a picture of natural inland scenery,” and (2) “a portion of land that the eye can see in one glance.” The landscape, then, is conceptualised as the backdrop to human action. This view, drawing on 1960s environmental archaeology, is not how landscape is understood in the context of the study presented in this volume.

Landscape is related to, but not identical with nature. This view is perhaps best articulated by cultural geographer Donald Meinig, who argues that

the idea of landscape (…) begins with a naive acceptance of the intricate intimate intermingling of physical, biological, and cultural features which any glance around us displays. Landscape is, first of all, the unity we see, the impressions of our senses rather than the logic of the sciences.

Landscape can be found all around us. Yet while the landscape may be contemporary to its dwellers, glimpses of older landscapes always remain visible, and these potentially continue to be meaningful. The past endures, and therefore, as Tim Ingold has noted, “the landscape is never complete: neither ‘built’ nor ‘unbuilt’, it is perpetually under construction”.⁴³ In other words, landscape has an important temporal aspect.⁴⁴

In the proceedings of the first international conference on Landscape Archaeology, published in 2012, the editors note that in today’s scholarship there are, essentially, two approaches to the topic. The first, ‘landscape as territory’ definition, is used by processual archaeologists, earth scientists, and most historical geographers. Post-processual archaeologists, new cultural geographers and anthropologists, on the other hand, “favour a more abstract definition of landscape, based on how it is perceived by the observer”.⁴⁵ The present study adheres to the second of these perspectives.

1.5 Landscape Biography

This study adopts a biographical approach to understanding the shaping of the Saqqara cultural landscape. The notions of landscape and the analytical concepts drawn from the biographical approach as adopted in the present study are further detailed in Chapter 2.⁴⁶ The present section is meant to briefly introduce the concept. At the core of the term ‘landscape biography’ lies the premise that it is useful to conceptualise the history of a landscape as a life-history.⁴⁷ The concept of ‘life-history’ was introduced by anthropologist Ruth Tringham,⁴⁸ interested in the transformation of spatial structures (houses) in a historical context.⁴⁹ The analytical value of the concept is aptly illustrated when she writes:

the house has to be considered as an individual, as a dynamic entity whose every month of life is significant for the men and women who act in and around it. It seems to me that the concept of life-history of the house has a more historical and humanistic significance than the term use-life. It concerns the time aspect—the duration of the house, the continuity of its next generation (its replacement), its ancestors and descendants, the memories of it that are held by its actors, the ghosts that are held within its walls and under its foundations. In other words, I become interested in its biography. In this respect, I am interested not only in its appearance of external wall and bounded interior space, but its appearance on the broader landscape through time.⁵⁰

A biography as the written history of a person’s life provides a comprehensive description of the life of an individual, but it involves more than just the summing up of notable events or moments in their life. A biography presents a life story, it narrates not every detail, but highlights various aspects, and aims to grasp the broader picture of one’s life journey. All is situated in the historical, social, and/or geographic context in which that life takes place. Along the same lines, in the social sciences, the biographical method as a research methodology is understood as

The collection and analysis of an intensive account of a whole life or portion of a life (…) Rather than concentrating upon a ‘snapshot’ of an individual’s present situation, the biographical approach emphasises the placement of the individual within a nexus of social connections, historical events and life experiences (the life history).⁵¹

Human biographies are notably limited and closed, because humans have more or less finite life cycles with a fixed beginning (birth) and end (death) with distinguishable life stages in between. Biographies of landscapes have no clear-cut beginning or end. To borrow the words of archaeologist Tim Ingold, the landscape is ‘always in the nature of “work in progress” ’.⁵² A landscape’s life-history or biography can be seen as a never-ending process of growth and aging. The making of a cultural geography may thus be viewed as a cumulative process. Landscapes play a part in the closed biographies of the individuals dwelling in them; the biographies of landscapes, on the other hand, far outlive those of their dwellers. The significance of studying the changing landscape and its interaction with humans in order to understand the formation of a cultural geography is perhaps best captured by Jan Kolen and Johannes Renes, when they state that

as an essential part of human life worlds, landscapes have the potential to absorb something of people’s lives, works and thoughts. But landscapes also shape their own life histories on different timescales, imprinted by human existence, affecting personal lives and transcending individual human life cycles.⁵³

The relationships between the life histories of landscapes and people have in the last two decades attracted growing scholarly interest. This has resulted in the creation of landscape biography as a new approach to landscape history. Landscape biography as a ‘research strategy’⁵⁴ was developed by archaeologists, geographers and historians in the Netherlands in the mid-1990s.⁵⁵ While the approach they developed was new, its foundations were not. The landscape biography approach is rooted in theories borrowed from the disciplines of social anthropology and geography. It combines insights from anthropological studies of material culture—object biography (also known as ‘the social life of things’)—as proposed by social anthropologists Igor Kopytoff⁵⁶ and Arjun Appadurai,⁵⁷ with those of cultural geographer Marwyn Samuels’s ‘biography of landscape’.⁵⁸ Current landscape biography also integrates insights from philosopher and cultural historian Michel De Certeau,⁵⁹ who is interested in the idea of the city as a locus of everyday life and the people who are actively engaged in the continuous production of living space. The views of Samuels and De Certeau with respect to ‘landscape authorship’ are further explored in Section 2.5.

Finally, the notion of biography which is meant to conceptually ground this study is aptly formulated by Christopher Ratté, curator of a 2018 Kelsey Museum exhibition focused on ‘urban biographies’. In his explanation of what is meant by ‘urban biographies’, the word ‘city’ may well be replaced by ‘necropolis’ to fit the case study of the present book:

Just as the biography of a human being is the story of what makes that person unique as an individual, so the biography of a city is the story of the unique experience of an urban community over time. How do cities come into being? How do they change and evolve?⁶⁰ How do urban communities create and articulate individual identities through development of their built environments, through the layout of streets, for example, or the construction of “signature” buildings? We can all conjure up images of modern skylines that simultaneously say “I am a city” and “I am different from other cities,” and most contemporary cities also bear clear witness to passage of time, from historic buildings to suburban developments.⁶¹

1.6 Structure of This Study

Chapter 2 engages with the theoretical and methodological concepts underlying landscape biography. The concept (cultural) landscape is elucidated by describing a number of its main characteristics, such as ‘layerdness’ and ‘temporality’. The chapter discusses ‘landscape authorship’, presumed ‘desired life-paths’, and consequences for heritage practices.

Chapter 3 introduces the data sources underlying the present study, and the methodology employed. The Saqqara New Kingdom necropolis is set in its environmental setting, and the corpus of tombs (both reconstructed and excavated) listed in the catalogue at the end of this study is elucidated. The analysis of the spatial and diachronic distribution of tombs in the necropolis (chapters 4 and 5) combines information pertaining to the natural environment with landscape phenomenology (e.g., visibility, accessibility, location, interrelation, etc.) in a diachronic perspective and augmented with corroborated data including prosopography (i.e. titles, filiations, professional association, etc.).

Chapters 4 and 5 form the core of this study, and describe the development of the two clusters of tombs (‘cemeteries’) located on the North Saqqara plateau through the New Kingdom. Chapter 4 focuses on the Unas South Cemetery, and dwells largely on material gathered by the former ees-Leiden and current Leiden-Turin archaeological expedition to Saqqara (1975–present). Chapter 5 aims to draw together the scattered results of roughly 200 years of excavations in the Teti Pyramid Cemetery.

Chapter 6 aims to answer the question why the tombs were located where they are, and why the necropolis developed as it did. In so doing, the study draws on the limited textual evidence available on the topic, and situates the cemeteries, studied ‘in isolation’ in Chapter 4 and 5, in their wider landscape setting.

Chapter 7 constitutes a conclusion to this study.