2.1 The Layered Landscape
The continued use of a site through time can potentially result in the accumulation of layers. Settlement sites present a case in point. The long-time use of the same space can lead to the build-up of multiple strata. In such cases, the stratigraphy tells the story of a site though time.1 In Near Eastern archaeology, the phenomenon observed in settlement sites is called tell formation. It refers to the process of vertically growing settlement mounds, accumulating layer upon layer.2 The story of such sites can be ‘retrieved’ archaeologically by studying the sequence of deposits formed by past events. Ideally, the story can be gleaned from a neat vertical section cut through (part of) the mound. Such a section would ideally show the progression of subsequent moments through time as they have materialised in the archaeological record. New layers are founded upon older layers (thereby covering them up), and so the layered landscape gradually and continuously expands. Yet to argue that landscapes (and the settlement sites located therein) simply grew (and continue to grow) vertically by building anew upon older layers, and that by simply peeling off the layers of past depositions one can easily reconstruct the development of a landscape over time, is of course an oversimplification of the archaeological facts.
Figure 5
View down an alley in the modern-day village of Edfu, built on the old tell
Photograph by the author, 2007
In reality, the material remains of various periods in time are literally intertwined. There is no neat stratification where the old is always covered by the new. Reality displays a much more complex mix of things. A view down a small alley in the modern-day village of Edfu in the south of Egypt helps to illustrate this point (Fig. 5). The modern city grew upon the ruin mound or tell of ancient Edfu—a major provincial town and capital of the 2nd Upper Egyptian nome.3 While the modern town has long developed far beyond the limits of the ancient settlement, people continue to live among the material traces of the past. The Ptolemaic temple of Horus Behdety, for example, prominently features in the urban landscape. Construction of the temple in its present form may have been initiated in regnal year 10 of Ptolemy III Uergetes (237 bce) and finished under Ptolemy XII Neos Dionysos (57 bce),4 it is just as much ‘of the present’ because it is part of the modern streetscape. In the lived urban landscape, the past and present cannot be easily separated, just as much as the past cannot be ignored in the lives of the present-day inhabitants. The past simply lives on in the present. It forms an integral part of it.5 The old temple may ‘date’ to the Ptolemaic period in the sense that it was constructed at that time; yet it also formed part of every subsequent contemporary streetscape, up to this day.
So, a more nuanced view doing justice to the more complex reality would be to describe the landscape as a ‘palimpsest’.6 The word derives from the Latin palimpsestus, which in turn derives from Greek palimpsēstos, translated as ‘again scraped’. In medieval textual studies the term refers to reused parchment manuscript pages in which a previous text, scraped away, can sometimes be recognised as it shows through (the) new text(s). In case of the medieval manuscripts, the older traces may have nothing to do with the later traces in the sense that the content and composition of the new text is not influenced by the content and composition of the underlying older text. It is the surface of the same medium that is used again to write. Sections of the old text normally will not be integrated into the new composition, for example. Palimpsests work differently in (archaeological) landscapes. The traces of older landscapes could very well influence the shaping and use(s) of the same places in the future. Thus, earlier traces serve not as a mere passive, almost invisible backdrop to the same landscape in later times. On the contrary, traces from the past very clearly have agency. The material deposits resulting from human actions that were formed in various periods in time can be seen mixed together in a single landscape, so that the past forms an integral part of the present. Or rather, the past forms an integral part of every present. It means that the continuously accumulating material remains of the past can very actively play a part in the lives of people for generations to come.
Figure 6
View of the Teti Pyramid Cemetery, facing south
Photograph by the author, 2013
Figure 7
Relief-decorated pilaster from the tomb of Amenemone (213/tpc), Paris, Musée du Louvre B 48 = E 3028
Photograph © 2016 Musée du Louvre / Christian Décamps
Saqqara is a prime example of a palimpsest or layered landscape, sometimes quite literally so. Take, for example, the north section of the plateau surrounding the Old Kingdom pyramid of King Teti (c. 2305–2279 bce).7 Here a large cemetery grew of courtiers from Egypt’s 6th Dynasty. The so-called mastaba’s8 of Mereruka and Kagemni, with their multiple relief-decorated rooms accessible to visitors, are perhaps the best known among the many monuments situated there. Over time, a thick deposit of sand and rubble gradually filled the areas in between the freestanding tomb structures. This happened up to the point where practically all man-made structures were covered and were no longer visible on the desert surface. Only the larger buildings such as the pyramid of Teti and those of his queens visually remained part of the landscape. Several hundred years after the first phase of use of this area for burial, the then-contemporary desert surface came to serve as the location of a cemetery made of relatively modest tombs of officials of the New Kingdom. One of the best-known owners of a freestanding tomb structure in this area was Amenemone (213/tpc), the chief of goldsmiths and overseer of craftsmen of the king (Fig. 6). Amenemone is literally surrounded by the past. When he had his tomb built in the reign of Tutankhamun, the nearby pyramids of Teti and Menkauhor (c. 2373–2366 bce)—the latter not featured in figure 6—had already stood there for more than 1,000 years. The foundation stones of Amenemone’s tomb were laid atop the roof of a chapel of an Old Kingdom official named Ka-aper. The floor levels of the two superimposed superstructures were separated by a thick deposit of accumulated sand and rubble predating the New Kingdom. Thus, the cemetery seen in this image is both literally and visually layered. The past was also conceptually layered. For example, the iconographic programme of Amenemone’s tomb includes the representation of the 5th Dynasty King Menkauhor, carved in raised relief on a pilaster decorating the north wall of the portico (Fig. 7).9 In its original context, the image of the king, standing and facing right, would have looked out to his pyramid, which stood on the eastern edge of the plateau, at a distance of less than 200 m from the tomb of Amenemone,10 forging a link between past and present. The image emphatically grounds the tomb in this ancient sacred landscape. Amenemone inscribed himself in the ancient sacred landscape of Saqqara, and in turn inscribed the past in his funerary monument.
Figure 8
The excavation of the ‘New Kingdom’ necropolis at Saqqara in full progress, 2019
Photograph by the author, 2019
Let us move through time and have a look at the archaeological site today. The not to be missed Step Pyramid11 was built almost 5,000 years ago today at the centre of the North Saqqara archaeological site. It dominates the present-day landscape in much the same way as it did ever since its construction in the 3rd Dynasty reign of King Netjerikhet/Djoser, who reigned c. 2592–2566 bce (Fig. 8). The time elapsed since the pyramid’s construction clearly has had its effects on both the structure and its surrounding landscape. The place now may look and feel desolate, as already signalled in the introduction, yet the present-day feel does not reflect the situation in the remote past. The surrounding plateau has seen people and their man-made structures come and go, and the natural landscape has changed also. That the Step Pyramid has maintained its place in the changed landscape does not imply that it has not itself changed—because it has, both under the influence of natural effects and human agency.12 Efforts to combat the effects of these transformation processes are well visible in the photograph of figure 8. In recent years attempts have been made to put a halt to the degradation of the monument caused by the combined forces of cultural (e.g., the removal of stone blocks) and non-cultural transformation processes (e.g., wind and water erosion). The scaffolding has been put in place to facilitate construction work at the pyramid in order to consolidate its present-day structural condition. It is, in other words, an attempt to counter the transforming effects that the progression of time has (had) (and will continue to have) on the building. Despite the progression of time and the changes the monument underwent along the way, it still is the same pyramid, albeit not exactly the same as witnessed by its earliest contemporaries. Its appearance today might rather be seen as a reinterpretation of its early image. One could even argue that in its present-day form, the pyramid represents the sum total of all its transformations through time. Its early contemporaries witnessed the pyramid in its early life (set in a temporally different landscape), whereas we today witness it at a more advanced age13—which does not represent the end of its life-history, however. The aging monument now forms part of a modern-day landscape that includes the visible remains shaped at many different moments in time. The photo also shows us that the landscape is still actively in the making. The continued shaping and reshaping of the landscape is captured by the archaeological workforce in the foreground of the image, busily shifting sand. They are visibly transforming the site.14 To point to the archaeologists at work and attributing them with site-transforming powers may seem rather trivial. Self-evident as it may seem, the contributions of archaeologists, past and present, to the (trans)formation of the landscape is seldom explicitly acknowledged in publications. Wrongly so, because archaeological work has seriously impacted the archaeological landscape. It influences not just the way in which we perceive and experience it; it also influences our interpretations of how the landscape was perceived and experienced by the people that form the subject of our study. A simple glance at early aerial photographs of the site makes clear that the funerary landscape we are studying today has changed markedly.15 Perhaps most eye-catching are the large-scale excavations led by James Quibell (1867–1935) at the beginning of the 20th century. His campaigns usually lasted for months. At any given time, up to 180 local workers were employed to carry out various duties on site. Donkeys were gradually replaced by a narrow-gauge railway by which sand and rubble were removed on an almost industrial scale. Huge debris mounds in the landscape still remind us of their work.16 These mounds—not only created by Quibell, but also by many others before him and long after—have altered the landscape considerably, sometimes beyond recognition. All this happened over the course of just a few generations. The period studied in this book, the New Kingdom, is separated from us by more than three millennia. It should come as no surprise, then, that the present-day archaeological landscape is very different from that observed at any one point in time during the New Kingdom. Given the fragmentary nature of the archaeological sources available to us today, we are able to produce only a partial reconstruction of the past landscape(s) at best.
2.2 Landscape and Temporality
The term ‘layered landscape’ was introduced to archaeology to describe a landscape’s inherently temporal dimension.17 As an analytical concept, temporality highlights the passage of time that has left a visible mark on the landscape, which ultimately impacts on how a landscape is perceived and experienced by people. The concept of temporality is central to the archaeological profession, or, in the words of Tim Ingold, archaeology is best understood as the study of the temporality of the landscape.18
The term ‘temporality’ probably needs some clarification, not the least because it is a rather ambiguous word. The scholarly literature does not always offer a clear-cut definition of what is meant when it is used, or it is used differently across the academic disciplines of the social sciences, philosophy, and history.19 At its core, the concept of temporality is similar but not the same as time, because whereas time seeks to measure and mark the progression of moments ‘objectively’ by fixing their duration (such as a clock measuring the lapse of time),20 temporality could be described as the subjective progression not through time but through moments. Thus, while time is usually understood as referring to a linear sequence of moments, temporality denotes the sense of time, or how the passage of time is experienced in daily life activities.21 In this book, the temporality of the landscape is similarly understood, namely as the “internal feeling of the continuous transformation of the landscape, along with all its inhabitants”.22 The use of the term emphasises that the landscape and those who dwell(ed) in it are (and were) continuously in motion.
Time and human life experience are closely tangled. Building on philosopher Henri Bergson’s influential notion of duration (durée),23 it has been argued that the ‘irreversible nature of human life experience’ constitutes a core aspect of what is meant by temporality.24 In more lay terms, the premise of the ‘irreversible nature’ means that no two actions can be experienced as completely identical to one another simply because time moves on. Take, for example, the experience of riding a bike for the very first time. This experience cannot be replicated, because when one rides a bike for the second time, one inevitably brings along the baggage of prior experience. Thus when one prepares a bike for riding next time, prior experience makes one anticipate on the situation that will unfold. Past experiences endure through time, or, in the words of Bergson:
Pure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states. For this purpose it need not be entirely absorbed in the passing sensation or idea; for then, on the contrary, it would no longer endure. Nor need it forget its former states: it is enough that, in recalling these states, it does not set them alongside its actual state as one point along-side another, but forms both the past and the present states into an organic whole (…).25
This description echoes the conceptual underpinnings of the palimpsest or layered landscape (Section 2.1). To further illustrate the concept of duration, we may use the metaphor of a rolling snowball to represent the sense of time. The shape of the rolling snowball continuously changes as it moves. It will never return to take on one of its former shapes. In its present shape it represents an accumulation of all shapes it previously took. The same could be argued for individual buildings, observed in the example of the Step Pyramid of Djoser in the previous section. The only difference between the snowball and the pyramid is that the latter does not move in space. The concept of duration naturally also applies to entire landscapes, ultimately transforming them into a ‘temporal collage’26 or palimpsest.
The irreversibility of human life experience also implies that one is always developing toward a somewhat uncertain future for which one must prepare, because since no two actions (or situations) will ever be the same, one will never know exactly how every new situation will unfold. Therefore, the lives of people happen within what can be described as a ‘boundary zone’ of the just barely known (it has just been experienced, and yet it essentially belongs already to the realm of the past) and the unknown future.27
Figure 9
Site transformation processes in action while excavating during a sandstorm
Photograph by the author, 2007
Landscapes are also subject to the principle of the irreversibility of human life experience. The fact that landscapes are continuously in the making means that, strictly speaking, people can never visit the same place twice. Archaeologist Cornelius Holtorf aptly illustrates this fact with Heraclites’s aphorism that “no man ever steps in the same river twice”, because other waters are ever flowing onto the person stepping in the river.28 The shifting desert sands at a site such as Saqqara could easily take the place of the flowing water in Heraclites’s metaphor of the river. The cemetery changes from day to day, even without the interference of people (or, perhaps better said, especially without their interference), because the combined forces of wind and sand will do the job. Everyone who has worked at Saqqara will be familiar with the fact that the excavation site on the first day of a season looks quite different from how it was left behind in the year before. The site changes slowly but surely—and on some days, with severe sandstorms, a site can transform visibly in just a matter of hours (Fig. 9).29
2.3 Landscape’s Temporal Paradox
The intricacies of time and temporality in a lived landscape—that is, a landscape continuously being shaped and re-shaped under the influence of human dwelling—can perhaps be best illustrated with a modern-day setting. It allows us to take an ethnographic approach to studying the shaping of the landscape. Understanding the everyday workings of the contemporary urban landscape might ultimately help us to understand some of the processes underlying the formation of the ancient cemeteries at Saqqara also. Conversely, the archaeological approach to the study of lived landscapes enables one to study an aspect which ethnography cannot. Archaeology offers a long-time perspective,30 a deep diachronic outlook on a landscape’s development through time.
The example of the contemporary urban landscape takes us to a street in the centre of the university town of Leiden in the Netherlands, not too far from where I am sitting at my desk typing this text (Fig. 10).31 The photograph was taken in early spring of 2019. It captures a contemporary situation which any present-day inhabitant of this town would immediately recognise and appreciate in its temporal context. Although it is unlikely that anyone will immediately guess the exact date that the photo was taken, it can certainly be estimated by identifying a number of diagnostic (or time-specific) features. These include, for example, the life-stage of the trees planted in the middle section of the street (these are still rather young), the particular shops that are housed in the buildings that line the street (the tenants of these buildings change every now and then, and the combinations of exactly these outlets help us narrowing down the time frame), the election posters affixed to the billboard in the centre of the scene (pointing to a specific and well-datable event, although the photograph was taken in the run-up to the election day and thus does not ‘date’ to it), and the style of the clothes worn by the people walking and biking about (fashion is indeed an important dating tool in art history, for example). All diagnostic features combined offer a clear sense of the temporal setting of this scene—at least to the initiated, such as the town’s inhabitants and frequent visitors. Should they be shown this photograph, they might not be able to tell precisely on what date the photo was taken, yet they would know that it must have been fairly recent. A photo taken in the 1990s from exactly the same spot would have been notably different. Even though the buildings lining the street would have remained the same, other shops were housed in them, people dressed according the then-prevailing fashion, the coffee-truck in the foreground would have been alien to the Dutch streetscape back then, and the pavement differed, because our photograph shows that it has just been repaved (one of the fences that were used to close off the street still sits on the sidewalk). Whereas there are various clear indications to date this scene to 2019, probably none of the things visible in this scene date, stricto sensu, to the spring of 2019, because none of the features are a product of that specific point in time. To start with, the urban landscape here is not made of early 21st century buildings; these were all constructed long ago. The people walking the street probably do not all wear brand-new clothes; in fact, even if the clothes were brand new to them, because they were bought from a store moments ago, it is highly unlikely that the clothes were also manufactured on the day the photograph was taken. Of course the people themselves do not ‘date’ to 2019 either, in the sense that they were likely all born in different years—the baby in the orange stroller perhaps being the exception. What these observations are meant to illustrate, is that the streetscape here is not a sterile environment in which a single temporality flourishes. Such would arguably be a situation one might experience only in museums,32 where objects are taken out of their real-life, multitemporal settings and (re-)arranged according to their date of manufacture rather than (prolonged) use. Think of the way in which Egyptian collections are usually exhibited, chronologically arranged to reflect the major time periods such as ‘Old Kingdom’, ‘Middle Kingdom’, ‘New Kingdom’, and so on—as if the material remains from these periods did not mingle in their environmental setting. What we are witnessing here in the Leiden streetscape is, in contrast, a ‘palimpsest landscape’ or ‘temporal collage’.
Figure 10
An example of a multitemporal urban landscape: image of Leiden, 2019
Photograph by buro JP
Now, imagine this street being excavated by future archaeologists. How would they date the site? In answering this question, let us think about how tombs in ancient Egyptian cemeteries are often met. The man-made structures would provide the first leads. Based on the architectural features and ground plans of the buildings (assuming that not much of the walls above the first few courses of stone survive in the future), the scene would easily be assigned to a period between the 17th and 18th centuries. The church on the left (Hartebrugkerk) was built in 1836 and the one in the background (Marekerk) between 1639 and 1649. All of the traces pointing to later human activities would then be labelled under the heading of ‘reuse’. This part of the life history of an ancient Egyptian tomb is usually hidden away in a paragraph whereas the main text would focus on the first stage(s) in their lives, namely those involving construction and initial use (burial of the tomb owner)—stages that form just a short episode in their much longer life histories. The objects found in excavation would probably be detailed in a catalogue, neatly categorised according to their date of manufacture. Such a presentation would create the false impression that a similar clear-cut distinction also existed in real life, where in every period people were surrounded exclusively by things ‘dated’ to their time. The photograph in figure 10 emphasises that the opposite is the case, because, in reality, “the present here is this imperceptible and continual process of increasing the unbelievable mess of the past”, in the words of archaeologist Laurent Olivier.33
No real landscape, cityscape or streetscape is homogenous in the sense of displaying an assemblage of products dating to one particular moment in time. The Leiden streetscape is made of a series of past temporalities that make the present ‘multitemporal’ or ‘layered’. One could argue that the past here exists in the present, or rather, that the past largely is the present.34 The continuity of the past into the present has been described as a ‘temporal paradox’.35 The paradox being that things from the past do not stay in the past, but continue to be around in every new present instant. The past endures. The present-day streetscape is a clear example of such a paradox, because it is made of a mix of elements from different periods in time. The young trees were planted at the same time when the street was paved, yet the trees themselves pre-date the street in its present form (remember the street had just been repaved). The individual stones are of course older than the pavement, perhaps even older than the trees if the stones were reused and previously formed part of another street (in which case the stones’ object biographies are more complex altogether). The long row of centuries-old buildings lining the street all have modern-day features affixed to their façades. They include house number signs, sun shades, the lettering of the shops’ names, and so forth. In fact, if one were to take a closer look, it would appear that none of the buildings in this image survived in their original state. Instead they are the products of centuries worth of reworking (including maintenance, which essentially transforms a building)36 and repurposing (not all buildings serving as shops have always been shops, for example; some were initially residential houses). Thus, paradoxically, the buildings are both old and new; or, neither old nor new. At the same time, the scene also shows details which do not date from the past, but which can be said to belong to an ‘ever-present’, or, as Olivier puts it, the “never-changing within the ancient”.37 Examples include the shadows cast by the people on the rain-soaked paving stones and the cloudy sky looming over the scene.
Figure 11
An example of a multitemporal urban landscape: image of Leiden, c. 1900
Photograph by Deyhle’s Lichtdrukken, Retrieved from Erfgoed Leiden en omstreken, public domain
2.4 The Landscape Connecting Moments in Time
Every period in time, every present instance, is in fact very heterogeneous, not just in the minds of people, but also materially in the sense that it is made up of fragments of different pasts. It is what we call a temporal collage, and it has the ability to connect moments in time which may be very distant from each other.38 The Saqqara necropolis with its long life-history takes this to the extreme, where the present-day visitor can come face-to-face with buildings made as much as 5,000 years ago. In the example of the contemporary scene of Leiden (Fig. 10), the street takes its shape from an abandoned canal that has been filled in (Fig. 11). It was turned into a street to meet the infrastructural needs of the changing city. The advent of automotive travel strongly impacted the town’s urban fabric.39 Many people walking about the street today will probably be unaware of the canal’s former existence. Yet, the way in which those same people move through the city is directly influenced by the canal’s former presence and, by extension, influenced by individuals such as city planners who are now of course long dead.
Figure 12
“Lugdunum Batavorum—Anno 1675” City plan of Leiden, 1675
Copper engraving by Christiaan Hagen, Retrieved from Erfgoed Leiden en omstreken, public domain
The example of Leiden can also be taken to a wider, spatial view. If we zoom out from the previous images (Figs 10–11) and take a look at the modern map of the city centre, we recognise clearly the layout of the city as drawn on a map as early as 1675 (Fig. 12).40 The city’s landmarks are displayed as icons in the map’s decorative frame, yet none of these landmarks were built in the year 1675. Several of the old buildings have since disappeared, and a number of the city’s canals have been filled in and turned into streets. Yet, the layout devised centuries ago still resonates in the modern-day city, where it continues to influence present-day behaviour. It affects how space is perceived and used. The activity of an entire community is sediment in the network of paths and tracks in the city,41 spanning many generations. The movement of people, past and present, can therefore be said to be ‘embodied’42 in the very fabric of the city because, in their layout, streets impose a habitual pattern on the movement of people.43 A graphically appealing example to illustrate movement embodied on the side of the landscape are stone stairways in old buildings. The stone steps can be visibly worn by intensive use over a long period of time. The wear and tear of the steps thus embodies the movement of many people past and present. Or one may think of the concentric grooves left in the limestone pavement stones in the entrance to the tomb of Meryneith/re (032/usc), caused be the repeated action of opening and closing the wooden door (Fig. 13). These grooves embody the many visitors that entered and left the monument in the past. Movement is embodied not only in the landscape (in its network of paths and tracks, and the configuration of buildings), but also in the people, in what archaeologist Tim Ingold terms their ‘muscular consciousness’. Think of the ancient visitors to Saqqara: in ascending and descending the elevated desert plateau they physically experienced the landscape.44
The spatial configuration of streets and buildings and other material (and immaterial) features in the urban environment influence the choices people can potentially make as they go from location A to B. As archaeologists, we can make use of the spatial organisation of a city (or a city of the dead, or necropolis, for that matter), with its idiosyncratic configuration of man-made structures in its unique natural landscape setting, to reconstruct how people would have made use of space in the built environment. For example, we may be able to deduce how groups and individuals moved through the landscape, to identify what places would have seen more traffic than others. High traffic of the living potentially made such places attractive locations for certain purposes, for example tomb building.
Figure 13
Concentric marks scratched in the pavement of Meryneith/re’s (032/usc) entrance doorway
Photograph courtesy of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden
Building activities and infrastructural projects (such as the construction of new roads) also need(ed) to reckon with all that which was made before. An archaeological example of a city in ancient Egypt where residents and ‘urban planners’ had little of the pre-existing to reckon with, is Akhetaten (Tell el-Amarna) in Middle Egypt. The city was purposely built at a site previously uninhabited (or rather: barely inhabited). Still, the people populating Akhetaten did not exist and operate in a temporal void. On the contrary, their building of houses and arranging of the city’s neighbourhoods was largely shaped by their prior experience gained elsewhere. Thus, the layout of their far-away hometowns potentially influenced the shaping of the new city, and ultimately also the way in which people moved through the urban fabric and how they used and experienced space. Even the newly developed architecture associated with the king and the cult of the Aten were not entirely without ties to how things were done in the past in their spatial configuration.45
The need to reckon with all that which already existed also goes for cities that were rebuilt following large-scale catastrophes. Take, for example, the city of Rotterdam, which was heavily bombed during World War II. After the war, city planners seized the opportunity to completely alter the street pattern, and realise current ideas and ideals of what a modern city should look like.46 If one compares the pre- and post-war city plan, one immediately notices the increase of open spaces between (blocks of) buildings. The spacious, modern (i.e. 1950s) city contrasts sharply with the cramped neighbourhoods of the old city which has its roots in the Middle Ages. Some argue that one can distinguish two different cities that share the same location, separated by time.47 And yet the current street plan does show that some of the new city’s main roads were grounded in the pre-existing layout. Some main roads were rebuilt on exactly the same spot, which influenced the further laying out of the city and its neighbourhoods. And because the city was oriented on the same river as before (the course of which was not altered significantly), the old plan is remotely recognisable in the new version. And finally, because an attempt was made to make a modernised version of the old city (and not an altogether alien one), the new city is in many respects a reinterpretation of the former, which has left its marks, even if (heavily) masked.
The street in Leiden and the city plan of Rotterdam possess not only a connecting capacity; both also vividly illustrate how memory of the past (as material trace) operates ‘masked’. It means that the past does not enter the present unfiltered; rather, it ‘flows’ into the ‘mould’ of the present day and thereby adopts the form of the present. Material remains from the past are (re-)interpreted and potentially ascribed new meanings in later times. The remains thus become an interpretation of the past, fulfilling the needs of the present day. It reminds me of the historiography of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, written by Belgian archaeologist and author, David Van Reybrouck. He mainly relied on oral sources, especially when addressing the colonial period and, via oral traditions, reached to the pre-colonial era, i.e. before the establishment of the Congo Free State in 1877.48 Van Reybrouck collected many stories of peoples’ personal pasts, but realised that their experiences of these pasts are largely (de)formed or (re)shaped by the present socio-economic situation in which people now live:
Uiteraard, het is altijd riskant om te extrapoleren naar het verleden wat mensen vandaag vertellen: niets zo hedendaags als de herinnering.49
⟨Translation: Of course, it is always risky to extrapolate to the past that which people are telling today: nothing as contemporary as the memory.⟩
His remark very well captures the concept of memory as it is defined in the social sciences. Lynn Meskell uses a similar definition working with ancient Egyptian sources.50 She states that “memory cannot exist in a thinglike state since it is always subjective and spatiotemporally situated”. Every memory inevitably becomes a ‘present past’,51 because people observe and interpret traces of more distant pasts to serve the needs and interests of their present lives. Amenemone and his image of King Menkauhor, referred to earlier in this chapter, illustrate this point for the Saqqara New Kingdom necropolis. The image was not included in the iconographic programme of Amenemone’s tomb as a random historic curiosity, but it was meant to fulfil a specific goal.
2.5 Landscape Authorship
Current landscape biography52 juxtaposes the work of cultural geographer Marwyn Samuels53 with philosopher Michel De Certeau.54 Both scholars employ the term ‘landscape authorship’ in attempting to identify the key players in the shaping of the urban landscape. Both conveniently (for the present study, that is) illustrate their views with Manhattan in New York as a case study. Samuels argues that the urban landscape of Manhattan is a prime example of a landscape inextricably linked to influential individuals. They include the urban planner Robert Moses, the ‘father’ of the skyscraper Louis Sullivan, and a whole range of influential families, politicians, industrialists, and so forth. To Samuels, they are the authors of the landscape. His argument: the city would have developed very differently without their involvement. Their life stories are inseparably linked to the life story of Manhattan. And their creations influence the daily lives of the millions of people living, working, and passing-by in the city.
De Certeau, on the other hand, sets in focus the concept of the city as a place where every-day life takes place. Instead of looking at the city ‘from above’ (as it appears on a map), he descends to street level to see how people (inter-)act with(-in) the built environment. He views the people who live, work, and pass by in the city not as mere passive users of the space created by others (i.e. Samuels’s influential individuals), but rather as what he calls the ‘ordinary practitioners’ who continually and actively produce lived space.
The opposing views of landscape authorship of Samuels and De Certeau can perhaps be best grasped with the phenomenon known as a desire path or elephant trail. It illustrates a conflict between the vision of the urban planner and the actual users of the infrastructure. Clearly, there exists a discrepancy between the desired life-path of a road network and its realisation, the latter being the way in which it is operated by its intended users. Thus while the paved pathway theoretically imposes a habitual pattern on the movement of people, the desire paths created by the actual users of urban space (De Certeau’s Wandersmänner) gradually show up as the accumulated imprint of countless journeys that people have made as they have gone about their everyday business. The path has arisen out of the movement of people. The desire path created by the actual users of urban space might ultimately be regulated, for example if the municipality should decide to pave it—a practice often observed in the Netherlands, where desire paths (olifantenpaadjes) are considered both symptom and accelerator of urban decay.
The everyday examples from past and present indicate that the interpretations of landscape authorship outlined by Samuels and De Certeau should not be seen as two strictly opposing mechanisms that are mutually exclusive. Rather, in the words of historian David Koren,55 both shape the lived urban landscape in a continuous dialectic movement. In this way, spatial imagination on the one hand, and spatial acting on the other influence and succeed each other. At this point, one may be reminded of a stela erected by King Ugaf at Abydos and re-inscribed for the 13th Dynasty King Neferhotep I.56 The stela, forming one of a series of four, was meant to demarcate, in the area traversing the necropolis, the sacred processional way in the wadi connecting the temple of Osiris in the east to Peqer and the ‘tomb’ of Osiris at Umm el-Qaab in the west, and ensure that the private tombs built in the adjoining cemeteries to the north (North Cemetery) and south (Middle Cemetery) would not encroach upon the sacred way. An excerpt from this royal decree reads:
As for anyone who shall be found within these stelae, except for a priest about his duties, he shall be burnt. Moreover, as for any official who shall cause a tomb to be made for himself within this holy place, he shall be reported and this law applied to him and to the necropolis-guard as (is the case) today. But as for everywhere outside this holy place, (it is) an area where people may make tombs for themselves and where one may be buried.57
The fact that it was deemed necessary to erect these stelae suggests that the practice of building tombs in the ‘sacred space’ was already widespread. It nicely illustrates the existence of continuous negotiation between the official administration and expected behaviour at sacred sites on the one hand, and the popular acting in such spaces on the other. Perhaps the royal decree had an effect on the short term; in the long term, however, the wadi would come to serve rather different purposes, as witnessed by the siting of the American dig house built in its west extent.
2.6 Pitfalls of Desired Life-Paths
Every new moment, every present instant, contributes to the ever growing accumulation of the past. The scene of Leiden captured in figure 10 therefore represents not a still life. It should rather be seen as a snapshot of a streetscape ‘in the making’, in the sense that at no point it can be said to be finished. Of course the task of re-paving the street was completed when the street reached the form anticipated at by those responsible for its design and construction. Yet one therefore cannot argue that the street reached its finished state, because such an argument would imply that the street would forever remain unchanged.
In the example of the desire paths, we observed that a discrepancy exists between the desired life-path of a road network design and its realisation. The same is true for cemeteries and the individual tombs such sites are made of. Tombs and tomb complexes would have been used for prolonged periods of time, albeit sometimes alternating with periods of inactivity or abandonment.58 The activities pertaining to the planning and building of a tomb, and the subsequent burial of the tomb owner, all occupied a comparatively short period of time in the ‘life’ of a tomb. Much vaster in number were the years pertaining to what is sometimes referred to as its ‘afterlife’59—a problematic term in this context.60 A tomb usually outlives its builder, and therefore the ‘(use-)life’ metaphor has recently received criticism. One could argue that from the use-life perspective a tomb is made to perform a certain function set by certain expectations. This is, in other words, the tomb’s desired life path or perceived emic ideal biography. It means that a tomb will be used until it is no longer ‘useful’ in performing that function. Becoming ‘use-less’ (being no longer used as it was originally intended to) does not, of course, signify the ‘end’ of a tomb’s life. On the contrary, even a seemingly decommissioned or abandoned monument can actively be part of a landscape. Also, the continued use of a tomb may not necessarily conform to what we would consider ‘appropriate’ treatment. It is therefore essential to emphasise that people cannot foresee at the outset whether what they consider the desired life-path of a tomb will actually be realised, because changes in meaning and use can of course only be comprehended with the benefit of hindsight. Therefore, tombs might be considered not as finished monuments but rather perhaps as ‘works in progress’, in a sense continuously in the making, adaptation, reuse, graffiti making, and so forth being thus an integral part of the biographies of monuments.
Figure 14
The plans of a selection of New Kingdom tombs built in the North Saqqara plateau
Image by the author
In figure 14, we are looking at a cross section tombs—or rather burials marked with a built superstructure—from the three main New Kingdom cemeteries on the North Saqqara plateau. They present a range of architectural forms and layouts, and were made for individuals of different social backgrounds and with different financial means at their disposal. The different colours show that the examples cover a large part of the New Kingdom. And the fact that some have more than one colour, indicates that these were worked on over longer periods of time. The plans of individual tombs do not show what was perhaps the most significant thing that influenced the course of their biographies: namely their spatial relationships to other tombs in the same cemetery. The blocking of a pathway at one end of the cemetery could affect the level of accessibility of a tomb at the other end, for example. And this is not insignificant for the ‘lives’ of tombs, because these were dependent on the living carrying out maintenance work, looking after the offering cult, and so forth. Accessibility was key.
Like the desire paths, the continued use of a tomb at Saqqara may not necessarily have conformed to what people in the past considered (or currently consider) ‘appropriate’ treatment. In the publication of the tomb of Meryneith (032/usc), Maarten Raven goes so far as to label the later Ramesside users of the western chapels for burial as ‘invaders’.61 The negative connotation of the word62 makes assumptions about the perceived emic ‘ideal’ of how an ancient Egyptian tomb should be used, while it actually reflects an etic ideal, conforming to the expectations of the modern researcher.
The tension between initial design and the actual use of space is not an exclusively modern phenomenon. Examples from the ancient world abound, and range in scale from the wider landscape to single architectural units. Take for example the 4th Dynasty Valley Temple of King Menkaure at Giza, which was originally envisioned as a stone-built megalithic monument.63 Plans changed when the king suddenly died before he could see the temple to completion. It was then decided to finish the structure by using less durable material (mud bricks) instead. Text sources inform us that the structure continued to be used as a memorial temple of the king until the end of the Old Kingdom, spanning a period of more than 300 years. Yet, it was not used exactly according to how the architect had envisioned it. Space within the building itself was soon redefined and repurposed. Not long after the structure came to serve as the dead king’s mortuary temple, houses of the serving temple staff were built within the monumental perimeter walls.
The priestly settlement eventually took up most of the space inside the walls, which affected the way in which space was used altogether. Over time, parts of the original structure were demolished or adjusted to accommodate the dwellings and other facilities such as granaries to serve the temporary residents. Following damage caused by a flood from a storm, measures were taken to renovate the building. These measures were especially aimed at safeguarding and rebuilding the settlement and not at restoring the building to its former glory (which, as we know, did not resemble a situation as designed by its builder to begin with). Only the sanctuary was rebuilt at its original location. Barry Kemp used the example of what he terms the “villagization” of the temple to illustrate “how great could be the gap between intention and practice, between the products of superlative craftsmanship and the way they were treated, and between the inner world of bureaucratic order and the rough reality outside”.64
At this point a distinction should be made between specific and generalised (or idealised) biographies, as raised by archaeologist David Fontijn.65 Generalised biographies go back to a widely-shared expectation as to an object’s (or building’s, landscape’s) kind of life path. If one were to study the life histories of specific objects or types of buildings in any given society (tombs, for example), it will become apparent that these histories often follow the same patterns.66 Thus, apparently, there are culturally specific expectations for the general life-path of objects or buildings. Fontijn notes that “we often only come to realise that such idealised biographies exist if we see an object being treated in a way that deviates from its desirable life-path”.67 Think of the example of the football boots of Egyptian and Liverpool FC forward Mohamed Salah, that were displayed next to ancient Egyptian sandals to coincide with the Champions League Final and World Cup in 2018.68 The only reason for these shoes to end up displayed in the British Museum is the fact that Salah wore them. To paraphrase Fontijn, “the lives of football boots may vary, but in general they do not end up in museums”.69 Salah’s football boot is an example of a specific biography, which is about the idiosyncratic histories of objects. In Egyptian funerary archaeology, we may point to the example of the 1st Dynasty royal tomb of Djer (c. 2870–2823 bce) which from the Middle Kingdom onwards was treated as the mythical tomb of the god Osiris. Tombs within a single cemetery can have deviating life paths; however, such a transformation is not usual for tombs in ancient Egypt. In the New Kingdom necropolis at Saqqara, we may point to the tomb of Horemheb (046/usc), the general who became king. His private tomb was transformed into a quasi-royal memorial temple: a life path intimately linked to the specific biography of its commissioning patron.
The display of Salah’s football boots in a museum gallery sparked off a dispute, which connects the object to some of the points raised in relation to landscape as a temporal collage. In Section 2.1, it was argued that the past exists in the present, or rather, that the past largely is the present. The exceptional decision to display the football boots in a gallery surrounded by ancient Egyptian objects was criticised by prominent Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass, who argued that it shows “disrespect to the great Egyptian history”, and further expressed that
it is completely inappropriate to have his shoe displayed between Pharaonic monuments, because these are sacred pieces. If the British Museum wanted to honor Salah, it should have built a museum for him or put the shoe in a special room.70
Salah’s boot was displayed alongside ancient Egyptian footwear in the British Museum to demonstrate that, from a material culture point of view, the object presents a newer example of the same object category. In so doing, the museum intended to demonstrate possible continuity from the pharaonic past to the present.71 Hawass’s critique, on the other hand, supposedly rejects any such continuity (although this was most likely not the point he was making).72
2.7 Landscape, Temporality, and Heritage Practices
Even institutionalised efforts aimed at maintaining a present-day appearance—which is looked after by the heritage management branch73—will never entirely succeed in preventing a street from changing. Time and temporality ultimately bring about change one way or another. This is all the more true for an environment lived in by people. The tension between targeted efforts at preserving a certain urban image on the one hand, and the people who live there on the other, reminds me of a section in my first travel guidebook of Egypt, the Lonely Planet.74 The point raised in an annotated section about the history and sights of Cairo’s Al Azhar area aptly illustrates the illusion of a never-changing lived urban landscape.75 The text first notes that the area is “home to a dense 21st-century population still living in what are essentially medieval quarters”, and that it “retains a vital human presence that lifts it above being more than a mere open-air museum”. It then signals that the Ministry of Culture has taken an interest in this “neglected” area—neglected, undoubtedly, from the point of view of tourism and heritage management, yet certainly not neglected from the part of the people who populate the neighbourhood. In the early 2000s, the ministry commenced many conservation projects aimed at restoring the grand buildings in this quarter to their former glory. These actions, according to the guidebook text, immediately received strong criticism. Critics argued that historic buildings were not so much conserved but rebuilt, and the plan to relocate inhabitants of this neighbourhood “sounds suspiciously like an attempt to turn a living neighbourhood into a theme park”. Such measures essentially led to removing the people and activities that gave (and, fortunately, still give) the area its character. The bottom line is that continuous transformations are an inherent aspect of any landscape lived-in by people. Removing the people equals depriving the landscape of its character.
What the measures aimed at restoring the Al Azhar area of Cairo actually accomplish, is emulating the image of what is collectively thought of as its former glory. The area is restored not to a random previous state; it is transformed to match a certain canonical image. In other words, there is a discrepancy between the landscape taken as “that part of the outside world that one can perceive from a particular view,” and landscape as “its representation in a work of art”. Jan Kolen and Johannes Renes suggest that the ambiguity of the word ‘landscape’
mobilised a continuous exchange between this outside world and representational world, with landscape painting becoming a measure for the design of ‘real’ landscapes, gardens and estates, and the ‘picturesque’ qualities of these landscapes being pictured, re-valued, reproduced and transformed in art, for example painting and photography.76
As an effect of the continuous exchange between the outside world and the representational world, the representations (whether it be in paintings, photographs, film, literature, etc.) could eventually, through time, build up to form a canonical image. By means of ‘artistic icons’ (for example famous paintings featuring a certain (urban) landscape), people get accustomed to what certain parts of that particular landscape look like. Over time, this can lead to a schism between a landscape’s current image and what it should look like. It can motivate authorities to preserve and restore the actual outside world in particular ways in order to keep it (or bring it back) in harmony with the representational world. This complex dialogue between the lived-in landscape and its canonical image can be observed ‘in action’ in the example of Cairo’s Al Azhar area. Various views of the neighbourhood were introduced to a Western audience through the paintings of romantic artists such as David Roberts (1796–1864). Their cityscape paintings contributed over many years to the creation of a canonical image. The modern-day efforts aimed at restoring the neighbourhood—or rather transforming it to match the canonical image—are meant to meet the expectations of tourists, it seems. Traveling to Egypt, (Western) tourists expect to see and experience precisely the scenes that they have gotten so accustomed to through the works of art made by their compatriots, now on display in their national museums. Their image may clash with the reality observed in an area that houses a sizable modern population living among all that which was made before. The inhabitants are confronted with the infrastructure and architecture designed (by Samuels’s influential individuals) for a population that lived in a different time with different needs. The adaptation of the urban fabric (by De Certeau’s “Wandersmänner”) to meet present-day needs is seen by some (e.g., policy makers, heritage managers, Western tourists) as messing with cultural heritage.
Today, the tourist visiting the Al Azhar neighbourhood will certainly not be disappointed, as the Al Ghouriyya area behind the mosque-madrassa and mausoleum of al-Ghouri neatly matches the scene painted by Roberts in 1838 (Fig. 15). Luckily, though, the area is as lively as it was depicted in the early 19th century, although my photograph taken at night time does not quite capture the liveliness.
Figure 15a
Lithograph of a watercolour by David Roberts, titled “Bazaar of the Silk-Mercers, Cairo”
After Haghe, L., Roberts, D. (1846–1849), Bazaar of the Silk Mercers, Retrieved from the library of congress,
Figure 15b
The Al Ghouriyya area behind the mosque-madrassa and mausoleum of al-Ghouri, Cairo, 2006
Photograph by the author, 2006
Choices made in preserving certain heritage sites or transforming them to match the looks of a former temporality are by no means undisputed. An example from Leiden pertains to the plans of the municipality, a few years ago, to restore a certain wooden bridge to its original colours. The precise colours used were retrieved following intensive archive research.77 The municipality’s plan was met with resistance from local residents, who were of the opinion that the ‘old’ colours looked out of place in the current setting.78 A not all too insignificant detail in the whole discussion is, that the wooden bridge was not the original 17th century structure, but one built only in 1983, serving as a replica of the old bridge, removed in 1817. In this case, the striving for authenticity touches on giddy nonsense as the bridge in its present state ‘dates’ to the 1980s and the surrounding urban landscape has changed almost beyond recognition since the bridge was included the cityscape drawing of c. 1669 that served as a model for the reconstructed bridge.
The examples cited above lay bare the tensions between the concerns of heritage management and the users of the landscape, foremost of which are the inhabitants. In practice, heritage management often aims at preserving a canonical image of a building or landscape, which in turn could be based on (an) interpretation(s) of the/a real landscape(s). Preserving such canonical images may go hand in hand with economic interests. From a biographical perspective on landscape, Roymans et al. argue that “heritage is never an objective historical given, but is closely tied up with the social construction of values and identities in contemporary society”.79 With successive ‘heirs’ to heritage, continuously different interests are employed and values and meanings attached to heritage.80
One problem central to heritage practices cited in the examples above, concerns the choice of highlighting or prioritising one temporal layer of a landscape (or rather its canonical image) over the plethora of previous layers. This brings us back to the Saqqara archaeological site. A few years ago, the cemetery with New Kingdom tombs south of the Unas causeway was opened to visitors. The Leiden archaeological expedition marked the occasion by installing an information panel (Fig. 16) signalling the cemetery that is hidden from view to the unknowing visitor. The panel refers to the area as the ‘The New Kingdom Cemetery of Saqqara’, not an altogether correct description of the place, however. While indeed the big tombs date to this period, it was also used as a cemetery long before the New Kingdom, and long after. Thus, the name for the cemetery highlights only one ‘temporal layer’, whereas the site was very much multitemporal. The information panel is somewhat symptomatic of the heritage management strategy employed at the site, because while the area under excavation was in continuous use as a burial ground from the earliest dynasties until the Late Antique, and assorted human activities can be traced until the present day, exclusively the New Kingdom tombs received proper treatment aimed at their preservation, and form the main subject of academic publications. In this case, the good intentions of heritage management resulted in the creation of a landscape that is much less temporally heterogeneous than it once used to be.
Figure 16
Information panel signalling “The New Kingdom Cemetery of Saqqara”
Photograph by the author
2.8 Landscape and Social Norms
In Section 2.4, we learned that the spatial configuration of streets and buildings, along with other material and immaterial features in the urban environment, influence(d) the choices people could potentially make when navigating from location A to B. We will briefly focus on the immaterial aspects, that include social norms, or expected behaviour when approaching or entering certain spaces. For example, people generally behave differently in a church than they do in a pub. And they behave differently in a football stadium than at a cemetery site. Why is that? One could argue that there is no practical reason why one should not behave the same in both settings. Generally, it is not exclusively the materiality of space that regulates people’s behaviour; what is important is the social situatedness of space. Space and place are more than just the spatial configuration of material facts. It also has an emphatically social, emotional aspect, which is socio-temporally grounded and could shift meaning over time.81
To further illustrate the complexities associated with expected behaviour in cemeteries, let us move to the city of Copenhagen. An ethnographic study conducted in 2014 focused on how space was experienced by ‘users’ and ‘non-users’ in two of the city’s modern cemeteries, Bispebjerg kirkegård and Vestre kirkegård.82 Due to a general tendency in the population towards cremation rather than inhumation, the city council was faced with the question of what to do with the increasingly available free space in cemeteries no longer used for gravesites. Researchers were consulted to draw up a development plan for the city’s cemeteries, and identify what new ways of using this urban space were seen as socially acceptable, relevant, and meaningful by its citizens. The researchers adopted a user-centred approach and interviewed people who regularly used (that is, visited) the cemetery and people who never used the cemetery even though they lived nearby. The non-users indicated that they did not use the cemetery for leisure (walks) because they felt they would intrude, or were unsure about how to behave inside a cemetery. One area of the cemetery closest to the house of one of the interviewed non-users was marked as particularly uninviting, even though it was a fairly open space with very few graves—precisely the sort of conditions which the city council had earmarked as having a high potential for different types of recreational use. The city council reasoned that space not used for burial equals opportunities for different uses. This dichotomy between expectation and reality led the researchers to conclude that
by directing an anthropological lens at the cemetery, and taking our cue from how users think and feel, we offer a perspective fundamentally different from that of the urban planner, the architect, or the landscaper. (…) ethnography on the ground challenged the more top-down approach of urban planners. In urban planning the focus is on making structures accessible (…) rather than exploring the emotional barriers and motivations that affect people’s choice (…)83
In this conclusion resonates the continuous dialectic movement in which spatial imagination on the one hand and spatial acting on the other are engaged—or, to link the example to the authors quoted in the present chapter, Samuels versus De Certeau in action. At this point we may also reference Christopher Tilley, the ‘patriarch’ of landscape phenomenology in archaeology, who adds that
[w]hat space is depends on who is experiencing it and how. Spatial experience is not innocent and neutral, but invested with power relating to age, gender, social position and relationships with others. Because space is differentially understood and experienced it forms a contradictory and conflict-ridden medium through which individuals act and are acted upon. The experience of space is always shot through with temporalities, as spaces are always created, reproduced and transformed in relation to previously constructed spaces provided and established from the past. Spaces are intimately related to the formation of biographies and social relationships.84
Traditional narratives of ancient Egypt, including those dealing with necropolis sites, often take an approach akin to that of Samuels, the top-down approach practiced by the urban planner.85 Kings and high officials are usually identified as the key players, or the ‘authors’ of the landscape (“king X built the temple of god Y”). Such views run the risk of ignoring the actual use and users of a site, and due to the predominant focus on the early life stage(s) of individual monuments (such as tombs), we also ignore the diachronic perspective. With movement through time comes changes in use, experience, and perception of landscape. Use and reuse are sometimes referred to as belonging to the ‘afterlife’ of buildings, as if the life of a building ends when its original design is transformed by actively using it. As I hope to demonstrate in this book, influential individuals certainly had their share in shaping the cultural geography of Saqqara at Memphis. But that is not the whole story. By taking a biographical approach, the active role of the ‘ordinary practitioners’ in shaping the cultural geography is highlighted, setting the living users in focus. This creates a fuller understanding of the dynamics that were at play in a lived necropolis. By focusing on the necropolis from the perspective of landscape biography, the life histories of all tomb structures and other buildings continuously influence and succeed each other.
Or rather the trained archaeologist reads their interpretation of the story of that site through time.
Parallel to the Arabic tell, meaning ‘mound’ or ‘small hill’, the word kom is also often used. The various ruin mounds defining the archaeological site of Memphis, for example, are referred to as koms, such as Kom el-Fakhry, Kom el-Rabiʾa, and Kom el-Qalʾa. These three koms include settlement remains dated to the New Kingdom. The modern village of Saqqara is also built on a ruin mound, sporadically referred to as Tell Saqqara. The site has received comparatively little scholarly attention, probably because it is not easily accessible due to the modern occupation. There are no tells present at the North Saqqara plateau. However, quite like the situation at tell sites, an accumulation of remains formed by generations of people using the same space (whether it be a single structure or a complete site) has sometimes resulted in a complex layering of structures and deposits. In the Teti Pyramid Cemetery, for example, New Kingdom tomb chapels were built on deposits (several metres of accumulated sand and rubble that has built up over the course of many centuries) covering underlying Old Kingdom mastaba tombs.
See Moeller (2016), 317–321; (2010), for current archaeological investigation of the (Middle Kingdom) settlement.
Vernus (1986), col. 324.
Moreover, the observant pedestrian may notice stone elements made in pharaonic times jutting out of the treaded-mud street here and there. Antiquities are sometimes excavated from underneath the houses located in the old town: Farout (2007).
Van Dyke/Alcock (2003).
The dates of the Old Kingdom are after Hornung et al. (2006), 490.
Arabic word for ‘bench’, in Egyptology used for the bench-shaped form of certain Old Kingdom elite tombs.
Ockinga (2004), 31–32 [13], pls 21, 22 a–b, 68.
For the pyramid, see Hawass, (2010); Berlandini (1978). Ockinga (2004), 20, following Berlandini, suggests that Amenemone may have been involved in the supervision of the production of statues of King Menkauhor and their ornaments, including actual pieces of jewellery, as depicted with such care for detail in the relief-decorated block Louvre B 48 = E 3028.
After the Arabic el-Harʾam el-Moodurʾrag, ‘Pyramid of Steps’, see: Lane (2000), 201.
The works of non-cultural and cultural transformation processes, respectively. See Schiffer (1976).
I deliberately use ‘more advanced age’ instead of the adjective ‘old’ to classify ‘age’, because the latter would imply we know that the pyramid is nearing the end of its life. In the very long term (say in 100,000 years), the pyramid in 2022 might prove to be still in an early stage of its life history.
At the same time processes not visible to the naked eye (because they are either too small or their transformational effects take long to show visible results) are at work too, such as wind causing erosion of the pyramid and changing the rolling of the desert landscape.
It is the responsibility of archaeologists to carefully evaluate the impact present-day activities have on the archaeological site they are working at. This calls for means to assess their effects and record the modifications of the landscape caused by them. The Leiden-Turin archaeological expedition to Saqqara has introduced the use of Digital Surface Models in their work on which to plot, among other things, the exact location and progressive three-dimensional accretion of archaeological spoil heaps in the various dumping areas at the site: Del Vesco et al. (2020), 66–67.
Quibell seems to have been well aware of the consequences of his actions. He initially sketched out the locations of the spoil heaps in his archaeological reports, e.g., Quibell (1907), fig. on p. v. The archaeological missions working at Saqqara that followed his example are extremely few, which makes it difficult and time consuming to unravel the modern transformations of the landscape brought about by our predecessors in the field. See e.g., Del Vesco et al. (2020), 64–67, for attempts in the Leiden-Turin concession area while deconstructing the spoil heaps created by our predecessors.
Renes (2015).
Ingold (1993). For a critical review of this publication, see Hicks (2016). Hicks posits four theses about temporality, landscape, modernity and revisiting: the passage of time transforms archaeological knowledge; archaeological knowledge transforms the passage of time; an archaeological landscape is an object that is known through remapping; and archaeological knowledge is what we leave behind. His study concludes that archaeology is best understood not as the study of the temporality of the landscape, as argued by Ingold, but as the study of the temporality of the landscape revisited.
In philosophy, temporality stems from Heidegger’s (1927) “Zeitlichkeit” of “Dasein”: Olafson (1987), 75–101.
Note that the passage of time is of course conceived of and reckoned with differently across societies: Dietler/Herbich (1993); Elias (1992).
Time estimation experiments in psychology measure an individual’s perception of time, or subjective time; an individual’s cognitive capacity of keeping track of time units. See e.g., Maggetti et al. (2015). For research on perceived temporality and subjective experience, see e.g., Larson (2004). Examples: protracted duration indicates a prolonged sense of time—in other words: something appears to take longer (i.e. more time) than measured by a clock. In such a case one would say that ‘time drags on’. Compression designates the opposite sense of time. In such a case one would say that ‘time flies when you’re having fun’. In cases of protracted and compressed duration, temporality denotes the dynamic shifting of time perception in occupation. Such instances are referred to as irregular correspondences of time (as recorded on a clock) and lived experiences (the sense of time).
Quoted from Cornejo/Olivares (2015), 95.
Bergson (2013 [1910]).
Abbey (2015).
Bergson (2013 [1910]), 100.
Lynch (1972), 171.
Abbey (2015).
Holtorf (2015), 179.
Jacobus van Dijk (2016), 91, narrates how, in 1983, a sandstorm exposed a dyad statue standing in one of the many shallow depressions marking the open courtyard of the now-buried tombs in the Unas South Cemetery. Clearly, sandstorms not just bury features, they can also expose them.
Or longue durée. Here, durée has a different meaning from ‘duration’ used by Bergson. The expression longue durée was introduced by the Annales School of historical writing to set in focus the long-term structures of history (it examines extended periods of time and draws conclusions from historical trends and patterns) as opposed to short-term time scales focused on events. See in particular Braudel (1949).
The following description to illustrate the concept of temporality of the landscape is inspired by Olivier (2001), 66–67.
Or, in the proceedings of the quinquennial conference Abusir and Saqqara in the Year (presently covering the years 2000–2020). The papers are grouped according to the Egyptological periodisation of Egyptian history: ‘Archaic Period and the Old Kingdom’; ‘Middle Kingdom’; ‘New Kingdom’; ‘Late Period and Beyond’. Kolen (2005) observes that the refining of chronologies as practiced in archaeology has given rise to a meticulous, objective organisation of archaeological and historical observations. This, he argues, has not necessarily led to a better understanding of the past changes that occurred in landscapes.
Olivier (2001), 66–67.
Paraphrasing Olivier (2001), 66–67.
Lucas (2010).
I have just started to paint the exterior woodwork of my house, which is maintenance. If I would not do this or postpone it indefinitely, the effects of time would cause the house to gradually break down. In carrying out maintenance, I have used a colour different from that selected by the previous owners of the house, and in so doing, I have also transformed the building. In addition to being maintenance work, the choice of paint colour also serves to express personal taste, which differentiates my house from those of my neighbours that are of the same architectural design.
Olivier (2004), 209.
Lucas (2010). Note that materiality is not a prerequisite to forge links between past and present. Think of the ancient Egyptian temples made for the gods that were repeatedly demolished to make place for new versions. The Satet temple on Elephantine island is a case in point. It was repeatedly rebuilt, on the same spot, over the course of many centuries, while retaining a link to the original place of reverence, the ‘source’ of the inundation of the Nile: German Institute of Archaeology (1998).
And later still, some canals-turned-streets were made car-free zones. Thus, practices of automotive travel were not the last incentive to transform the urban landscape.
Copperplated city plan drawn by Christiaan Hagen in 1675: “Lugdunum Batavorum—Anno 1675”, see: Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken PV_PV370.3, retrieved from:
Cf. Ingold (1993).
Following Low (2003).
Ingold (1993), 167, following Jackson (1989), 146.
Today, visitors normally arrive by car or bus, and do not themselves physically experience the steep escarpment.
Bělohoubková et al. (2021).
E.g., Rooijendijk (2005), 4–12.
Blog post by Frans Blok, “Rotterdam dubbelop: twee steden vergeleken”, published on 27.10.2014,
Van Reybrouck (2010).
Van Reybrouck (2010), 13.
Meskell (2008), 236.
Terdiman (1993).
Kolen et al. (2015); Kolen (2005); Roymans et al. (2009).
Samuels (1979).
De Certeau (1984).
Koren (2015), 255.
Now held in the Cairo Egyptian Museum: je 35256. See Leahy (1989).
Translation after Leahy (1989), 43.
For these and the following observations, see also Staring (in press, a).
Term: Bradley (1993). The metaphor is also practiced in e.g. urban studies, see for example Binelli (2012).
In the publication of the tomb of Meryneith (032/usc), Raven (in Raven/Van Walsem 2014, 327), uses the term to refer to all material traces pertaining to activities post-dating the burial of the initial tomb owner.
In Raven/Van Walsem 2014, 328.
Merriam-Webster dictionary has: 1) to enter for conquest or plunder; 2) to encroach upon (infringe); 3a) to spread over or into as if invading; 3b) to affect injuriously and progressively.
Reisner (1931).
Kemp (2006), 209, fig. 74.
Fontijn (2002), 26; Gosden/Marshall (1999), 170–171.
Kopytoff (1986), 66.
Fontijn (2002), 26.
Adidas Deadly Strike X17 boots, London, British Museum ea 95151. Displayed in Room 61, May–July 2018, see The British Museum online catalogue,
Fontijn (2002), 26, uses the hypothetical example of wedding rings and John Lennon’s guitar to make the same points.
Tawfeek (2018).
For this subject, see e.g., Haikal (2014); (2011).
The critique was likely not so much targeting the suggested continuity; it rather signals disrespect towards ancient Egyptian heritage from the side of its British keepers.
The definition of cultural heritage practised by unesco considers it as “both a product and a process, which provides societies with a wealth of resources that are inherited from the past, created in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations” (emphasis ns). Alonso/Medici (2014), 130.
Humphrey et al. (2004), 88.
See also Meskell (2012) on this subject.
Kolen/Renes (2015), 29.
Blog post by André van Noort and Monique Roscher, “#vvdw: kleuren van de Rembrandtbrug”, published on 18.04.2017,
News item by Chris de Waard, “Omwonenden op de barricade voor behoud witte Rembrandtbrug”,
Roymans et al. (2009), 351–352.
Roymans et al. (2009); Kolen (2005), 225–295; Bender (1993).
For example, one of Amsterdam’s most popular concert halls, Paradiso, popularly referred to as ‘pop-temple’, is housed in a former church communion building. In this church, people do behave like they do in pubs.
Nielsen/Groes (2014).
Nielsen/Groes (2014), 111.
Tilley (1994), 11.
Also Staring (2019).